I wrote this on my desktop computer in google docs, so there's totally likely problems with my bbcode and stuff that I will try to fix at some point. This is an article I've had percolating for a while that I may revise and clean up at some point. If you yoink any of my key thoughts for a more official article please credit me. Nothing really that groundbreaking here but I think I have some unique takes on the archetype.
Exploration Exploration or Loaming Las Vegas
Whether you call it lands.dec or exploration.dec, or even sometimes landfall though the themes are often conflated, the Commander community abounds with decks that want to play extra lands rather than traditional approaches of ramp. This approach to the game comes with a number of hurdles that overlap a great deal with the traditional "wrong half" problem that Birds of Paradise decks suffer from (and to a lesser extent, Explosive Vegetation decks. This essay explores how the wrong half problem connects to key commander concepts of win conditions, card advantage, and opening hands, and proposes some guard-rails to help build great Lands decks that don't flame out or spend all their time durdling.What is Exploration.dec?
First and foremost, this deck is a mono green deck that splashes other colors. Because all of the good Exploration effects are in green, about 20 near-mandatory green cards comprise the core of the shell.
While it is possible to make a good Exploration deck without Life from the Loam it is basically wrong; if you're on a budget and can't get fetchlands, I would advise playing a Cultivate shell instead. It's almost always better if you can't get your hands on the graveyard shenanigans (1).
The core set of effects that make up the Exploration strategy are:
Acceleration - Exploration, Wayward Swordtooth, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, and to a lesser extent Sakura-tribe scout and Skyshroud Ranger. These effects (amongst others) let you play extra lands that you've gotten through some source of card advantage engine.
Because extra land drop effects scale better than any other ramp source when fuelled it is absolutely critical to have enough mana value 1 and 2 effects, which often necessitates playing a lot of fairly questionable cards like Llanowar Scout depending on the color layout and curve. Otherwise powerhouse cards like Nature's Lore pale in comparison - if you find ...
Engines - Life from the Loam, Ramunap Excavator, and crucible of worlds (with honorable mentions for ancient greenwarden). These cards give you the truly ridiculous card advantage engine required to keep dropping lands; while it is possible to fuel the beast with conventional card advantage, even otherwise powerful engines like Rhystic Study can struggle to keep up with a well oiled loam.
Engines exist to get lands to play; it is worth noting that a card that reads "Landfall; draw a card" is not quite good enough to be considered an engine. The core goal of an engine is to let you play as many land drops as you have per turn; if you stall out because of not hitting a land, you don't realize all the benefits of the style of acceleration.
It's also worth noting that you can assemble an engine out of components as well as using single cards. A 'DIY' engine might consist of a card that lets you play lands off the top like Augur of Autumn and a thing that lets you rearrange your top like Sensei's Divining Top. Shuffle effects are very useful here even one-time effects. Other multiple part engines can be composed of say, a token producer and an effect that draws cards off of creatures entering -- such as Risen Reef + Titania, Protector of Argoth. Keeping up with your rate of land drops is much harder with multiple component engines and obviously assembling multiple pieces is more challenging.
Some rare cards provide aspects of both engines and accelerants; these cards are usually good enough, but not always. Oracle of Mul Daya is the prototypical example.
Cards like Splendid Reclamation and World Shaper do not fit cleanly into these buckets, and because of their cost and dependency on other effects should not be considered either; they're properly thought of more as part of a win condition package which will be discussed later.
Commander
The first real Lands.Dec was helmed by Azusa, Lost but Seeking, because putting a double exploration in the command zone is pretty good. Azusa decks still bring an absurd amount of power to bear, but struggle with the green interaction suite, so have often been replaced by simic generals like Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait and Tatyova, Benthic Druid.
The purpose of this is not to exhaustively cover all generals; remember that Exploration.dec is a mono green deck that can be helmed by any green commander. Being an engine or accelerant, or both, supports the design very well but many other approaches exist; I've seen multiple Damia, Sage of Stone lands decks, for example.
Mistakes
Common mistakes in construction of the basic shell include:
- Mixing in too much generic ramp - There is very little room in a good Lands.dec for stuff like Mana Vault, Golgari Signet and Fyndhorn Elves. The best pieces of generic ramp are usually Cultivate effects that impersonate an engine by bringing extra lands to hand.
