I've been making my way through his videos and recently watched this one. Which got me thinking.
In the video, he talks a lot about his Glissa Sunslayer deck. Specifically, how the deck runs very little in the way mid-game plays, as Glissa Sunslayer guarantees a great 3 drop every game that provides removal, card draw, and a phenomenal blocker. So he is free to build the rest very greedily, lots of ramp and lots of bombs.
This concept isn't totally new to me, I usually try to keep the MV slot that my commander occupies pretty light, but this video got me thinking how far can this concept be taken? His Glissa Sunslayer deck already took the concept much further than my decks ever had.
Conveniently, MKM is releasing Kellan, Inquisitive Prodigy who I think would be a great candidate for this idea. He gives you a ramp spell on t2 that perfectly ramps into a body + card draw engine on t3. Theoretically, you could fill the rest of your deck with 5+ mana spells and have a more consistent deck than many decks with a much better curve.
So, that's basically what I'm going to do. There will still be SOME <5 MV spells, for reasons I'll explain later, but the plan is to see just how far I can push the average MV while still having a consistent deck.
Lands
So, how many lands does that take? Well, I wrote a long paragraph with a bunch of screenshots of a Hypergeometric calculator and my reasoning for the amount of risk I decided I was comfortable taking, but I realized that it wasn't very clear/concise, and what constitutes "acceptable risk" is, ultimately, highly subjective.
Suffice to say, at 45 lands, you have a ~90% chance to get 3+ lands in your first 2 mulligans, and a ~76% chance of getting the last 2 lands you need in time. So, two lander hands will not be acceptable when playing this deck, full stop and, to be honest, a 1 in 4 chance to not make it with a 3 land hand is higher than I would like. Unfortunately, these things have diminishing returns, so this is the balance I decided would be acceptable. After all, we still need some actual spells in our deck to cast with all these land drops.
Fortunately, their are a couple cards that allow us to put our thumb on the scale, and make the 76% just a little bit better:
Simic Growth Chamber is a land that counts as two lands, you kind of have to put it in with the additional land drop Kellan gives you on t2, otherwise it makes sequencing pretty awkward, but I'm confident it's worth it (I have a much higher opinion of the Ravnica bounce lands then most people, so YMMV). It also turns a t1 Crop Rotation into a land.
Hedge Maze I'm fairly confident that this land cycle is going to be very good, but specifically here, it's phenomenal, it lets you dig one card deeper for that 5th land drop and it allows all of our fetches to do the same, just by being in the deck. It's like we get to run 8 copies of this one card.
Temple of Mystery is much worse than Hedge Maze in just about every way, but I honestly think it's still reasonable here. The deck has a lot of room for tap lands, as you can play a tap land on t1 and put in a tap land from kellan on t2 as well.
Lórien Revealed/Generous Ent/Turntimber Symbiosis // Turntimber, Serpentine Wood/Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn are all lands that can be spells if that's what you actually want.
All in all, you're still going to miss your 5th land drop from time to time, the only way to completely prevent that would be to run 92 lands, but this is an acceptable number to me.
Now for some more fun lands, I'm keeping colorless lands on a tight leash, as I've recently begun to think I've undervalued my mana fixing in the past, still their are some pretty sweet tech lands that we can use:
Tanglepool Bridge and Darksteel Citadel are SWEET, they turn Kellan into +1 card every turn for the rest of the game.
Seat of the Synod/Tree of Tales: much less exciting but they are psuedo basics that can be cashed in for a card with kellan in a pinch. don't run them if artifact wipes are popular in your meta.
Gingerbread Cabin allows any green fetch to make an artifact that Kellan can then cash in for a card.
The Shire/Kitchen can make artifacts as well, a bit mana heavy, but they are colored lands, so not hard to justify.
In general, I wouldn't recommend creating you land base BEFORE you pick the rest of your cards, but I wanted to make sure that this concept was at least somewhat feasible. I can always tweak the mana base later if I feel that the rest of the deck came together differently than I expected.
The Spells
After putting all that thought in the manabase, I don't actually know what I want to do with the deck. I know I don't want to go to hard on Kellan, hopefully I can find a Tanglepool Bridge, and if a couple other disposable artifacts pop up, sweet, but building hard around a once-per-turn-effect (and not a particularly splashy one at that) isn't a great idea. Especially because just using him as artifact removal is a totally fine option. I guess since the idea here was to create a super consistent early game, midrange is the way to go. Just cram a bunch of good high MV spells and call it a day. Simic is a good color combination for midrange, so that's nice. It hurts not having good board wipes though =/
Something to note is we haven't really designed a ramp deck, just a deck that can afford butting all of the low MV cards, so we still need to keep the 7+ MV cards lower then an actual ramp deck would be able to.
Hmm, I was totally planning on playing a couple cards low MV cards so that I can hold up interaction and doublespell. However, if I fully committed, I could run Keruga, the Macrosage as a companion. Hmmmm....
While brewing, it occurred to me that Cascade spells are probably really strong here, I could cut all the reactive spells and go hard down this path, but then we are straying away from the original design idea, which was generic-bombs.dek. Also, Cascade can be kind of tedious, so I'll keep it to the generically good cascade spells.
In a similar vein, extra turns are probably a good idea, but I don't like them, so I'm only going to run Ugin's Nexus.
And after another hour or so of brewing, I've come up with the following list:
The most Timmy deck of all time.
Approximate Total Cost:
I don't normally post decks grouped by MV, but in this case, the whole point is that the bombs DON'T play any specialized role, they're just stand-alone, potentially game-ending, threats, all along the curve.
Since I did opt for Keruga, the Macrosage companion, I have no cards with less than 3 MV, which, in turn, means double spelling will be pretty rare, because of this, additional value was placed on cards that make it more probable that I can double spell (Treachery, Chromatic Orrery) and mana doubling spells that will hopefully get me casting multiple bombs each turn.
I played a LOT of goldfish games, and the deck is buttery smooth, I did miss land drop #5 once, but it was only once, I still had a play, and I found a land the very next turn, so I think the concept is fine, time to go play some good ol battlecruiser magic in the year of our lord, 2024 and see what happens.
