Now here’s an interesting deck that’s really piqued my interest. The interaction between Dark Depths and Vampire Hexmage brought about a resurgence of Depth‘s somewhat around Zendikar but the inherent fragility of Hexmage being a spell allowed there to be some answer in countermagic. Then along comes Return to Ravnica with the interesting new Vesuva variation Thespian’s Stage to spin the power of a 20/20 flying Avatar in a new direction. Because copy effects like Vesuva trigger onto the battlefield effects it was not able to pair with Depth‘s for value but Stage is already in play so doesn’t get the tokens placed on it. Thus you are able to copy and trigger the token generating effect immediately. This is the basis for the win condition of this cool new Loam brew.
The deck is stacked half full of lands thus able to work with the very powerful Life from the
Loam engine. This engine is fueled by an extremely heavy discard package which works not only to strip threats and answers from the opponent but also to gain back advantage from costs and effects from your spells. Starting with something as simple as rebuying the land pitched to a
Mox Diamond,
Raven’s Crime or
Crop Rotation, reusing a fetchland or the dreaded
Wasteland.
Crop Rotation is able to tutor directly into play either piece of the
Depths/
Stage combo you’re missing or any of your utility lands such as
Bojuka Bog against Dredge or Reanimator,
Maze of Ith &
Tabernacle against creature decks,
Karakas to bounce pesky Legendary creatures that might get in your way or even
Wasteland to punish decks relying to heavily on non-basic lands. There are very few non-land permanents in the deck but a full set of
Liliana of the Veil are included to clear away opponents creatures on board and strip away potential threats or answers from their hand, and the built in synergies in the deck reduce the downside from pitching your own cards. Speaking of synergies there are several elements designed to fully take advantage of the devastating
Smallpox. We’ve already seen how we recycle lost lands from the graveyard but we also find
Nether Spirit which returns itself to play to be sacrificed again and
Squee which returns back to your hand to be discarded for Smallpox or Liliana alike. We also find the very powerful
Punishing Fire and
Grove of the Burnwillows combo which can double as a secondary win condition in a pinch. Then rounding up the deck we have
Entomb and
Faithless Looting which combined with the rest of the parts of this deck form a formidable draw engine to get the rest of the decks combos working.
One of the main weaknesses of the deck is the difficulty in dealing with on board non-creature/non-land permanents. Obviously the goal of the deck is to deny mana then strip the hand but sometimes everything does not go according to plan. From the sideboard we find a trio of
Pithing Needle used as a catchall to lock out planeswalkers primarily but also other activated abilities can be bricked easily. Also there’s an
Ancient Grudge and a
Ray of Revelation to remove artifacts or enchantments respectively. Interestingly we find
Phyrexian Ingester which is possibly the most offbeat answer I’ve seen so far to creatures from
Show and Tell decks. There’s added redundancy with some of his other picks in the sideboard but you’ll obviously need to tune it to your expected meta.
Definitely a deck that needs some play time to learn how to pilot it properly but a real treat of a deck with some amazing but simplistic synergy guiding a sheer bolt of lightning. If you’re able to pull it together don’t cheat yourself the chance to take this baby out for a spin.