Tireless Tracker is such a sweet Magic card.
There's just something inherently satisfying about playing lands, drawing cards, which draws you more lands, so you can draw more cards. The Tireless Tracker train doesn't stop until your opponent kills her, and then even if they do you can almost always get at least one clue for the two for one.
Tireless Tracker is often seen as a tool in midrange decks as a threat that can snowball and draw cards while you use interactive elements to slow your opponent down and draw the game out.
However, today's deck is not one of those decks.
Rather, today's deck is a full-on ramp deck, looking to trigger Tireless Tracker early and often, while leveraging the extra mana gained to make clues and draw cards at an accelerated rate. Then you do something huge like Hydroid Krasis or Alrund's Epiphany and call it a day!
Time Stamps:
04:13 - Match 1
25:41 - Match 2
36:47 - Match 3
Turboland | Explorer | Jim Davis
- Creatures (20)
- 4 Arboreal Grazer
- 4 Hydroid Krasis
- 4 Leafkin Druid
- 4 Risen Reef
- 4 Tireless Tracker
- Planeswalkers (4)
- 1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
- 3 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
- Instants (4)
- 4 Growth Spiral
- Sorceries (3)
- 3 Alrund's Epiphany
- Lands (29)
- 2 Island
- 5 Forest
- 1 Boseiju, Who Endures
- 1 Otawara, Soaring City
- 2 Hall of Storm Giants
- 2 Lair of the Hydra
- 4 Barkchannel Pathway // Tidechannel Pathway
- 4 Breeding Pool
- 4 Dreamroot Cascade
- 4 Fabled Passage
- Sideboard (15)
- 1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
- 3 Aether Gust
- 3 Mystical Dispute
- 2 Negate
- 2 Scavenging Ooze
- 4 Elder Gargaroth
That was a nice run!
The land-based ramp available in Explorer is very good, but is built in a way where you need to play a lot of lands in your deck to ensure that it works. You can't ever afford to cast an Arboreal Grazer or Growth Spiral and not put an extra land in play. This please that there are an amazing 29 lands in the deck!
However, with Tireless Tracker and Hydroid Krasis, it's not hard to turn all that mana in to more cards. You've got some top end like Alrund's Epiphany and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, but what's nice is that the deck isn't full of 8 and 10 mana cards to flood on. With half of your payoffs being creature lands or Tireless Tracker, you always have something to do with your mana.
Throw in some sideboard counterspells for control and combo decks as well as a full playset of Elder Gargaroth for the aggressive decks and you've got a deck that's well capable of going over the top of the format!