In this experiment, we raise our demented cartographer from the dead, repeatedly, until she and a whale have given birth to an entire plane.

My recent articles have had a lot to do with putting lands onto the battlefield, but that’s because I covered Retreat to Kazandu, Retreat to Emeria, and Retreat to Coralhelm. This week, we won’t be Retreating, but we will be landfalling. Hey, it’s not my fault. It’s the Battle for Zendikar.

Cartographer Shepherd

Emeria Shepherd is exciting because she can return permanents to the battlefield for 0 mana. That’s a rare skill. I’m tempted to revisit Decree of Silence, but I’d have to pay 7 for the Shepherd anyway, so why bother? Actually, we won’t be planning on paying 7 today, but setting up a string of reanimation for the Decree doesn’t seem worth it. Oh wait—setting up a chain of reanimation is what we’re going to be all about today.

You see, if Emeria Shepherd returns a Kor Cartographer to the battlefield, the Cartographer will search up a Plains, letting us return something else. That’s cute. We gain a free 2/2 and an extra land along the path to returning what we really want.

But what if what we return is another Kor Cartographer? Then we can find another Plains and return the Cartographer again! The only step we have to add in between is putting the Kor Cartographer back into the graveyard, as I doubt we’ll have as many Cartographers in our graveyard as we have Plains in our library, and we want to be able to search up all our Plains for maximum value.

There aren’t a ton of white cards that let us sacrifice for value at no mana cost, and there aren’t many in blue either, which I researched after I decided I’d be playing a second color. So I resorted to an old combo staple:

Paying 7

One of my early decisions with this deck idea was that I didn’t want to actually pay 7 for the Emeria Shepherd. Maybe that’s greedy of me, but I wanted to have the potential to be a bit faster at the cost of consistency. Resurrection and Breath of Life will let us cheat the Shepherd into play, but only if we’ve put it into our graveyard first.

Hedron Crab is a powerful card. It serves as our enabler, starting from turn one (or starting the actual enabling from turn two). It can also serve as a win condition when we’re putting so many lands onto the battlefield, and it synergizes perfectly with our plan. It’s also nice how landfall-oriented decks always come out themed around Zendikar. It’s like accidental theme decks!

Of course, I chose Altar of Dementia only after picking out Hedron Crab, so the milling tied them together; otherwise, we may have ended up with Ashnod's Altar or Phyrexian Altar.

Plan A

Basically, then, our plan is to play Hedron Crab, mill Emeria Shepherd, throw a Kor Cartographer into our graveyard, cast Altar of Dementia, and then Resurrect the Shepherd. Trigger landfall with a Plains, return the Cartographer, triggering it. Sacrifice the Cartographer to the Altar and resolve that ability, resolve the Cartographer’s trigger, and then repeat with the Shepherd triggering from the Cartographer’s Plains. Meanwhile, we’re milling an opponent (or ourselves) with the Altar and Hedron Crab until we’ve pulled all the Plains out of our library.

With one opponent, four milled cards for about fifteen lands should take out an opponent. The problem comes in when we have multiple opponents. I don’t always concern myself with such things, but our combo isn’t so infinite when we run out of lands to search up—and we may have ended up with several in our graveyard from our early self-milling.

Plan B

I decided to include some singletons to help shore up some of the deck’s weaknesses.

Phantasmal Image — If we have our Kor Cartographer on the battlefield and no others in sight, we’ll have to wait for it to somehow die before we combo off. However, adding some copies of Phantasmal Image (or another Clone variant) will help us with it is in the graveyard instead of the Cartographer. This is a remnant from a version of the deck that had Retreat to Coralhelm (again!) instead of Altar of Dementia, but I thought it was worth keeping. (With the Retreat, use the landfall trigger to target the Image, killing it, thus setting us up for the next iteration.)

Emeria Angel — This is just a generic, strong card, though it’s fully on theme and can give us a bunch of Birds while we’re comboing.

Great Whale — When we repeatedly pull land after land out of our deck, they’ll all be hitting the battlefield tapped, and we probably will have already spent our mana for the turn. If we’re milling ourselves and Shepherd out a Great Whale at the end, we can untap seven of our lands, prepping ourselves to actually cast some kind of follow-up if our combo wasn’t game-winning enough.

Planar Birth — If we have been milling ourselves while comboing, we’ll be cut short a bit early because a bunch of our lands will be hitting the graveyard, reducing the number of iterations we can perform. Planar Birth will help us out with that, returning a good portion of those lands to the battlefield, triggering a huge chunk of landfall at once. And it’s only 2 mana!

Archaeomancer — Of course, we can’t expect to have had that Planar Birth in our hand. If we mill ourselves out completely, we can use that last Shepherd trigger to bring out Archaeomancer. And then if we have just two lands available, we can Planar Birth, triggering the Shepherd a bunch more times. That lets us return Great Whale for 7 more mana.

Beacon of Tomorrows — Potentially with no library remaining, Beacon of Tomorrows will let us take turn after turn until we find a way to end the game—may I suggest Birds? Its cost is a bit more than Great Whale gives us, so that may be a challenge.

Elixir of Immortality — This is another good option to help out when we’re out of cards in our library.

Excavation, Jokulmorder, and Zuran Orb — One concern I had is that we’ll run out of lands to search up and/or play. These three cards offer us different ways to bin some lands so we can return them to our library with the Elixir. Perhaps only one of these is necessary—and the best is probably Zuran Orb—but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off the endless potential of the classic Leviathan archetype and of the Prophecy powerhouse.

Shepherd and Cartographer ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (19)
• 1 Archaeomancer
• 1 Great Whale
• 1 Jokulmorder
• 2 Emeria Angel
• 2 Phantasmal Image
• 4 Emeria Shepherd
• 4 Hedron Crab
• 4 Kor Cartographer

• Spells (17)
• 1 Beacon of Tomorrows
• 1 Planar Birth
• 4 Breath of Life
• 4 Resurrection
• 1 Excavation
• 1 Elixir of Immortality
• 1 Zuran Orb
• 4 Altar of Dementia

• Lands (24)
• 12 Plains
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Hallowed Fountain
• 4 Prairie Stream

Buy This Deck

I’m not sure exactly how all of that shakes out, but if you can make heads or tails of any of it, if you never thought Kor Cartographer would put endless lands onto the battlefield (outside of Deadeye Navigator and Intruder Alarm with Silver Myrs), or if you’ll just try anything with Jokulmorder once, give this deck a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com