LLCLFOLD [EDH]

[Oversoul]

Huh. I've been mostly meticulous about creating threads for EDH decks of my own design for a while now, but this seems to be the exception, likely because until recently it was all just virtual testing and I hadn't physically constructed a list. Well, I did that, but I also made some updates, so let's get that out of the way first. I'll show the original version presently, but mostly just so that I have it recorded in an easy-to-remember place for my own recordkeeping. Everyone else can ignore the first list in this post, as it's not the one I've been playing for real...

Commander
1 Omnath, Locus of Rage

1 Abundance
1 Ancient Greenwarden
1 Anger
1 Arid Mesa
1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
1 Blasphemous Act
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Burgeoning
1 Combustible Gearhulk
1 Constant Mists
1 Courser of Kruphix
1 Crop Rotation
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Cultivate
1 Destructive Revelry
1 Earthcraft
1 Elvish Reclaimer
1 Eternal Witness
1 Exploration
1 Fabled Passage
1 Far Wanderings
7 Forest
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Gaea's Cradle
1 Gamble
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Ghost Town
1 Harrow
1 Hull Breach
1 Journey of Discovery
1 Khalni Heart Expedition
1 Kodama's Reach
1 Land Grant
1 Life from the Loam
1 Lotus Cobra
1 Manabond
1 Maze of Ith
1 Mina and Denn, Wildborn
1 Misty Rainforest
5 Mountain
1 Mountain Valley
1 Mox Diamond
1 Nahiri's Lithoforming
1 Natural Balance
1 Natural Order
1 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
1 Obliterate
1 Oracle of Mul Daya
1 Prismatic Vista
1 Rampaging Baloths
1 Rampant Growth
1 Ramunap Excavator
1 Regrowth
1 Roiling Regrowth
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Scapeshift
1 Seasons Past
1 Sol Ring
1 Spike Weaver
1 Splendid Reclamation
1 Springbloom Druid
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Stomping Ground
1 Storm Cauldron
1 Strip Mine
1 Summer Bloom
1 Survival of the Fittest
1 Sylvan Library
1 Sylvan Safekeeper
1 Taiga
1 Terastodon
1 Thermopod
1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Ulvenwald Hydra
1 Valakut Exploration
1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
1 Wasteland
1 Wayward Swordtooth
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wood Elves
1 Wooded Foothills
1 World Shaper
1 Worldly Tutor
1 Wrenn and Six
1 Zuran Orb

I hadn't done any work on this deck since last year, so the physical version I built this Tuesday made a few changes. Tireless Provisioner and Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth are no-brainer inclusions for a deck like this, so I worked them in. And while I was happy with Nahiri's Lithoforming in the old test version from last year, I couldn't find a copy of the card, so I've temporarily replaced it with my new red auto-inclusion: Nalathni Dragon. Here were the changes.

-1 Courser of Kruphix
-1 Nahiri's Lithoforming
-1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
+1 Nalathni Dragon
+1 Tireless Provisioner
+1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth

With those changes, here's the deck I actually built on Tuesday and piloted multiple times on Wednesday...

