Landing on Your Feet

By Luis Scott-Vargas

Luis Scott-Vargas plays, writes, and makes videos about Magic. He has played on the Pro Tour for almost a decade, and between that and producing content for ChannelFireball, often has his hands full (of cards).

for years, the Lands deck has been floating around Legacy. The first list I can remember had forty-three lands and seemed more like an absurd joke than an actual deck, although it was neither. As new toys (and lands) show up in each new set, the land count has dropped to its current thirty-six, but the core of the deck remains the same. Manabond is long gone, with Exploration, Mox Diamond, and Life from the Loam providing the main incentives to play millions of lands in your Legacy deck.

Besides adding mana, what do the lands in this deck do? It's clear that playing a ton of them is what powers Life from the Loam and Exploration, but the lands actually have to have use for the whole engine to work. Luckily, Legacy is vast enough that there are plenty of lands with sweet abilities, and this deck plays a whole lot of them. Wasteland is the most obvious example, but the fun certainly doesn't end there. Ghost Quarter, Bojuka Bog, Karakas, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Rishadan Port, Tranquil Thicket, Creeping Tar Pit, Maze of Ith, and Glacial Chasm all bring cool powers to the table, and the power of Tolaria West and Intuition helps find whichever one you are missing.

That isn't the end of the list, either. Dark Depths and Thespian's Stage deserve their own mention, because they combine to make a 20/20 for very little effort. Copy the Dark Depths with Thespian's Stage, keep the Stage, which conveniently has no counters on it, and profit. In other combo news, Grove of the Burnwillows pairs with Punishing Fire to reward you for dredging Life from the Loam, and gets rid of annoying 2-toughness creatures at very little cost.

The deck is rounded out by a couple other spells. Zuran Orb, Engineered Explosives, Ensnaring Bridge, and Oblivion Stone all provide some solid utility, and all are findable with Academy Ruins. Liliana of the Veil is a little hard to cast, but incredibly powerful, and gives the deck some much-needed disruption.

Playing the deck is a little strange. Its goal is to just get Life from the Loam going, and almost any hand with Loam and the mana to cast it is keepable. Intuition also works to find Loam, but hands with neither can be quite dangerous. If you can't land a Loam in the first couple turns, the deck does have a fair amount of disconnected pieces, so be aware of that.

Shane Kelley's Lands

Decklist Stats Sample Hand

Planeswalker (3)

3 Liliana of the Veil

Sorcery (4)

4 Life from the Loam

Instant (5)

2 Punishing Fire 3 Intuition

Artifact (8)

1 Crucible of Worlds 1 Engineered Explosives 1 Oblivion Stone 1 Ensnaring Bridge 3 Mox Diamond 1 Zuran Orb

Enchantment (4)

4 Exploration

Land (36)

1 Thespian's Stage 1 Bojuka Bog 1 Creeping Tar Pit 1 Verdant Catacombs 1 Misty Rainforest 2 Grove of the Burnwillows 3 Tolaria West 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth 1 Academy Ruins 1 Dark Depths 1 Ghost Quarter 1 Windswept Heath 2 Tranquil Thicket 1 Forest 3 Rishadan Port 4 Wasteland 1 Glacial Chasm 3 Maze of Ith 1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale 1 Karakas 1 Bayou 3 Tropical Island 1 Taiga

60 Cards