After a few days of iteration, theorycrafting, and goldfishing, I feel comfortable starting a thread for the final draft of the deck itself. While it remains untested, I believe it to be a fantastic starting point for when Thalia and The Gitrog Monster releases in two months.
Well, let's get to it.
Why Thalia and The Gitrog Monster?
Have you read the card? The Princess and the Frog are a hyper-efficient Swiss Army knife, culminating in a card that is unadulterated value. Vigilance and deathtouch make this pairing a top-tier blocker. This deck is very aggressive with its life total and deterring attacks is her floor. Given that this is a deck that this deck is focused on lands, being able to drop multiples per turn is clearly the main attraction. Not only does this put us ahead on mana, but it also allows us to trigger multiple Landfall effects as well, While putting you ahead, they also slow your opponents down, punishing the incredibly greedy manabases of most EDH decks. If that wasn't enough, if you feel safe attacking, they draw a card at a pittance. Thalia and The Gitrog Monster are the One True Pairing.
The high power level of the card is centralizing for the deck, so much so that the current decklist is largely devoted to ramping into them on turn 3. When accounting for the requisite land drops and ramp spells, there's a roughly 70% chance of that happening, statistically speaking. With intelligent mulligans, this should be happening far more often than not and is thus worth optimizing around.
"They're too much value," you might say. "The deck builds itself," you could argue. "It's boring to play against," you might protest. These things may be true, but neither the Abzan nor their Junk ancestors care. Long have the people waited for a card that enabled a Lands deck in this color identity, and Wizards, shockingly, delivered.
The following aren't exhaustive notes, but they should give a lot of insight into how I envision to deck to both play out as well as the sort of deck I'm striving for it to be.
Land
46 seems like a lot, but for a Lands deck I think it's towards the bottom end of the amount you should normally run. With our commanders allowing extra land drops we want to make as many drops as possible not only to cast them on turn 3, but also to take advantage of those extra land drops the following turn. The full suite of fetchlands are played, of course, as well as the best color fixers in the color identity. The deck strives to find a balance between a chunk of utility lands while also being able to produce its colors as quickly and consistently as possible. Colorless lands are minimized. The deck used to run more lands that came into play tapped, including the cycling lands, but those lower our chances of accelerating into an early TATGM. The cons outweigh the pros, to me. As for basics, they're split between snow and non-snow to both improve Field of the Dead and Into the North, which is now functionally just Rampant Growth. Not great, but still worth running.
Ramp
While only 10 ramp spells are listed in this category, there are in fact 14 ways to enable a turn 3 TATGM: a land, two tutors for a creature, and Exploration with some lands in hand. These cards help make the deck remarkably consistent and most of them trigger Landfall effects as well. I chose as few dorks as possible to avoid losing my mana in a random board sweeper, but Birds of Paradise and Bloom Tender are too good to pass up.
Land Drop
A staple of Lands decks, I suspect these cards don't do as much work as they do in other decks here. We already have this effect in the command zone. While some redundancy in case of removal is good, we don't need to run a critical density of them to ensure hitting one every game.
Recursion
Playing lands from the graveyard with extra land drops is an absurd combination, particularly fetchlands. This makes what our deck does even better in just about every category, so we want to play all of the good ones. As an additional card advantage engine we're also running Seasons Past since it combines so well with Demonic Tutor. This combo can come out much earlier than you might think since this deck can produce so much mana.
Spot Removal
I think 6 is a good amount here. We're not a control deck, we don't want 10+, but Rest in Peace is a card we'd need to deal with immediately and when combined with our universal tutors gives us a reasonable chance to find an answer to a problem.
Board Wipe
Maybe Farewell isn't great here, but I would feel awkward running less than 4 board wipes. Sometimes, you need to save yourself from a lethal board state. Sometimes, you have to clean the board up so you can rebuild faster than everyone else and run them over.
Draw
In my opinion, this is the weakest aspect of the deck. Lands decks can run out of gas halfway through the game because they've emptied their hands into land drops but have no relevant plays. Having the option to refill your hand is something every deck needs, this deck more than others. I tried to include the best black draw spells that dug deep, but there aren't so many of them that are actually playable. Even then, it's difficult to find room for them.
Tutor
Not much to say here. We run the best universal tutors, the best land tutors, and the two green versatile creature tutors. They do what they say on the tin.
Sustain
Multiple fetchland activations per turn add up, and there needs to be some way to stanch the bleeding. Shout out to Overgrown Estate for finally being mildly playable 20 years later.
Win Condition
Pretty standard stuff here. Landfall tokens or ways to pump those tokens into lethal. I suppose they're sort of anti-climactic, but they feel like the inevitable result of a land that ramps so hard.
That's the deck. I plan on fleshing this out a little bit more in the future, but for now I wanted to get the ball rolling on a specialized thread in the decklist subforum.