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We've come a very long way since the classic Stone Rain. Wizards went through a phase where they realized they had pushed land destruction too much and that players hated it, and so they stopped doing it pretty much at all, or, if they did, they made sure it was terrible.
But the one constant in Magic is change, and Wizards has especially been working to explore new design space in the game in recent years. We've seen DFCs pushed to the limit, we've seen the rules themselves pushed to the limit with Ikoria's mutate, and they've steadily been pushing into the exile space as a usable resource rather than a functional removed-from-game pile.
All of which is to say, it was inevitable they'd revisit land destruction at some point. They've been quietly printing a few new attempts at actual land destruction (as opposed to something like Alpine Moon), and it was actually a different format entirely that sold me on the power level.
Check out this Modern list.
Boros Brought Back | Modern | PENACH010 (5-0)
- Creatures (21)
- 1 Grim Lavamancer
- 1 Skyclave Apparition
- 2 Ranger-Captain of Eos
- 2 Walking Ballista
- 3 Thraben Inspector
- 4 Esper Sentinel
- 4 Fury
- 4 Solitude
- Instants (8)
- 4 Brought Back
- 4 Ephemerate
- Sorceries (4)
- 4 Cleansing Wildfire
- Enchantments (4)
- 4 Showdown of the Skalds
- Lands (23)
- 1 Mountain
- 4 Plains
- 1 Rustvale Bridge
- 2 Ghost Quarter
- 3 Marsh Flats
- 4 Arid Mesa
- 4 Flagstones of Trokair
- 4 Sacred Foundry
Cleansing Wildfire? In Modern? How awesome is that? I'm not doing Mining Modern at the moment, but this jumped out to me like a Mining Modern deck if there ever was one. Anyway, I wanted to explore some of the newer land destruction options. EDHREC recently published an update to the Salt Scores, which is how much people dislike certain cards based on more than three million votes.
Number 1? Stasis.
Number 2? Winter Orb.
Number 3? Static Orb.
Number 4. Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger.
Noticing a theme?
People hate when you mess with their mana in any format, but especially Commander and its status as a "casual" format (whatever that means to you).
But let's face it, some lands just have to be answered.
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There are some recent options, like the Modern standout, that walk a middle ground in the land destruction debate, but nothing I'm going to suggest on this list is even close to the Obliterate end of the scale. So, let's dig in!
As far as I know, this is the first two-mana land destruction spell we've seen in quite some time, and it's kind of beautiful from a design perspective how many of the issues with land destruction they solved here. For a long time, the answer to Sinkhole and Strip Mine and Stone Rain creating miserable game states was to just keep adding mana to land destruction spells. That certainly worked, but it created just absolute throwaway cards in every set that served no purpose in any format, Limited or Constructed or 78-cards-on-the-concrete-playground Casual.
What if there was a way to do better?
Enter Cleansing Wildfire. You can't mana-screw someone out of the game because they get to go grab a basic land, but you also get to draw a card so you're not 1-for-0-ing yourself. Thus, Cleansing Wildfire scales to the power of the cards it's opposing, which is really neat - it doesn't do much against a bunch of basic Swamps but it will nab that Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth on turn two, in a way that pretty much breaks everyone even but removes the problematic land. That's how you get a land destruction card back down to two mana and turn a previously-forgotten slot in a pack into a relevant design space.
Sounds perfect for Commander. I think this kind of utility card is easy to pass over or cut late, but I think the opportunity cost to playing it is very low and the upside is very high - I've talked myself into putting it into more of my decks. Or you can get fancy like the Modern players and target your own indestructible lands or Flagstones of Trokair!
I don't even know what to say about this card other than I'm glad it exists - it never would have in a world where they hadn't decided to start pushing envelope on land destruction.
This one sure has a lot of words, but starting with the words "destroy target artifact, enchantment, or land" is pretty cool, and it turns out the cost of doing that for three mana is giving the controller a Rampant Growth, or two if the destroyed card was a land. Plus, it has flashback!
