Mox is about the only interesting update to the deck, many of the cards here are holdovers from the Deathrite Shaman version.
Mox also gives you similar utility to Elvish Spirit Guide or Lotus Petal in matchups where you need to be explosives. The deck is built to capitalize on powerful two-drops like Dark Confidant and allows you to hammer through as many as you can over the first couple turns. For a lands deck it’s by far the best accelerator.
Mox Diamond is probably the only reasonable replacement for Deathrite. Especially if they’re packing Karakas and/or Swords to Plowshares.īut then Deathrite Shaman was banned, what do we do now?ĭavid Long has been a dedicated Dark Depths mage for a long time and has often pushed innovation in these archetypes that I’ve agreed with. I have found two-to-three lands and a Safekeeper to just lock-out some opponents. Against a lot of the format’s top fair decks this card just ends any chance your opponent has from removing a 20/20 token from the battlefield. Obviously this has been technology since the turbo version but it’s worth giving it some shine. The second creature that’s always impresses me in lands decks is Sylvan Safekeeper. This gives them no shot to participate in the inevitable outcome. I’ve been super impressed with Dark Confidant in this deck and it leads to some games where you snowball the card advantage, shred your opponents hand and then Pithing Needle everything. It has similar one-shot potential but you can easily switch gears and bury your opponent in cards before ending the game with Marit Lage at your leisure. Dark Confidant along with Sylvan Library give this deck some card advantage options to push into the late game if your core plan doesn’t work. The other creatures also make this deck unique to its predecessor. Just taking a deck that’s already winning and add the best creature in the format, sounds pretty smart right?ĭeathrite Shaman is an absurd card and obviously is so good it was banned so we don’t need to go in depth on that. The main difference with this version is the addition of a lot more creatures and less fast-mana in order to be able to grind a little harder. I tried this version before it got banned and was overall unimpressed. Obviously, this card is no longer apart of Legacy but its important discuss the progression of the deck. The next evolution of this archetype was to add the best creature in the format to the deck - Deathrite Shaman. It’s designed to do one thing, and do it well, but when it doesn’t work the game is often over on the spot. All in all, this deck can be a little bit of a glass cannon. Things have settled now and I would say Reanimator decks would take that spot now, but this is a close second. I considered this version of the deck to be the best combo deck in the format before the banning. Speed and discard also gives you proactive game plans against the few combo decks in the format, and that’s where R/G Lands would typically struggle. You shouldn’t be worried about Surgical if you’ve got your 20/20 into play. Another major upside to making the switch is that the hate cards people tend to play for the Lands matchup don’t really work against Depths with the exception of Blood Moon and even that you can race. Your plan is just to get a 20/20 into play as fast as possible and protect it for a lethal one-shot-kill. The upside of this deck is that it’s blisteringly fast. This has mostly gone away since the banning as control decks are back to playing a bunch of basic lands.īefore the bannings, man Lands players were looking for a new way to 20/20 their opponents and I finally caved and decided to try it out for myself. This was when players started to clue into attacking the matchup from a variety of axis’ both in the maindeck and the sideboard.įinally, we saw Blood Moon to become a popular card in the format to prey on the greedy Deathrite Shaman decks. The second thing we started to see is the rise of Diabolic Edict for Marit Lage and even dedicated hate cards for Lands like Price of Progress. After that, we started to see every deck lean on either 2-3 Surgical Extractions or Leyline of the Void to be able to interact, which obviously led to a lot of splash-hate on Lands. This arguably started with the breakout deck last year - B/R Reanimator.
But, slowly but surely, we have seen small shifts that slowly pick at its standing in the metagame. R/G Lands used to get so much of its power from being an unknown quantity - very few players knew how to approach the matchup properly. After a long stretch of being the secret best deck, preying on the fair decks people tend to play, over the last year we have seen real respect for the archetype. For some time, many R/G Lands players have been dissatisfied with the position of the deck in the Legacy format.