There are some phrases which pop up on cards now and again which we should train ourselves to notice. "You win the game" is a big one: there will often be a number of hoops to win with the card, but the fact it says that is worth, at least, considering. "You can't lose the game" is another one. "Target player loses the game." You get the gist.

But it's not just the top-line splashy game-winning text we should notice. "Destroy target Creature." That's a good one. "Exile target Creature." Another. "Draw a card" is great, especially if it's preceded by a colon, because it means rather than a single-use draw it's repeatable, and anything which provides repeatable card draw is worth a second glance.

Today's Commander has a phrase we should notice, pretty much every time we see it. We don't necessarily need to do anything with it, but we should notice, remember, and consider it the next time we're doing anything which relates. That phrase? "You may play an additional land on each of your turns."

Land drops are, in my estimation, one of the very best parts of Magic: The Gathering. Without the mana system, mostly determined by Land, you wouldn't have much of a game. It forces us to be creative in gameplay, opens up a lot of different play styles, and balances the game so the winner isn't necessarily the person with the best or most expensive deck - sometimes you just don't draw your Land. Sometimes you flood out.

Circumventing the "one-Land-per-turn" rule is a great way to flex in this game; it gives us extra power early, more power late, and is relevant pretty much all the time. There's a reason Oracle of Mul Daya is as pricey as it is these days.

(Not for nothing, but a four-mana 5/5 with Trample is also worth considering when you see one!)

There is a Gruul stompy deck in Hugs where you basically ignore his middle line of text and just ramp like crazy and play a bunch of really big Creatures. That would be fun! He's cheap, in two great colors for this kind of play style, and could lead to all kinds of shenanigans. There's also a Landfall deck in any Commander which lets us trigger Landfall more than once; Hugs could be the Commander in a deck which wants to play spells like Omnath, Locus of Rage or vice versa, where Hugs is in the 99, but either way, there's a deck there.

But I don't want to ignore that middle line of text. Much like "draw a card" is text we should notice, the fact we have access to extra cards with Hugs should at least be acknowledged. And recently I've noticed a rash of cards which care about things being cast from places other than your Hand, specifically from Exile, so I say let's have some fun and do all three: Stompy, Landfall, and play with stuff from Exile!

Hugs, Grisly Guardian | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Hugs, Grisly Guardian

• Creatures (27)
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald
• 1 Fanatic of Rhonas
• 1 Farhaven Elf
• 1 Flaming Tyrannosaurus
• 1 Goblin Anarchomancer
• 1 Graham O'Brien
• 1 Iraxxa, Empress of Mars
• 1 Kami of Celebration
• 1 Keeper of Secrets
• 1 Laelia, the Blade Reforged
• 1 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Memory Worm
• 1 Mina and Denn, Wildborn
• 1 Nalfeshnee
• 1 Omnath, Locus of Rage
• 1 Party Thrasher
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Savvy Trader
• 1 Sisterhood of Karn
• 1 Squee, the Immortal
• 1 Tireless Provisioner
• 1 Topiary Stomper
• 1 Wild-Magic Sorcerer

• Enchantments (2)
• 1 Exploration
• 1 Passionate Archaeologist

• Instants (6)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Delayed Blast Fireball
• 1 Momentous Fall
• 1 Pawpatch Formation
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker

• Sorceries (22)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Escape to the Wilds
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Finale of Devastation
• 1 Flare of Cultivation
• 1 Grow from the Ashes
• 1 Growth Spasm
• 1 Impending Flux
• 1 Jeska's Will
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Life's Legacy
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Season of Gathering
• 1 Soul's Majesty
• 1 Tempt with Discovery
• 1 They Went This Way
• 1 Three Visits
• 1 Tlincalli Hunter
• 1 Wear Down

• Artifacts (2)
• 1 Heaped Harvest
• 1 Unstable Amulet

• Lands (40)
• 12 Forest
• 9 Mountain
• 1 Bonders' Enclave
• 1 Castle Garenbrig
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Commercial District
• 1 Game Trail
• 1 Highland Forest
• 1 Kessig Wolf Run
• 1 Raging Ravine
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rockfall Vale
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Rootbound Crag
• 1 Sanctum of Eternity
• 1 Scavenger Grounds
• 1 Sheltered Thicket
• 1 Temple of Abandon
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Wooded Ridgeline

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This shell will definitely work and should be a nice starting point to focus the deck - or not - as time goes on. Like the Landfall aspect? Start building in more of it. More play-from-Exile? Go for it. Or just jam some giant Creatures and go full-bore stompy. Just don't cut the Ramp, and don't cut any Lands - you need all that mana to make any of these ideas work.

