When was the last time you hoped to get mana flooded during a game of Magic: the Gathering? In any format, whether it’s Commander or at your local Friday Night Magic, you’d always prefer to draw just enough lands to cast your spells and just enough spells to make the best use of your lands.
But what if your deck was based on dumping as many lands as possible onto the battlefield? Lands-based strategies, sometimes referred to as “Lands Matter,” are among the more powerful strategies in Commander. Lands Matter gets an added benefit from the social contract of more casual settings; because most tables will not feature heavy doses of Armageddon or Jokulhaups, a Lands Matter player can keep its value engines online.
It just so happens that the Simic guild features one of the best color pairs for “value” in Commander; blue grants access to valuable stack-based interaction and card draw, while green provides ramp and the beefy creatures to close out a game. So, with Tatyova, Benthic Druid as your commander, you can establish lands-based value engines and protect them with interaction while keeping your hand stocked and digging for the big finishers.
A fully optimized Lands Matter deck can be expensive; as it turns out, cards that put you ahead on mana can be among the most powerful in all of Magic, and as a result, they can also be among the more expensive. Not to worry, though, as Tatyova enables a viable budget strategy and scales up at higher power levels.
Budget $50(ish) Deck Tech
One of primary win conditions here is an infinite combo with Retreat to Coralhelm, Simic Growth Chamber, and a “land dork” such as Sakura-Tribe Scout, Llanowar Scout, Skyshroud Ranger, or Walking Atlas. The combo works like this: with Retreat to Coralhelm on the battlefield, tap the land dork to put Simic Growth Chamber from your hand into play; when Simic Growth Chamber enters the battlefield, there will be triggers for both itself (return a land you control to its owners hand) as well as Retreat to Coralhelm (scry 1 or tap or untap target creature); from here, you will return Simic Growth Chamber to your hand, and you will choose to untap the aforementioned land dork using Retreat to Coralhelm. This will bring you back to the starting point. Then, repeat the process as many times as you want.
If Tatyova is on the battlefield, this means we can draw our entire deck. Sprinkle in Psychosis Crawler, and each of our opponents loses 1 life each time we do the loop, meaning we can most likely drain the entire table. Without Tatyova on the battlefield, we will still get infinite landfall triggers, so we can create infinite 4/4 beast tokens if we have Rampaging Baloths or infinite 2/2 elemental tokens if we have Zendikar’s Roil. We can even make an arbitrarily large Baloth Woodcrasher, Vinelasher Kudzu, and/or Oran-Rief Hydra and swing for massive damage, though this will only allow us to kill our opponents one turn at a time, leaving us more vulnerable to our other opponents.
The deck can win without hitting a combo. There are a number of ways to pump out tokens, and then we can put all our mana into a Biomass Mutation to make a massive army. We can also win by just dropping big creatures or enchantments and then playing lands as usual, but it can be slow, and there is some potential for “durdling” or “spinning wheels,” which are just MTG lingo for “drawing a bunch of cards and/or playing a bunch of lands but not doing anything that has an impact on the board or on life totals.”
One strategy for winning with this deck is to lay low until you have something set up, such as a way to play extra lands along with a big landfall-based payoff, or until you have the Retreat/Growth Chamber combo in hand. Just answer the threats that are most imposing on you and let the rest of the table handle anything else. Always remember you can combo at 1 life and still win—and if you’re gaining life off your land drops with Tatyova, you can even reverse a bad trend in your life total.
Upgraded Deck Tech
We still have our 3-card combo as a primary win condition, but an increased budget grants access to a few more payoffs and alternate win conditions, including Roil Elemental, which can just get mean as a way to end the game. We also get one of the best Lands Matter win conditions ever printed: Field of the Dead. Sometimes, a win can be as easy as just playing Field of the Dead and going about your business. Hitting 7 different land names is not difficult, even in a budget deck that features upwards of 20 basic lands.
By upping our budget, we also get to improve our removal and interaction suite. We no longer have to rely on 3-mana spells to handle challenging creatures when we have access to two of the best kill spells blue has to offer in Pongify and Rapid Hybridization. We can also get rid of some of our more mana-intense interaction like Rewind and Condescend in favor of efficient if narrower counterspells like Flusterstorm.
Storm Cauldron is a little mean, so use discretion at casual tables, but we can generate massive value by bouncing our own lands back to our hand. Our opponents do “benefit” from an extra land drop each turn, but they won’t get to make much use of it; meanwhile, with our land dorks and even Azusa, Lost but Seeking—more affordable now than ever thanks to the recent reprint—we can comfortably generate mana and continue to play more lands than our opponents even as we bounce lands back to our hand and get one landfall trigger after another.
Now that we have two lands (Simic Growth Chamber and Field of the Dead) that can accelerate us toward a win in their own ways, it is helpful to have ways to find the specific lands you need in a pinch. We already have Sylvan Scrying from the budget build, but Crop Rotation and Elvish Reclaimer are both relatively cheap and can find us exactly what we need to either combo or start making an army of zombies.
