Recipient of the Jeffery D. Zandi Award for Best
Card of the Week. Life from the Loam first made
it onto my radar screen in Extended a couple of
years ago as the latest in a long line of
powerful enablers for the mighty Psychatog. Life
from the Loam never did THAT much for Standard
or block constructed decks, but it has been an
Extended mainstay since it first arrived a year
or so ago. Unfortunately, this card is about the
only Ravnica card with Dredge that was not
useful in limited play.
Once again, this card is an incredible source of
power, but ONLY if you have a deck that
sincerely expects to discard (or dredge away) a
lot of lands-- otherwise it's sideboard fodder
against LD.
Constructed- 4.9
Casual- 3.9
Limited- 1.5
Aethereal
A very
overlooked card when it first came out, but it
didn't take long for people to realize the combo
potential of this thing. Life from the Loam
powered many decks in Extended including the
powerhouses Dredge-A-Tog and CAL thanks to the
card advantage you get from using this to
recycle cycling lands and fill the graveyard
(Tog), as well as give yourself cards in hand to
maintain Solitary Confinement or pitch to
Seismic Assault (CAL). The power to get card
advantage, fill your graveyard up for abuse, as
well as kill your opponent with those cards or
keep yourself alive, all make this a great card.
Just make sure you don't play it in limited.
In casual, it's a pretty neat draw engine to
have if you want a draw engine without having to
play blue.
This card had a
bunch of people scratching their heads when it
appeared in Ravnica. At the time, many of us
thought its use was nothing much more
complicated than recurring Onslaught fetchlands.
Then Aggro Loam came along and showed us what
Life from the Loam can really do. It turns
Devastating Dreams into a one-sided prison card.
It allows endless damage with Seismic Assault.
In Standard, it allows endless card draw with
Trade Routes and gets Mystic Enforcer to
threshold in two turns. That's even before
getting to the endless number of things you can
do with it in large casual card pools. Like many
such cards, though, it's less than stellar in
limited play. If you were to make a dredge-based
deck with the likes of Shambling Shell and
Golgari Brownscale, it lets you start the
dredging on turn 3 (you don't have to have any
lands in your graveyard to play it), but that's
about it.
Constructed: 4/5
Casual: 5/5
Limited: 2/5
Arcane
Reviews by
Arcane
Life from the Loam
Constructed: The backbone card of a quite a few
Dredge based decks, Life from the Loam has been
chased by Extended players since it came out.
Currently (and if you’ve been paying attention
to the other reviews this week you’ll know) it’s
part of the Aggro Loam deck to help recover
after a Balancing act or Devastating Dreams. It
also sees a lot of use in the G/W slide decks
using the cycling lands as well as Eternal
Witness and Loxodon Heirarch. It’s a Johnny-riffic
combo card that makes quite a few decks right
now, and on top of that it gives you a way of
recovering from land destruction decks and net
card advantage; they use three stone rains to
eliminate your lands and you use one loam to get
them all back. Other than that it won’t do much
else without some kind of combo to back it up
though.
Casual/Multi: A solid card for a variety of
kitchen table decks. Helps your dredge theme
decks, or a seismic assault deck, or even to
help you recover from the one person at the
table who thinks their land destruction deck is
“fun” and “casual.” It was actually for a fun
combo deck that I first sought after Loam
(thankfully managing to get a playset cheap and
easily before it became popular and chase) based
around using Loam, Vinelasher Kudzu, Dark Heart
of the Wood and Azusa Lost but Seeking to sac
forests for life, loam them back and they power
up my kudzu. A fun deck idea like this are just
some of the possibilities that can be exploited
with the card in a non-spike environment, but
again the card does very little on its own.
Limited: If this card is a diamond in the
Extended environment then limited is where this
is just a lump of coal. Land destruction effects
are not only sparse in limited, but they’re also
usually not the best strategy as they are not a
threat or removal. This means that Loam will
most often sit in your hand unused. If you have
a bunch of cards with discard costs you might
use it, but in the Ravnica block the only real
time you’d want to use discard effects is to hit
Hellbent, which means you don’t want cards in
your hand. Could be considered in a combo with
cards like Rakdos Guildmage, Nihilistic Glee, or
Dark Heart of the wood; these options are all
narrow and odds are won’t win you the game.
Constructed: 3*
Casual: 3.5*
Limited: 1.5
*Rated based on the fact that it does nothing on
its own, and not based on the decks it is used
in.
Necro
nomikron
Life from the
loam:
This card is amazing! Extended decks are abusing
it as a card advantage engine with the cycling
lands. Standard decks are abusing it as a way to
obtain lands, and a dredge engine to fill up the
graveyard. Just watch out for graveyard hate.