40 Lands here, with just over half Basics because that's the most common ones we can search out. Reliquary Tower becomes important here, Bonders' Enclave is great for using excess mana, and Castle Garenbrig and Temple of the False God both give us more mana than they should. Probably the best Land we've got is Sanctum of Eternity, because it allows us to bounce Hugs right back to our Hand and recast him for more cards. If you find that's the direction you go, you might want to consider Crop Rotation and Expedition Map so you can go get it, but we're not leaning in that hard.

Ramp comes in the normal form when we have access to Green, so Farseek, Rampant Growth, Cultivate and Farhaven Elf are all here. Because we can cast the spells from Exile off Hugs, options like Grow from the Ashes are nice - it's not another Cultivate, but we can adjust how we cast it based on our needs and mana availability. We've also got a few more cards which let us play additional Lands, like Exploration and Azusa, Lost but Seeking. This can be key if we hit, say, four Lands out of five cards with Hugs, especially if we have some Landfall out.

Card draw is great with Green, particularly because we have Momentous Fall and Life's Legacy. We don't have sacrifice outlets for Hugs (and if you want to use his ability a ton, I'd look into other ways, like Stampeding Wildebeests), but being able to draw five cards and return him to avoid the Commander tax is great. We also have to assume people will kill him occasionally, via board wipes or point removal, because they won't want to get stomped by a 5/5 Commander all the time, and chumping is less useful when it has Trample. Anyway, Soul's Majesty and Rishkar's Expertise will normally draw us enough cards to get moving again, and sometimes they'll draw more than 5 because we'll have something bigger than that.

Of course, we also have Hugs' impulse draw, plus a few more ways to do that. Escape to the Wilds impulses five cards, plus gives us an extra Land drop - it's kind of a huge Explore. Laelia, the Blade Reforged impulses whenever she attacks. Party Thrasher does a selective version, plus it can make our spells cheaper, a thing worth doing when sometimes we want to cast a bunch of them. (Goblin Anarchomancer does a similar thing.)

The rest of the deck is where things start to get really fun.

One card which overperformed in play-testing is Finale of Devastation. Because we have so much mana, we can always make X=10 or more, and in every circumstance, I went and got Avenger of Zendikar. That made a bunch of Plants, which then got +10/+10 and Haste. Of course, Omnath, Locus of Rage is another good target, both for attacking on its own and generating a fairly large number of large Elementals. Tireless Provisioner is worth it if it's out for a single turn; more than that and it gets really nuts. Rampaging Baloths, too, is great when this mana Lands hit the 'field all the time.

Nalfeshnee is fantastic here. We cast so much from Exile, and getting copies makes it quite hard for our opponents to keep up. Imagine casting that Avenger of Zendikar from Exile with this out and getting two! Even for just one turn, that's two groups of Plants, plus two Landfall triggers for each Land you play afterwards. But that's not all. We get Wild-Magic Sorcerer, Iraxxa, Empress of Mars, and Keeper of Secrets, all of which care very much about those extra spells we're casting. Flaming Tyrannosaurus sounds like something I'd never like to meet but does a nice job of being annoying while it's out and terrifying when it dies. Even Graham O'Brien and his Food Tokens can matter. Particularly notice Delayed Blast Fireball, which will do its full five damage to everything for its normal cost if cast off Hugs, and Impending Flux, which is confusing until you realize its Foretell cost lets you count it as an additional spell cast from somewhere other than your Hand. I also really like that Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald cares about Lands entering from somewhere other than your Hand, too. It's amazing how quickly those Wolves can get out of hand! (See what I did there?)

A few more things about this deck.

First, whenever you can, don't play Lands from your Hand when you know you're going to look at cards in Exile. Once they're Exiled, they're gone, but the ones in your Hand can be played later.

Second, options on cards are great. A card like Pawpatch Formation is excellent, because it's normally the sort of thing we'd keep in our Hand until we needed it, but since we may be forced to cast it right now, options help get the most use.

Finally, several of the cards in this deck are rather pricey, a thing I try to stay aware of (and often attempt to avoid). Finale of Devastation is impossible to recreate, but Chord of Calling or Overwhelming Stampede would both be reasonable choices. There are lots of ways to impulse draw now, so as good as Jeska's Will is (especially with the extra mana option) something else in that slot would be great. Exploration could just be Explore - not as good but a lot cheaper - and Passionate Archaeologist could be Warstorm Surge to great effect. Or - and this sounds crazy but I'm not kidding - just run more Lands. The deck wants them and you'll not regret seeing more of them.

This deck is a blast to play, and should keep a table off-balance with what's going to happen next. It's also tricky! There are a lot of triggers to track, so make sure you're ready to watch all of that. Now get out there and stomp some stuff!

Thanks for reading.