It’s 9PM the night before an Extended PTQ.  Most of the playtest group you’re with is talking about running Scapeshift and how it’s the best deck in the format.  You’re thinking about defaulting to the burn deck when Chris Kelly talks about a deck he saw online that had four Fulminator Mages and four Avalanche Riders… you’ve got my attention!  Most people in the PNW know my love for land destruction – my 150 Highlander deck ran somewhere between 40-50 LD spells – so any time I can start a decklist with 8 LD spells when the supposed best deck in the format has to get to 7-8 lands to win is something I’m going to investigate.

Then I got told the rest of the deck concept and I was completely sold.  I proxied up the deck and played a few games against Scapeshift, and not only was the deck absolutely a blast to play – it was competitive too. So dig around your Alara Reborn draft leftovers pile, and find a few copies of the following cards that you haven’t written the names of better cards on yet:

I’ll wait for a minute while you go look at those cards.

Done laughing?  Take a look at this oft-forgotten gem from Time Spiral:

Living End
Sorcery
Living End is black.
Suspend 3 – 2BB
Each player exiles all creature cards from his or her graveyard, then sacrifices all creatures he or she controls, then puts all cards he or she exiled this way onto the battlefield.

Now I hear you saying, “That thing’s gonna be suspended for three turns!  By turn seven, you’re gonna be dead.”  Sure, if you play fair.  Extended is not a realm for playing fair, though, so why not do what the Hypergenesis combo deck does, and not fight fair?  Enter Demonic Dread and Violent Outburst.  Two of the three Cascade cards in Hypergenesis (along with Ardent Plea), the only card in the deck they can cascade into is Living End.  Simple enough, right?  For three mana (and potentially at instant speed), I get to Wrath the opponent’s side of the board and bring back 10-20 power worth of guys from my graveyard, and the guys that killed lands earlier (Fulminator and Riders) come back too to put a dagger into any hope of an opponent’s comeback.

Dwayne and I brewed up a loose list, and we hoped to finetune it a bit the following morning – only to find out that there was a third guy on the plan on site!  Travis Woo had brewed up the same deck shell, with less LD (no Avalanche Riders) and more creature control to slow early beatdown (hi, Shriekmaw!).  My decklist from the GP Trial is an amalgam of the two plans after going 1-2 in the main event.


Our PTQ list had Simian Spirit Guide to accelerate the LD package.  The mana base is extremely budget, but with 8 land cyclers, mana issues were rare.  The list should definitely have one Overgrown Tomb so that the land cyclers can get any color you need.  Still Had All These will have tournament reports later this week including PTQ finalist Greg Peloquin.