One more strong upgrade is Constant Mists. It would be good enough as a repeatable Fog effect, but because we are likely to play more than one land a turn, we can often pay the buyback cost repeatedly without being stuck on lands as would happen with a piddly one land drop per turn.
Optimized Deck Tech
The price tag might give you heart palpitations; you certainly can upgrade the deck in one shot, but there are reasonable upgrade paths that don’t require the all-in investment. Some of the most important cards will be those that let you play an additional land each turn, such as Exploration, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Wayward Swordtooth, and Azusa, Lost but Seeking. All of these cards have been either printed or reprinted within the past 3 years, and all of them will help fuel that value engine.
The optimized deck carries a heavy theme of getting lands into the graveyard through sacrifice outlets like Zuran Orb and Sylvan Safekeeper, as well as playing lands from the graveyard using Crucible of Worlds and Ramunap Excavator. There are also Splendid Reclamation and World Shaper to pull all of the lands out of our graveyard at once, which can make for a very explosive turn if you have been utilizing sacrifice outlets like Sylvan Safekeeper, Zuran Orb, and Scapeshift. And if you are able to spring for some allied fetchlands, the value you’ll get out of them is just absurd. All of the enemy fetchlands are north of $50, so I have left them out for the time being, but Prismatic Vista is an okay “budget” option here, as well. Everything else listed in this paragraph can run anywhere from $5 (a cup of coffee) to $30 (3 pounds of it). Most of these cards can function just fine on their own, but to start, you’ll want at least two sacrifice outlets, one way to play lands from your graveyard, and one or two en-masse lands-from-graveyard-into-play effects. The fetchlands can wait until close to the end; although they are the runts of the fetchland family, Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse aren’t the worst cards you could play in those spots—especially when you can double up on landfall triggers.
At this point, your options are so powerful that you can consider for yourself whether to keep the Retreat/Growth Chamber combo pieces or to lean into your other robust win conditions. From my perspective, all 6 cards from the Retreat/Growth Chamber combo are good enough in a vacuum (i.e., without the other pieces in place) to include in the deck: the land dorks can help us get off to a fast start; Retreat to Coralhelm helps us filter the top of our deck or push out extra lands by untapping our land dorks; Simic Growth Chamber might be the worst card of the bunch, but by bouncing a land back to our hand, we can potentially help fuel those big turns by hitting multiple land drops and getting the value that comes with it.
However, because we have loosened the purse strings, I decided to cut one of the 4 land dorks (Walking Atlas) to include instead a Lands Matter staple: Oracle of Mul Daya. Not only does Oracle provide the extra land drops that keep the value train rolling, but Oracle will also give us card advantage by allowing us to play multiple lands off the top of our deck, practically drawing us cards—and actually drawing us cards if Tatyova is around, as well.
Speaking of multiple land drops, Oboro, Palace in the Clouds can be one of the best cards in the deck. In addition to giving us a second land to enable the Retreat to Coralhelm combo lines (where you would bounce Simic Growth Chamber back to your hand as part of the cost of playing it, you can tap Oboro to bounce it back to your hand after having played it), Oboro can represent multiple landfall triggers each turn, allowing us to dig for the right cards we need if Tatyova is on the battlefield.
Maybe all these months of quarantine have taken a toll on my interpersonal skills, which would explain why I’ve decided to include one of the meanest combos (or synergies) I’ve ever put in a Commander deck: Sunder and Manabond. These two have a special relationship with Tatyova; if I cast Sunder to return all lands to their owners’ hand, then go to my end step and trigger Manabond to put all the lands from my hand into play and discard the rest of my hand, Tatyova’s triggers go on the stack after the entire Manabond trigger resolves, so you will still get to draw cards equal to the number of lands you put into play. The end result is that all your friends have been sent back to the stone age and you’re right where you left off—and with a fresh grip of new cards in your hand, to boot. And with enough lands, pulling all this off with Field of the Dead or Rampaging Baloths is almost assuredly a game-winning play.
Speaking of mean combos, if you think it’s fun to take an extra turn, can you imagine how fun it will be to take all the extra turns? We can loop infinite turns if we cast Walk the Aeons to take an extra turn, then sacrifice three Islands to pay the buyback cost, then play those same three Islands from our graveyard using either Crucible of Worlds or Ramunap Excavator and either Azusa or two other cards that each give us an extra land drop (e.g., Exploration and Dryad of the Ilysian Grove). Taking all the turns will be fun for us (if not our friends), but on its own, this is just a flashy thing to pull off; it doesn’t win the game on its own. We will still need a way to close out the game from there, and that’s where Rampaging Baloths, Avenger of Zendikar, and Titania, Protector of Argoth will make their presence felt by creating a repeatable, growing army to swing on your opponents.
In budget versions, we take a more reactive approach while we set up a combo; with the optimized version, we want to race for value. Nearly every card is a threat, and the few that are not threats will help us answer our opponent’s threats while we establish our own.
Tatyova can hold her own at any table and at any budget, so let your friends cut lands from their deck to fit in extra bombs; with Tatyova, your lands are your bombs.
MTG Frenzy 