By Ben Plummer

Hello everyone. So I was playing my creature token deck and had assembled a nice board of over 30 insect and squirrel tokens and I was ready to slam Coat of Arms on my next turn for the big win, but the last card in my opponent's hand was a Wrath of God which swept away all of my tokens, my hopes, and my dreams. I was sick of my creatures dying and as I watched him gain his footing I thought about how awesome it would be if all of my creatures became invulnerable to conventional removal at the end of my turn. My eyes fell upon my Worldwake manlands and a new idea was born in my head. I smiled smugly at my friend as I scooped up my cards, knowing that he was in for a Rude Awakening if you know what I mean.

I've included two decklists. One of them, Manly Lands, is much more land heavy and is less explosive than the other list, Land Surge. I'll start by explaining Manly Lands. This deck is to be played as a control deck. You want to hold off their creatures with spot removal like Lightning Bolt and Doom Blade, and save mass removal like Wrath of God for those explosive "I suddenly have a million guys" types of turns. If you can stick a Ward of Bones you are pretty much set. Since you have zero creatures in your deck, once you play Ward of Bones they can only play one creature before Ward of Bones kicks in.

Once you have them locked down you can start getting your land engine going. Most of your lands come into play tapped, so Amulet of Vigor is there to help smooth out your turns. There are only two because Amulet of Vigor gets worse in multiples and it's not absolutely essential for the deck. Earth Surge, on the other hand, gets more powerful with multiples since its effect stacks. Your Treetop Village usually becomes a 3/3 trampler for two mana, but with just one Earth Surge in play it becomes a 5/5 MEGALAND. Not bad right? What's even better is with Terra Eternal, all of your lands are indestructible (even when they turn into creatures).

This brings me to the issue of consistency. At first glance, the deck may seem wildly inconsistent since it is four colors. However, there are eleven dual lands in the deck and Expedition Map allows us to fetch any land in our deck. Expedition Map is a great way to smooth out your mana based on which manlands you have in play, which is important because what good are manlands if you don't have the right mana to activate them. I also included Explore because it lets you accelerate your mana and also allows you to draw cards and get to your relevant spells nice and quickly.

As for the manlands themselves, it mainly depends on your personal preference. I recommend choosing manlands that match the colors of your other spells. Since I don't play any blue spells I decided not to use Creeping Tar Pit or Celestial Colonnade even though both are very powerful manlands. You certainly could play bounce and counterspells as spot removal over Lightning Bolt and Doom Blade or cut down on the utility cards instead. I definitely recommend going green as at least one of your colors and I feel like white should be in there for the powerful wrath effects; although you may also be able to go heavier into black and play mass removal cards like Decree of Pain.

The next deck, Land Surge, is a lot more explosive and is meant to kill the opponent out of nowhere. Like the last deck, you want to get as many lands into play as you can as fast as possible. In the Manly Lands deck you pick at your opponent's life total little by little with massive manlands, but in this Land Surge deck you use mana accelerants to play a ton of forests as fast as possible and then blow your opponent out with Rude Awakening or Natural Affinity.

The key theme of this deck is swinging at your opponent with all of your lands out of nowhere. Cards that allow you to do this are Rude Awakening, Natural Affinity, Jolrael, Empress of Beasts, and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa. Kamahl is not quite as good at turning lands into creatures as Jolrael, Empress of Beasts, but what he does is give you an Overrun effect. Between him, Jolrael and 12 lands, you could have four 6/6 tramplers headed toward your opponent. The key here is to have enough lands in play to use your spells and creatures to turn some lands into creatures, and still have enough lands left over to mount a sizable assault. Earth Surge is great in this deck because it pumps your creatures yet only requires a one time mana commitment.

This deck would be way too slow and clunky if you had to wait fourteen turns to get fourteen forests into play. First of all, Rites of Flourishing and Rowen allow you to draw a maximum of three cards every turn if the first one you draw is a basic land. These cards not only put more lands into your hand but also increase the likelihood of drawing into one of your blowout spells. Rites of Flourishing along with Gaea's Touch allow you to play additional lands on each of your turns, which is key because you want a lot of lands in play as fast as possible. Explore is also a great card for this purpose and it even allows you to draw a card to help refill our hand.