- Not playing enough lands - An opening hand with fewer than 3 lands is unplayable at a high rate. I have kept 6 landers with Exploration. My typical manabase is 42 lands and I've played as many as 55 (!!!) successfully.
- Overvaluing one-shot effects - Arboreal Grazer, Explore and Growth Spiral are not accelerants. They can be correct sometimes but they don't do the same thing.
- Forgetting about Sakura-Tribe Scout (it's not a second copy of Exploration but it's the closest thing we have. And it has advantages.
- Forgetting to play a cycling land - Tranquil Thicket is almost mandatory.
- Bonus Gameplay mistake - Forgetting to dredge Loam.
In summary, the Exploration.dec seeks to assemble a piece of acceleration and an engine, which combine to form a 2-card combination that creates functionally a very resilient copy of Mana Reflection. This alone grants the pilot more questions than answers, because having a bunch of mana doesn't do anything, especially the design is soft to early game aggression.
Win Conditions
The traditional Llanowar Elves deck showcases the wrong half problem in probably the most blatant way. Everyone has seen an elfball or mana dork deck vomit out a hand of mana dorks and then go "Oh, you countered Craterhoof Behemoth? Guess I lose." Balancing the number of win conditions and ways to find them challenges even great deckbuilders.
Exploration.dec asks the question: "What if my mana dorks could be more resilient at the cost of not really contributing meaningfully to winning?" Which is not to say that playing lands can't be part of your win, it's just an awful lot of extra steps. The payoffs are fewer, worse and more complex to assemble.
We will discuss a number of approaches by archetype rather than trying to exhaustively cover all the angles.
Landfall Tokens
Probably the most common Lands.dec in the wild, Landfall decks attempt to turn all the churn of lands entering the battlefield into triggers that generate bodies. Powerhouse cards like like Titania, Protector of Argoth, Scute Mob and Rampaging Baloths bring potentially lethal power to bear in just a couple turns most of the time, which is an extremely compact win condition. Field of the Dead is almost its own sub-archetype here, with a resilient way to keep churning out bodies through sweeper after sweeper.
While many landfall token decks struggle with sweepers, pilot error through overcommitting or inaccurate threat assessment cause more of these issues than the cards themselves. Landfall token threats are incredibly powerful against sweepers in abstract, bringing an extremely mana efficient army-in-a-can that allows a light board commitment against sweeper heavy decks. Many landfall token decks can play cards like Volrath's Stronghold and High Market that make these threats essentially immortal as well.
Even in decks that don't focus on this theme, playing a couple of the best effects brings a whole lot of board presence for a small investment in cards that are easily found in our primary color. I recommend playing Scute Swarm, Field of the Dead and Titania, Protector of Argoth in most Lands decks.
Board presence is the key distinguishing feature of this archetype. Lands decks traditionally struggle with combat, particularly when their colors don't bring great sweepers, and landfall token producers close that gap handily. These decks struggle to find room for interaction, however. Commanders that grant haste like Maelstrom Wanderer grossly over-perform in this archetype since lack of haste is a common problem.
Combo-Control
Infinite combos provide a compact win condition for a deck that has a lot of slots preallocated to engines and accelerants, which provides the distinguishing feature of having room for interaction. Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait and Tatyova, Benthic Druid both helm the prototypical version of this deck, the CEDH combo deck built around leveraging the general's engine capability to fuel Mystic Sanctuary infinite turns loops. This deck packs a truly absurd amount of interaction, and numerous lower powered cousins exist as well.
Typical combo Lands decks seek to turn the landfall into card advantage which fuels interaction and ultimately enables surviving long enough to combo out. While the most efficient combos use lands for one or more pieces it's definitely possible to use non-synergistic A+B combos as well. The combination of massive card advantage and mana advantage creates a lot of inevitability for combo focused decks; they'll eventually assemble enough mana to interact multiple times to protect a combo, despite having less explosive early games than decks that use other kinds of ramp.
In general I think Time Warp effects are the best way to win with Lands.dec; they have high synergy with Exploration effects and numerous lands interact favorably with effects that enable infinite turns - lands such as Mystic Sanctuary, Volrath's Stronghold, and Riptide Laboratory for example.
My second favorite approach to comboing with a Lands shell is to repeatedly untap lands that generate infinite mana. There are numerous combinations of effects that generate infinite mana off of powerhouse lands like Gaea's Cradle. That said, this effect has less natural synergy and more choke-point pieces (effects that there are only one of, like Deserted Temple and Rings of Brighthearth).
