Haze Burn  wrote:

Hello BMoor,

I'd like to start by saying that I visit your garage often. Having said that, I have gone through pretty much every deck you've ever fixed and I don't believe you've ever dealt with one quite like mine, but I was still hoping you could take a look at it.
 

Land Ho!

Creatures: 0

Other Spells: 0
 

Lands: 60

1x Bazaar of Baghdad

4x Blinkmoth Nexus

3x Desert

2x Deserted Temple

4x Ghitu Encampment

1x Kher Keep

3x Maze of Ith

4x Mishra's Factory

12x Mountain

2x Petrified Field

3x Quicksand

1x Rath's Edge

2x Rishadan Port

2x Scorched Ruins

1x Shivan Gorge

4x Terrain Generator

1x The Tabernacle of Pendrell Vale

3x Vesuva

3x Wooded Foothills

4x Zoetic Cavern
 

Sideboard:

1x Dark Depths

4x Gods' Eye, Gate to the Reikai

1x Keldon Necropolis

1x Mikokoro, Center of the Sea

1x Miren, the Moaning Well

2x Rishadan Port

1x Strip Mine

4x Wasteland
 

This deck is strictly casual and as you can see it isn't quite contemporary. Now before I go any further if you are going to fix my deck there are some rules I have to lay down. I'm not normally particular about what cards go in my deck but in this case I must ask that you please:

1. Not suggest a card if it is not a land. It can be any land type, artifact, creature, snow, etc. just as long as it's a land.
2. Not suggest cards that are out of my budget. No more than $20 a card and keep the total cost of all cards below $100. Yes, I know I have two cards that are valued at over a hundred dollars each however, I did not buy those, but received them from a good friend as a gift, which brings me to my third rule.
3. Not remove either Bazaar of Baghdad or The Tabernacle of Pendrell Vale.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'll explain how it works.

The idea is to win using lands that produce creatures. For this there's Blinkmoth Nexus, Ghitu Encampment, Kher Keep, Mishra's Factory, and Zoetic Cave. In total, including the sideboard there are 22 of these.
 

To keep my opponent occupied I run Desert, Maze of Ith, Quicksand, Rishadan Port, and Tabernacle. That makes 1/5 the deck devoted to stalling and the sideboard can add to that if necessary.

Two of the sixty cards, Rath's Edge and Shivan Gorge, cause damage; nice, colorless, hard to counter damage. With the sideboard there's another one and Miren, the Moaning Well, which does a rather poor job of countering burn. I'm thinking about adding in some Barbarian Rings but the whole threshold thing might not work so well.

Besides that I have Bazaar of Baghdad for drawing cards along with Mikokoro. Deserted Temple for untapping my own lands. Petrified Field for recovering lands. Scorched Ruins for extra mana (plus it works real well with Deserted Temple). Terrain Generator for putting multiple lands into play a turn, which is vital since one land per turn won't cut it. Vesuva can copy a variety of lands, in essence supplying me with extra copies of important lands. Finally Wooded Foothills (I use to use Terramorphic Expanse but it was too slow.) for searching for Mountains.

I don't expect it to survive against land destruction and don't want to try to fix that. With my various stall lands I have no problems with weenie rush or most other creature intensive decks until late game when they start dropping bigger creatures. Control usually doesn't bother this deck much as there isn't really anything to counter, or bounce, or stall. It doesn't do so well against burn or mill but that's practically to be expected.

Thank you for your time, help, and patience.

~Haze

Years ago I actually gave some thought to a similar deck idea.  I decided to go green and white, with Riftstone Portal in the graveyard powering Nantuko Monastery and Kjeldoran Outpost.  Green does traditionally have the best "man lands", but after looking over the decklist, I'm starting to warm to the idea of going red instead.  While Ghitu Encampment isn't exactly Treetop Village, Shivan Gorge is a solid addition and Kher Keep works about as well as Kjeldoran Outpost... until you try to attack with the tokens.

At any rate, it looks like you already have covered the main concerns of a 60-land deck.  You have suitable win conditions, ways to disrupt your opponent, and so forth.  But are there better ways?

Well, seeing as how you're already using Wooded Foothills to fetch Mountains, you could just as easily replace half your Mountains with Forests and make this a red/green deck, thus opening up your options a bit.  For one, that lets you run Treetop Village.  I'd say you could even drop a few basic land slots to make room for the villages.

As for extra sources of damage, I originally wanted to suggest Keldon Megaliths, but that has the same problem as Barbarian RIng-- you have no way to enable threshold or hellbent.  As is, your only means of reducing your hand size below seven aside from mulliganing or playing first are with Terrain Generator (but that only works with basic lands), Bazaar of Baghdad (which can't be relied on as you only have one), and playing Zoetic Cavern face down (which you could do the same turn as you dropped another land).  So the Megaliths is out.

Fortunately, however, you found other ways to do it.  I particularly like Shivan Gorge as a means of bringing people's life totals down.  Rath's Edge I like less.   Yes, it can hit creatures too , but it's more mana and you have to sacrifice a land to use it.  I think you may be a little too willing to sacrifice lands-- between that and  Scorched Ruins, you're depleting your lands almost as fast as you're playing them!  I'd say switch Rath's Edge and Keldon Necropolis between maindeck and sideboard.  At least creatures you can make tokens of.

My next thought was to use some of the Ravnica "guild halls"-- the lands that each had activated abilities that let you do something guild-appropriate.  The two most commonly used, and most generally useful, are Vitu-Ghazi and Orzhova.  But they're not in your colors.  In fact, adding green gives you access to Skarrg, the Rage Pits, and not much else.  I suppose a copy of Skarrg could be useful in getting your various land creatures to swing in that much harder, if you can find room.

You also mentioned Miren as "doing a poor job of countering burn spells".  I found a decent replacement in City of Shadows.  It can't recoup life points you may have lost to a Lava Axe, but if you were talking about creature burn, then the City will let you turn doomed man lands into mana.  You still lose the creature, but in a sense, you didn't lose the land, as you're trading one mana for one more counter on the city.  That sounds convoluted, but the math should work out alright.  You can also use it on your Kher Keep tokens if you want to just stockpile mana, but I have no idea what you'd then spend it on.  Removing counters from that Dark Depths in your sideboard?  Just as well, since you've only got one Kher Keep and no way to search it out.  Pity this deck can't support the double-blue requirement for the Transmute cost of Tolaria West.

But I'll tell you what you could use that mana for: Stalking Stones.  Yeah, yeah, I know, it's just another animating land, but this one's different.  When you activate Stalking Stones, it stays a creature.  Ghitu Encampment and Blinkmoth Well you need to pay mana to activate every turn.  This one asks for one lump sum payment, so it's not tying up your mana turn after turn.  And as far as man lands go, this one's pretty big.

After that, the ideas start to dry up.  There's Arena, but I'm not sure that's an improvement on what you've already got.  And I doubt Mouth of Ronom is worth turning all your basic lands snow.  Maybe I need to pay a visit to Mikokoro myself.

Until next time, this is BMoor, using all his self-restraint to not suggest Cruible of Worlds.

Good luck!