There’s nothing I love more in Magic than hitting my land drops. First land drop, tenth land drop; it doesn’t matter. All I want to do is play a bunch of lands. Of course, I also love when I can generate value with those land drops, either using spell-lands, Landfall effects, or something else altogether. That’s part of why I was so excited for the return to Zendikar, and why I’ve been so disappointed to see so little Landfall. It’s also why I’m so excited to see a greedy Landfall deck from Adamante:

Four Color Landfall ? Oath of the Gatewatch Standard | Adamante, 5-0 Standard League

• Creatures (13)
• 1 Dragonlord Atarka
• 2 Oblivion Sower
• 3 Mina and Denn, Wildborn
• 3 Sylvan Advocate
• 4 Siege Rhino

• Spells (15)
• 3 Languish
• 4 Animist's Awakening
• 1 Retreat to Kazandu
• 3 Retreat to Emeria
• 4 Retreat to Hagra

• Lands (32)
• 1 Plains
• 2 Swamp
• 4 Forest
• 1 Blighted Woodland
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Foundry of the Consuls
• 1 Hissing Quagmire
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 2 Bloodstained Mire
• 2 Canopy Vista
• 2 Sea Gate Wreckage
• 2 Smoldering Marsh
• 4 Shambling Vent
• 4 Windswept Heath
• 4 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Dragonlord Atarka
• 1 Duress
• 2 Flaying Tendrils
• 4 Infinite Obliteration
• 1 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
• 1 Murderous Cut
• 2 Planar Outburst
• 2 Transgress the Mind
• 1 Ultimate Price

Buy This Deck

This deck does everything I want to do in a game of Magic. You have Sylvan Advocate to hold the fort down early, backed by Retreat to Hagra and Retreat to Kazandu to keep your life total high. Then you can play either Retreat to Emeria to begin stalling the game out or Mina and Denn, Wildborn to start powering out lands. At that point you can start leveraging Siege Rhino and Oblivion Sowers to gum up the ground and buy you more time to find Retreats and grind out value by hitting land drops. This all leads to an endgame where you can drain your opponent out by bouncing and playing lands with Mina and Denn.

But that’s not where the awesome interactions end. Let’s take a closer look at the wombo combos contained within, starting with Retreat to Emeria. Retreat to Emeria gives you a great way to gum up the ground, particularly in conjunction with Retreat to Hagra and fetchlands to give your tokens Deathtouch at instant speed. You can also pump your team to massive proportions, particularly with fetches and Mina and Denn, which means your Languishes can be one-sided sweepers reasonably often.

Next, there’s Retreat to Hagra, which does a great job of keeping your life total relatively high so you can begin wearing your opponent down with landfall triggers. But it also interacts very well with Mina and Denn. Deathtouch and Trample is a powerful combination which allows you to assign just one damage to each blocking creature with the remainder trampling over. This combination can set up some surprising alpha strikes capable of stealing games out from underneath your opponents.

My favorite card in this deck, by a large margin, is Animist's Awakening. This card walks a crazy line between setting up landfall triggers and functioning as a pseudo tutor for lands capable of taking over the game once you’ve traded resources. If you can stall a game until you have two to four retreats in play and then resolve an Animist's Awakening for three or four lands, you’ve probably won the game. But even if that’s not enough, finding a Shambling Vent or Foundry of the Consuls will certainly help to get the job done.

All told, this deck is a combination of all my favorite things, and I really hope this strategy sees just a little more play before we return to Innistrad and lose the fetchlands which fuel this Landfall-themed monstrosity.