The flexibility here is what's great. I don't know if this necessarily makes the cut in any of my decks, but I could see a Klothys, God of Destiny deck, for instance, wanting this. If you have extra cards of your own you want to turn into lands, you can, or you can use it similarly to Cleansing Wildfire where you get to take out a problematic land at a small price to pay, while getting more out of your land destruction card than just the initial destroy effect (in the case of Dire-Strain Rampage, that's the flashback).
Wildfire, again. If you're playing a Red deck and really don't want your friends to abuse their nonbasic lands, you have the technology.
I don't know if this one counts as recent anymore (I actually don't even want to look up what year Ixalan came out and feel older), but anyway Star of Extinction has to be mentioned in any discussion of this. I'm not saying it's what you want to happen, but I've certainly paid seven mana for a Blasphemous Act before. The Star gives you that plus planeswalker damage and takes out a land to boot.
seven mana is a lot in Commander these days, and it's difficult to spend that much mana on an effect like this. But the beauty of Star of Extinction is that it can straddle the gaps in your deck strategy, giving you some overlap between "board wipes" and "land hate" that isn't really apparent at first sight but adds up to a big advantage over time. It's why double-faced land cards from Zendikar Rising are so powerful, and to a lesser extent Star of Extinction fits the bill.
Anyway, it's a cool Dinosaur meteor card. Blow up that land.
Hear me out, there's more here than meets the eye at first glance. We've all passed over a bunch of four-mana land destruction effects, but the other parts to this card actually make it worthy of consideration.
For starters, it's an instant. When it comes to blowing up lands, that may not seem immediately relevant - after all, why would you let them untap? - but here's how this actually plays out since it also has the ability to blow up an artifact.
You get to pass the turn with the Success up. If the player to your left a spot or two presents a target you can't pass up - say a Cabal Coffers or a Crucible of Worlds - you can use the Success to stop the shenanigans. And if they don't, you can use it to blow up your land or mana rock or Mimic Vat of choice.
And it sometimes comes with a Treasure token! Turn their mana rock into your mana ramp. The Success feels like it's destined to be among the last 10 or 20 cards cut from many decks, but it's a lot better than you think.
This is pretty much exactly what I mean when I talk about cards that are right on the verge of making their way into my decks. And the Slumbermound would make it for exactly the same reasons the Star of Extinction did - the straddling of different roles in the deck.
In any Commander deck, you get basically 3-5 lands that come into play tapped that you can get away with without too much drawback to your gameplay; you can generally play a tapped land early and curve out and either way you aren't punished nearly as much for the loss of tempo. So, when I look at the 'mound, my thought process is to decide if this is better than any of the other tapped lands I already play - most of which are probably for mana fixing.
But if you can find a spot for Gnottvold Slumbermound in your deck - and let's face it we know you can if you really want to since it's a land! You get to tuck a land destruction spell into a land in your deck, and while it's expensive at 6 mana plus a tap, it's "free" in the sense that you're getting a spell effect out a land slot in your deck, and you also get a random 4/4 if that helps.
What do you think this costs in a relatively normal game of Commander? My local group has a Kozilek player, so it would be a guaranteed full discount in that case, but how many other decks have random colorless lands like Temple of the False God or Drownyard Temple or Myriad Landscape or whatever? How much of a discount do you need before you look at Charmaw in Commander?
I'll say I really wish this had 5 power so I could play in Mayael the Anima, but I think this is still a cool card to consider in Commander. This was obviously surgically designed to target Tron in Modern (good), but it seems pretty reasonable to believe that you can play the Charmaw for three mana a decent amount of the time, giving you a recurrable dragon along with your Stone Rain. Heck, this may just be a sleeper in the set.
I've become a fan of including more of these break-even land interaction spells in Commander recently - they really allow you to walk the middle ground between answering problematic lands and annoying everyone because you're the land destruction deck. Do you have any cards you like to fill a similar role?
Thanks for reading,
Corbin Hosler