I've seen builds with Dryad of the Ilysian Grove and scapeshift with Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle as combo outlets before; generally I view this approach as a bit brittle, but it is certainly compact and can also have non-deterministic wins simply by slamming out mountains.
Beyond infinite turns and infinite untaps, several generals offer synergistic combos with landfall. The Gitrog Monster enables multiple deterministic combo wins with compact packages. Damia, Sage of Stone has a powerful combo with Manabond and Words of Wind. Kodama of the East Tree offers multiple infinite combos with landfall token producers like Scute Swarm and Field of the Dead. Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios offers another avenue for Mystic Sanctuary combos as well.
I also consider stax and lockdown strategies that leverage the advantages of the Lands shell to be part of this sub-strategy, although a case could be made to discuss them separately. A brief survey of this group of combo-control builds includes such gems as: Armageddon + Splendid Reclamation; Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite + Nature's Revolt; Winter Orb + Cabal Coffers/Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth; and more!
While it is possible to play the Lands.Dec shell with a glass-cannon combo focus, I believe that is a misuse of the archetype; Lands decks offer inevitability in exchange for sacrificing early game explosiveness, and inevitability in Commander requires being able to defend yourself. Trying to out-ramp mana rock and dork decks and combo out without control elements or board presence is a risky proposition at best.
Haymakers
Many lands.dec builds seek to close the game with single card winconditions like Expropriate, Debt to the Deathless, Torment of Hailfure, Enter the Infinite or Tooth and Nail. The lands shell uniquely brings the ability to reliably make the massive amounts of mana required to close the game with these cards; often, conventional ramp packages are unable to make the 10+ mana needed to find, play and defend cards like this.
The astute reader will note that this approach does not significantly differ from combo-control in its game-plan and requirements. To close the game with a huge bomb requires extending the game, and that typically requires enough control to stave off combo and aggro decks.
While most haymaker decks more closely align with combo-control, sometimes these cards will crop up in landfall token decks - while this will win some games, I consider it to be a mistake in construction. Landfall token decks win by applying pressure, and should usually play more interaction, payoffs, engines, or accelerants instead of haymakers. A removal spell for Peacemaker is usually a better solution than trying to go over it with Torment of Hailfire.
Mistakes
Common mistakes in win-condition packages for lands.dec:
- Non-Synergistic packages - Using lands.dec ramp to cast random good-stuff is usually going to work out worse than playing Cultivate or Birds of Paradise decks. The Lands package requires a large commitment and will rarely leave enough room for win conditions that don't benefit from lands hitting the battlefield.
- Too many haymakers that don't affect the board - Torment of Hailfire rotting in your hand against a token deck is no way to go through life. It's not *bad* but it requires thought.
- Too Many or Not Enough - Balancing a win condition package is *hard*. Try to find things that do double duty; a great example is Woodland Bellower who gets Ramunap Excavator and Wayward Swordtooth but also gets Risen Reef or Eternal Witness. Tutors obviously fit well here, with cards like Finale of Devastation putting in a lot of work.
- Bonus Gameplay Mistake - Playing a second guy who makes tokens from lands. Just don't do it unless it's going to win right now.
- Another Bonus Gameplay Mistake - Not killing the control player first. Never let them talk you out of attacking.
The best approaches to winning the game with Lands.dec have some kind of synergy with Exploration or Life from the Loam. Deviating too far from that path spreads a deck too thin (2). Decks looking to play three lands a turn off of traditional card advantage engines will usually run out of steam, and playing one land a turn is not going to benefit enough from land engines like loam and crucible.
Card Advantage
Engines create a truly stupendous amount of card advantage, but a proper Lands deck usually needs some way to get cards that aren't lands as well. This is where the "wrong half" problem usually rears its ugly head in a Lands deck; the deck vomits out a bunch of lands and keeps doing that, but never draws win conditions.
Many approaches exist to solve this problem, and a blend of them often works best.
Graveyard Shenanigans
Loam decks truly excel at filling up the graveyard and benefit from it as well. There are many lands that benefit from filling up the bin and recurring them; good old Bloodghast + Phyrexian Tower, Volrath's Stronghold, and Emeria, the Sky Ruin being a small subset.
Graveyard combos using such luminaries as Razaketh, the Foulblooded, The Gitrog Monster and Hermit Druid, and multiple land drops can make getting enough bodies for Dread Return easier as well.