Commander
1 Omnath, Locus of Rage

1 Abundance
1 Ancient Greenwarden
1 Anger
1 Arid Mesa
1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
1 Blasphemous Act
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Burgeoning
1 Combustible Gearhulk
1 Constant Mists
1 Crop Rotation
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Cultivate
1 Destructive Revelry
1 Earthcraft
1 Elvish Reclaimer
1 Eternal Witness
1 Exploration
1 Fabled Passage
1 Far Wanderings
7 Forest
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Gaea's Cradle
1 Gamble
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Ghost Town
1 Harrow
1 Hull Breach
1 Journey of Discovery
1 Khalni Heart Expedition
1 Kodama's Reach
1 Land Grant
1 Life from the Loam
1 Lotus Cobra
1 Manabond
1 Maze of Ith
1 Mina and Denn, Wildborn
1 Misty Rainforest
5 Mountain
1 Mountain Valley
1 Mox Diamond
1 Nalathni Dragon
1 Natural Balance
1 Natural Order
1 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
1 Obliterate
1 Oracle of Mul Daya
1 Prismatic Vista
1 Rampaging Baloths
1 Rampant Growth
1 Ramunap Excavator
1 Regrowth
1 Roiling Regrowth
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Scapeshift
1 Seasons Past
1 Sol Ring
1 Spike Weaver
1 Splendid Reclamation
1 Springbloom Druid
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Stomping Ground
1 Storm Cauldron
1 Strip Mine
1 Summer Bloom
1 Survival of the Fittest
1 Sylvan Library
1 Sylvan Safekeeper
1 Taiga
1 Terastodon
1 Thermopod
1 Tireless Provisioner
1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Ulvenwald Hydra
1 Valakut Exploration
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
1 Wasteland
1 Wayward Swordtooth
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wood Elves
1 Wooded Foothills
1 World Shaper
1 Worldly Tutor
1 Wrenn and Six
1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth
1 Zuran Orb

The deck's name stands for "Low Land-Count Landfall Omnath Loam Deck." This all started because I heard some people claim that a landfall or land-based deck in EDH needs to run more than 40 lands. I figured, "Sounds like an easy challenge to take on" and then pondered how to actually do that. I had liked the performance of my Livonya Silone deck from the West Coast Commander League. That ran 38 lands and had a lot of other thematic nonsense going on. So I picked Omnath, Locus of Rage as the commander for this endeavor and pretty quickly settled on 33 lands as viable, with 32 lands being too unreliable for my tastes. Once I ran enough tests to satisfy myself that this concept worked, I mostly didn't really do anything with it, although occasionally I'd return to the deck in some way or another.

Actual performance so far has been poor, but I think I made some egregious misplays and that the deck just had lousy luck in a few of those games. I'll keep this around and accumulate more experience with it...

 

[Oversoul]

Yikes, this deck continues to underperform. I do want to adjust it, but I'm also a bit alarmed at the realization that this is probably just operating at a lower power level than most of the pods I'm playing in. Now, that's not a dealbreaker for me and I don't mind being in that position, but usually that's because I intend to do silly theme-based stuff. The "low land-count" gimmick here is supposed to be mostly serious. Omnath packs a punch and I did witness this deck churn out lots and lots of tokens. It's got some power to it. And yet, it just gets outclassed.

 

[Oversoul]

Well, this deck's losing streak continues unabated, but getting games in has given me a bit more information that I might use to update the list in the future. In my most recent game with this deck, I kept a one-land hand and was able to use that to ramp into Omnath pretty quickly, but one player at the table only ever cast a Rakdos Signet and spells that killed my creatures. This allowed a third player to eventually overwhelm me. I could still have potentially won, but with no Genesis in my Survival package for this deck, my Spike Weaver couldn't easily be recurred, and I was one turn away from setting up a way to deal with the ridiculous dinosaur army I was facing down. As a last-ditch effort, I used Obliterate to try to reset the board, but my opponent just happened to have Heroic Intervention.

This is getting to be just silly at this point. I probably do need to adjust the manabase to make this thing more consistent, but most of my losses have been due to a confluence of actions taken by my opponents, stopping me from winning and simultaneously handing the game to another player at the table. I'm OK with that happening and it's part of EDH, but it's like it happens every single time this deck isn't manascrewed. At what point do I admit that this deck just isn't powerful enough to beat the decks I'm competing against? That conclusion seems wrong based on my intuition here, with how many times I've wiped out a player or come one turn away from winning. I don't know. Further research is needed, I guess.

 

[Oversoul]

Hey, this deck finally won a game! Nothing particularly special happened in gameplay. I just made some elementals and attacked. The game was pretty close and had some back-and-forth, but none of the particular answers that were fielded really stopped Omnath, so I came out on top in the end. It was a good game, but kind of anticlimactic, as I'd had some better starts and more explosive turns in other games in the past. What won it for me wasn't really any card in my deck, but more a lack of answers to Omnath's 5/5 elementals within the right window of time. Still, at least the big losing streak is broken.