The reason there are no wrath effects in this deck is because the creatures are instrumental for accelerating your mana and setting up kills and you would not want to wipe them out with a Day of Judgment. Kamahl, Fist of Krosa and Jolrael, Empress of Beasts both allow your lands to turn into creatures and with the plethora of card draw effects in this deck, discarding two cards to Jolrael, Empress of Beasts should not be a big problem. I included only two Kamahls and Jolraels because they are legendary creatures and as you know no two legendary creatures with the same name can be in play at the same time. If you have three Kamahl, Fist of Krosas in your hand two of them would be dead cards and we don't like dead cards because they smell bad and may or may not turn into anti-Semitic zombies (better to just not take the risk). Azusa, Lost but Seeking along with Oracle of Mul Daya allow us to play additional lands on our turns and since Oracle of Mul Daya allows us to play lands off the top of our library we could potentially play 11 lands in one turn (4 Oracles of Mul Daya, 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking, 2 Rites of Flourishing, 3 Gaea's Touch).

Even though lands are the main focus of these decks, you still want spells in your opening hand. You will definitely want to mulligan a hand of seven lands or a hand of six lands most of the time. It can be tough to decide which hands can work and which hands cannot and the only way to get better at this is to play the deck a lot and against different opponents. You may be able to keep a five land hand against a control deck, but against aggro you may want removal (if you're playing Manly Lands) or mana accelerants (for both decks). Like all ramp style decks, these decks have a hard time dealing with aggro decks so you just have to be extra careful about the hands you keep against them. On the plus side, aggro decks do not play counterspells and their creatures tend to be small so you will not have a problem getting your lands through when you go on the attack. Also, landing a Ward of Bones from the Manly Lands deck basically shuts down aggro. The only problem is it costs six mana and you could very well be dead by then if you are not careful.

Some notable cards that you could include in these decks are Crucible of Worlds and Sacred Ground. Crucible of Worlds, Terra Eternal, and Sacred Ground all accomplish the same thing which is keeping your lands out of the graveyard. I would say to only play one of these three cards in the deck since if your lands are indestructible they won't be going to the graveyard, which means that having a Terra Eternal in play kills Crucible of Worlds and Sacred Ground (and we all know what happens to dead cards that don't get a Proper Burial). I might think of playing Crucible of Worlds in the Land Surge deck because with all of the mana accelerants you can easily empty your graveyard of lands in one turn. Then again with the Land Surge deck your lands are likely going to be too big for your opponent to handle with instant speed mass removal and even if they do manage to Doom Blade a couple of the lands during your attack, it Is easy enough to replace them with lands from your library.

While these decks are certainly viable in single player, they can really shine as bright as a Fist of Suns under a Bad Moon in multiplayer games. Who would perceive you as a threat if you've just gone land-go for the past five turns, and MAYBE played a non-threatening creature or two? In Manly Lands, your wrath effects can hose both opponents at the same time and in Land Surge you can usually attack both opponents in one attack phase.

There is also another direction one could take this idea. Like Manly Lands, you could have zero creatures in your deck and instead of relying on manlands to do your dirty work you could load up your lands with enchantments like Caustic Tar, Sunken Field, Flowering Field, Barbed Field, and Equinox to name a few. This concept is a little more risky because the deck kills more slowly than either Manly Lands or Land Surge and it would likely have fewer ways to protect itself.

So get out there and hug some tress, climb that Mountain, and have a blast, but be careful not to upset that Raging Ravine (anger problems… very dangerous). Thanks for reading!

"Manly Lands"

• Spells (30)
• 4 Earth Surge
• 3 Day of Judgment
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 3 Doom Blade
• 2 Amulet of Vigor
• 3 Wrath of God
• 2 Ward of Bones
• 2 Terra Eternal
• 4 Expedition Map
• 3 Explore

• Lands (30)
• 4 Stirring Wildwood
• 4 Treetop Village
• 3 Ghitu Encampment
• 4 Raging Ravine
• 3 Lavaclaw Reaches
• 3 Forest
• 3 Plains
• 3 Swamp
• 3 Mountain

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"Land Surge"

• Spells (24)
• 4 Earth Surge
• 4 Rude Awakening
• 4 Natural Affinity
• 2 Rites of Flourishing
• 3 Gaea's Touch
• 3 Rowen
• 4 Explore

• Creatures (10)
• 2 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
• 4 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 2 Jolrael, Empress of Beasts
• 2 Azusa, Lost but Seeking

• Lands (26)
• 26 Forest

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