Entomb, Gamble and Intuition are powerhouses that are both actively graveyard shenanigans and can enable Life from the loam. Additionally, we now have multiple copies of Hedron Crab that can rapidly fill a graveyard, and looting/rummaging effects can be functionally twice as good with a Crucible of Worlds available.
Because most of the best engines are highly graveyard synergistic, almost every Exploration.dec will include some amount of graveyard synergy. It's usually important enough to play ways to defend your graveyard-- and it's worth noting that Entomb effects can do double duty here by instantly shuffling your bin with a Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, as cards like survival of the fittest.
Graveyard bombs like Living Death can be a great way to close games as well, allowing you to turn an empty hand into a game win with a single card.
Make the Lands Do More Work
If your win conditions are also lands, all your land tutors become both part of your engine and win conditions. Cards like Crop Rotation can find Krosan Verge or they can find Emeria, the Sky Ruin to start your graveyard recursion engine, or they can find Eye of Ugin to start the Eldrazi train.
I once used The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale as a sac outlet for Emrakul, the Promised End tutored for by Eye of Ugin and recurred by Volrath's Stronghold to win a game that had ended up heads up. Zero cards other than lands and things that find lands were involved in the slaying of that Planeswalker.
Even just a handful of cycling lands can do quite a bit of work; I usually will play a couple at least.
Bomb Card Draw
While I've disparaged one-card win condition haymakers like Torment of Hailfire, card draw bombs can be great in Lands.dec. Cards that scale like Stroke of Genius can serve as mid-game bridge card draw (draw 3 or 4) or as endgame (draw 30) card draw spells.
Usually traditional card draw bombs like Consecrated Sphinx and Recurring Insight are outclassed by synergistic card draw, but these cards can put in a lot of work if they can easily be reused.
Traditional Card Draw
Common card draw effects like Rhystic Study are *fine*. The problem they have is that they only do one thing, and it's really easy to fill up a Lands.dec build with cards that find other cards and don't actually do anything. I'm more a fan of these effects in Combo-Control builds than Aggro builds.
Stack your Deck
I greatly enjoy cards that stack the top of the deck for a sub-theme of Oracle of Mul Daya effects, like Sensei's Divining Top, Sylvan Library, or even Ponder. They're mana efficient, synergistic, and don't have such a low floor. There's a truly massive number of these nowadays. I've had great luck with both Future Sight and Experimental Frenzy, Scroll Rack and more.
The feeling of chaining life from the loams into a 18 card hand and then scroll racking all the lands on top, playing 4 of them, and then going bananas is hard to top.
Other Synergistic Draw
Many of the traditional ways to draw massive amounts of cards off of creature swarms go great with landfall token decks. Cards like The Risen Reef as many landfall effects make elementals, and Skullclamp with Scute Swarm, as well as Regal Force effects, for example.
A number of "landfall, draw a card" effects such as Tireless Tracker and Tatyova, Benthic Druid exist, although there aren't really critical mass of them. There are a number of generals who give some variant of this as well.
General as card advantage outlet - Probably the easiest thing to do is have a general who generates repeated card advantage, like Maelstrom Wanderer or Damia, Sage of Stone. Make mana, cast your general, profit!
Synergistic Interaction
There's a surprising amount of synergistic interaction in Lands.dec. Allowing cards you have to play for Lands (lots of lands, land tutors, engines) enable you to interact or at least sort of interact can go a long way to reducing the slot problems the lands shell causes a deck.
Land Slot Interaction
Lands like Maze of Ith, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Kor Haven, Field of the Dead and Glacial Chasm can stand in for interactive effects in a lot of scenarios, while the extra land drops of the archetype reduce some of the mana setback for lands that don't tap for mana - or simply remove it by tutoring up Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth. Volrath's Stronghold allowing the reuse of creature based interaction sometimes also qualifies.
Landfall Interaction
Probably my favorite landfall shenanigan is Roil Elemental. The sheer number of overwhelming board states turned into free insurrection by a few lands and the elemental is innumerable. Retreat to Coralhelm's ability to tap attackers has won me a lot of games as well. It's definitely worth a scan through the database of landfall effects. Generally I'd recommend aiming for things that provide some other utility.
Incidentally, Bloodghast and various tokens tend to play very well with Grave Pact effects and sac outlets on lands like Phyrexian Tower.
