Introduction
After playing it for months I found it really scratched a lot of itches I have in magic - playing lots of lands, especially off the top, generating value, life from the loam, etc. And it also pushes me outside of my comfort zone toward attacking and doesn't play a ton of interactive spells -- it has quite a few answers but they are very unconventional. I tend to not like to play decks with glaring weaknesses, and this deck has a hard time with pillow fort effects in particular. But I find I rather enjoy that; I've got a few answers to them and can usually beat them in different ways - things like killing with omnath, locus of rage triggers and high market which is something I have done more than once.
Overall it's a fairly conventional Temur landfall shell but people are always surprised to see it from Maelstrom Wanderer which is something I like a lot.
Temur Elemental Landfall
Approximate Total Cost:
Gameplay
The most consistent way to get going in this deck is to hit some kind of way to play lands from the yard and an extra land drop effect or a way to find one. We're somewhat yard dependent in optimal lines, but sometimes we can hit with courser of kruphix, experimental frenzy or oracle of mul daya.
Usually we want to deploy a bunch of ramp creatures then find gaea's cradle so we have an explosive turn, but lotus cobra lines can also be really explosive.
Because we want to play extra lands it makes for fairly fragile openers and we can be at the mercy of topdecks but a lot of the topdecks are great. It's usually right to windmill slam maelstrom wanderer or omnath, locus of the roil immediately -- but figuring out when to do that is the key really. Sometimes it's nice to have refueling cards in your hand if you envision a sweeper.
A lot of time we have the opportunity to kill someone mid-game but can't quite kill the table yet, and the main thing to think about there is whether it's better to spread some love -- I usually will try to split my damage and put some damage on one person who won't have lifegain and put commander damage on someone else. Really a matter of figuring out who your opponents are though as the deck does not have a lot of ways to interact with combos.
There are a few card draw engines in the deck to help stay in the game and recover from sweepers, but they're not that explosive because the command zone is so heavy on card draw. The main ones are:
* Playing lands off the top with courser/oracle/frenzy
* Cycling lands and Loam / Wrenn and Six
* Tatyova, Benthic Druid, Risen Reef, Tireless Tracker
* Regal Behemoth getting Monarch. No one is attacking us almost ever so if you get monarch you rate to keep it.
Something I really like about this deck and something I generally like about lands strategies is how resilient they are to the normal sweepers in EDH. Usually by the time stuff like exploration gets blown up we've had our value from it.
Gaps and Opportunities
I think there's a lot of room to explore the lands-off-the-top theme with future sight and sensei's divining top as well as adding more topdeck manipulation, but I tried to stay very focused on generating a powerful beatdown and that's less reliable the more air in your deck.
Another large opportunity is adding some giant fatties like multani, yavimaya's avatar and potentially a lot more elementals like cavalier of gales. I don't like to play those cards because they are quite a bit better or worse depending on who your commander is -- for example giant fatties like Multani are much better with haste and elementals are much better with omnath, locus of the roil at the helm.
Adding a bunch of creature tutors is another opportunity -- I erred on the side of not tutoring too much because I'm already searching for lands so much it's annoying to also be running all the creature tutors and what not. I think chord of calling is probably the main thing I would add -- right now tutoring is focused on finding a crucible/loam effect (e.g. intuition for loam + cycling).
We're very light on interaction and there are a few more things we could run like Cryptic Command. The interaction is fairly limited to stuff that's fine to hit off Wanderer, like mystic confluence and spelljack. Roil Elemental and blatant thievery can solve most board states however.
We could probably stand to play a Maze of Ith although I tend to not like that as much in non-Urborg decks.
I could also see adding a few traditional cards like Eternal witness -- I just get tired of playing the same cards all the time. I might add a skullwinder someday just so I have a bellower target. In general I didn't want to overexpose the deck to yard hate which it already is fairly weak to. It's really tough to find room for all the stuff I like as is.
Closing Out
Most of the landfall token themes (e.g. omnath, locus of rage and titania, protect or arboth) are much, much deadlier with Maelstrom Wanderer at the helm, but you can always tutor for wanderer to get haste. I have GSZ'd for him more than once.
That said it's more than feasible to just kill people with a giant omnath, locus of the roil or stick a couple elementals with RG Omnath and then start pounding. The dudes just get huge really fast.
