PAX Prime Spellslinging Landfall

By Melissa DeTora

Melissa is a former Magic pro player and strategy writer who is now working in R&D on the Play Design team.

This week on Daily Decks, I'm showcasing the decks that were used during our Zendikari vs. Eldrazi Spellslinging event at PAX Prime 2015. Today's deck is Landfall, a red-green deck that tries to get as many lands into play as possible and uses them to cast huge spells or trigger various landfall effects.

Landfall was our intermediate deck. Any player who had played Magic before but didn't have very much experience with the game was given the Landfall deck. Of the three Zendikari decks, this one is my favorite because it can do so many cool things. For example, you can use Rampaging Baloths or Avenger of Zendikar to flood the board with tokens. When you have so many ways to get lots of lands into play (with spells such as Rampant Growth and Harrow), there isn't much your opponent can do to stop the swarm.

Hellkite Charger is another card that can do powerful things in this deck. It's a pretty straightforward card. You can attack for 5 in the air the turn you cast it, then the following turn you can attack again, pay seven, and get an additional combat step—but in this deck it's actually possible to attack twice the turn you cast it. Yes, it's possible for this deck to have thirteen lands on the battlefield. You'll be doing a lot of Exploring and Harrowing, and when the game goes long enough, massive land totals are very common.

While a lot of cards in this deck speak for themselves, one card that may seem out of place is Cunning Sparkmage. Believe it or not, Cunning Sparkmage was a metagame call for this deck. In our Spellslinging event, players were battling against Eldrazi, and Eldrazi produce a lot of Spawn. Spawn are very tiny, and Cunning Sparkmage does a good job of destroying them. Most players didn't know what was in the decks, but as the night went on, it was great to hear that players were able to figure out that the Landfall deck was favored against the Eldrazi for that reason.

PAX Prime Landfall

Decklist Stats Sample Hand

Creature (20)

1 Avenger of Zendikar 1 Baloth Woodcrasher 1 Geyser Glider 2 Grazing Gladehart 4 Plated Geopede 1 Rampaging Baloths 2 Territorial Baloth 2 Cunning Sparkmage 1 Frontier Guide 2 Hellkite Charger 1 Scute Mob 2 Zendikar Incarnate