Opening Hands & Early Game Deck Design
The previously discussed need for both an engine and an accelerant, and eventually a way to find a win condition, makes designing for and understanding opening hands difficult in a Lands deck. It's very easy for sequencing to stall when an engine dies, and the strength of the archetype of scaling twice as fast as other strategies falls flat if you don't have an accelerant.
I'm going to share some general rules of thumb, but bear in mind that different generals and strategies will vary wildly. The Gitrog Monster may want to make a lot of sacrifices to ensure getting to 5 early since he brings an extra land drop *and* card draw to the table, much like Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait wants to get to 6. The specific trumps the general as always.
It's a good idea to have an idea of your position at the table and who you're playing with to help you decide what you can do without. The faster your pod, the more critical an accelerant is and the more you may have to risk a hand without a great engine. The slower your pod, the more risky exploding early and not having card draw can be.
When I look at a hand I always try to understand where my land drops are going to come from, and I'm personally a lot more likely to keep a 5 land hand with life from the loam and no accelerant than I am a 3 land hand with Exploration and no engine. There are, in general, a lot more playable accelerants than there are engines, and some of them are great at catching you up.
Understanding what kind of "bridge" ramp that doesn't provide a steady stream of acceleration - read, arboreal grazer vs exploration - that you have, and need to play to fill out your curve is critical. An important thing to note is that a huge number of the key cards cost 3 mana, so filling out your curve at 0/1 CMC ramp is important. There are now 3 "exploration dudes" at 2 cmc as well, which does smooth out the curve, but these guys - llanowar scout, budoka gardener and scaled herbalist are infinitely worse than skyshroud ranger.
Unlike a mana dork deck, you really cannot afford to be choosy about having a way to find a win con - if your hand has an accelerant and an engine, keep it! Trust your deck to find a win condition or draw into one. If you're stalling out with an accelerant and an engine, tune it up. You generally have to play more threats or more card draw effects than an elfball deck.
The typical magic number for something you want one of in your opening hand at a high rate is 10. Unfortunately there are not really 10 playable early game accelerants and there surely are not 10 playable engines. So depending on your color scheme you're going to be playing some filler; what form that filler takes is up to deck design. I typically will use a mix of good quality ramp spells, cantrips, or cheap draw spells to fill in the gaps in my curve.
A card like Ponder or Sensei's Divining Top may not seem obviously synergistic, but they shrink the size of your deck which makes finding an engine or accelerant easier early on, and of course have light synergy with some other staple effects like Courser of Kruphix. Similarly, a bridge ramp spell like Nature's Lore or Cultivate might get you to the mana cost you need to do something else about your woes (while simultaneously being partially synergistic).
--
Admittedly, this is a bit packed with truisms about deck construction in general, but constructing a Lands.dec requires careful attention to how you're going to sequence your early game and bridge to the late game. Because the archetype lacks a complete synergistic package with a perfect curve we have to choose filler. Choose wisely!
Footnotes
(1) A couple exceptions exist but I think the best is Yasharn, Implacable Earth -- that's another article.
(2) It's fine to play Exploration or Crucible of Worlds as good cards on their own; but the Lands shell doesn't have room to mess about with lack of synergy.
Recommended Shell
Note, this shell does not include any staple artifacts or anything in colors other than green. I may expand some of the staple cards from other colors (e.g. Entomb and Intuition) at some point.
I'm also not prescribing any staple card draw effects like Sylvan Library - just out of scope. I'm on the fence over whether I should include Worldly Tutor but that ability to act as another engine or accelerant is - despite the card disdavantage - pretty darn good. I could definitely see cutting it.
Some of the lands get trimmed with more colors, particularly stuff like Petrified Field.
Regarding the bridge ramp, I almost always play Nature's Lore and Three Visits these days, but I could be convinced to add another of the 2-drop tap guys personally.
1 and 2 color builds should usually play Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and some 3 color decks can accommodate it. My current primary landfall deck has some pretty ridiculous color demands so I do not run it.
Run all the fetchlands you can. I usually will go ahead and run Fabled Passage in most 3 color decks and it's been pretty okay. Borderline, but usually worth the risk. I run a lot of basics.
I actually do not run Sol Ring or Mana Crypt in my Maelstrom Wanderer build because I didn't feel like it.
Decklist
Tutors
Accelerants
Bridge Ramp
Lands
Fetchlands
Approximate Total Cost:
