Cade walks through his first time building a lands deck and the thought processes behind the parts of what he built.

Commanders: Thrasios, Triton Hero, Vial Smasher the Fierce

My Deck: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/mea-cultum/?cb=1592871365

cEDH Gitrog Dredge: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/the-gitfrog-1/

cEDH Tatyova Turns: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/yTWpTtbBDE62_VKsvQPX_g

I was always intimidated whenever I sat down to play a deck with someone who said they were playing “Lands,” because something like that sounded not only powerful, but completely different from the strategies I normally like. I started off playing casual magic, slamming creatures against each other to see which had the higher power and toughness, but I learned to love planeswalkers once they came out, and I started playing Storm once I got a few cards I thought were cool—I played Grapeshot in Modern back in the day and it was glorious.

Once I came to college and got into Commander, I followed a pretty similar path to how I’d experienced Magic throughout my life. I started with a deck Commanded by Lazav, Dimir Mastermind, and it was awful—I was playing nonsense like Greater Werewolf and it was fun, but I lost every game. Deckbuilding has always been my favorite part of this game, and I ripped that blue-black deck apart in my quest to win a game, which I soon did once I built superfriends. We didn’t have all the cool stuff that we have now (especially after War of the Spark), but I did some cool stuff, like using the ultimate ability of Ajani Unyielding to get enough loyalty on Samut, the Tested to kill her and get out both Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker and Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh, which is surely a flavor fail, but I sure won the game I did that.

I moved on to Ydris, Maelstrom Wielder after that, which was as Storm-y as I could be. I still used Grapeshot, but I also played Tendrils of Agony and Mind’s Desire. That deck was super fun and linear, so I turned that deck into one Commanded by Najeela, the Blade-Blossom after a while, which lets me do everything I want. I never built a Lands deck, though, and I built a lot of other things on the way to Najeela—Wheels, Cantrips, and even really bad mono-red Voltron Valduk, Keeper of the Flame. I played against the deck lots of times, but now I wanted to own it.

The first thing I do when I build a deck is write down literally every card I can imagine going well together. When I built Najeela, the list was well over a hundred cards before I even started browsing online, but for Lands, the list came to about twenty cards, and most of them were expensive. I didn’t know if this was a deck I’d want to keep, but there’s nothing less fun about Magic than not being able to play a strategy because the cards are expensive, so I became determined.

cEDH Lands decks use either Tatyova, Benthic Druid or The Gitrog Monster to accumulate card advantage while playing lots of lands, and that’s really what you want from your Commander deck—your deck should have things built in to reward you for doing whatever it wants to do. If the deck wants to play lands, then the deck should have systems built in to reward you for playing lands, and the cEDH decks keep their reward systems in the command zone. I wanted to play both commanders with stuff like Lord Windgrace and Seismic Assault, so I knew that I was either playing four or five colors, as seems to be my normal process in deckbuilding. I want to do everything, and my goal is to do everything well enough to compete at the top tables.

Well, the combination between those two commanders is a fine line to walk, but I ended up with something that focuses on cycling through the deck, putting out as many lands as possible until I find some critical mass of nonland permanents, which all focus on putting lands out or getting additional advantage out of actions the deck already wants to do, like playing lands. My favorite combination is something like Sakura-Tribe Scout and Retreat to Coralhelm, which allow you to play any lands that you have in your hand and becomes really fun with Tatyova or the Gitrog Monster, creating a system that draws you a card for each free land that you put into play.

Most of the rest of the deck I built works to solve particularly common situations, like what happens if I have thirty lands and Seismic Assault on the battlefield, but only like five left in the deck? Cards like Sunder have multiple functions—it’s like tossing a slightly less mean Armageddon down sometimes, or it lets us pick up our lands and turn them into fireballs. The essential strategy is to put out as many lands as you can, and murdering your opponents is secondary.

You can never plan for exactly what your opponents will do, but you can make your deck as efficient as possible, trimming what you can, then add whatever might help you, like a well-timed Spell Pierce, which absolutely doesn’t help put lands on the battlefield, but countermagic is necessary if you want to stay competitive—it’s the state of the game. If everyone stops playing interaction tomorrow, then you can take all of yours out, but you make certain meta calls every time you build a deck. Countermagic can help you win the game, but too much countermagic just takes up space. It’s situational—only you can guess at what’s exactly right for your meta. You’re wrong, or you’ll win every game, but I hope you’re close enough to win a few here and there.

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