Magic Foundations has arrived and it feels like Magic is finally emerging from a 4-year long coma. It's almost like the post-Covid years have rolled back and we're finally getting back to real Magic. People are talking about Standard, people are playing Standard, and Foundations seems like a homerun of a Standard set.

One of the biggest draws of Core Sets is allowing players to play with some of their favorite cards and strategies without shoehorning them into the current Magic sets/storylines. We get to revel in nostalgia while we Burst Lightning our opponent, or use Omniscience to cast our entire hand. We get explore some of our favorite strategies, like Elves, Goblins, or my personal favorite, Landfall.

So, of course the first deck I dove into was a Landfall deck.

Simic Landfall | FDN Standard | Travis Hall

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Bonny Pall, Clearcutter
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 1 Springbloom Druid
• 2 Loot, Exuberant Explorer
• 2 Lumra, Bellow of the Woods
• 2 Overlord of the Hauntwoods
• 3 Tatyova, Benthic Druid
• 4 Aftermath Analyst
• 4 Mossborn Hydra

• Instants (9)
• 3 Aetherize
• 3 Archdruid's Charm
• 3 Into the Floodmaw

• Sorceries (5)
• 1 Dopplegang
• 1 River's Rebuke
• 3 Glimpse the Core

• Lands (26)
• 4 Island
• 8 Forest
• 1 Arid Archway
• 1 Fountainport
• 2 Restless Vinestalk
• 2 Yavimaya Coast
• 4 Fabled Passage
• 4 Hedge Maze

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Aetherize
• 1 Archdruid's Charm
• 1 Into the Floodmaw
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 2 Cease/Desist
• 2 Ghost Vacuum
• 2 Tranquill Frillback
• 2 Vivien Reid
• 3 Blue Sun's Twilight

Buy This Deck Export text Export Arena

The card choices and numbers are all over the place, but I've been trying different configurations and interactions as the metagame on Arena is changing every day.

Card Choices

Confession time. I have a Tatyova Commander deck. Tatyova is probably my favorite Commander to play in Brawl on Arena. I began this deck look at ways to make Tatyova as powerful as possible, and ways to put as many lands into play as possible. She is the lynchpin of the deck in its current incarnation, though I can see some variation (and I'm currently working on a Bant version). One of the biggest things to remember about Tatyova is that she's a 6-drop in many matchups, as you want to play her when you can drop a land to immediately draw a card.

As I said above, I wanted to put as many lands into play as possible once Tatyova hits the board, and these two cards are the best way to do that. They've seen play in various strategies while they've been in Standard and have shown that they are powerful enough to see play.

If Tatyova is the cornerstone of this deck, then the Hydra is the pillar. It's been a revelation. This card has won me so many games I had no business winning. Once you play this, you just need 4 lands to hit the battlefield and it gets you to 16 power/toughness, and that's often enough to win the game (and if not, 5 lands drops is 32/32 and I've yet to have someone survive that hit). There are times where I will structure the entire game around playing this and giving my opponent 1 turn to answer before they die, thanks to Analyst/Lumra returning a ton of lands. Like Tatyova, it's sometimes necessary to look at this as a 4-drop. This is also one of the cards that lets you race the aggro decks.

Simic is probably in the weakest spot of any color combination in Standard right now. It has trouble with both hyper aggressive decks and decks that go very wide. Green has no way to deal with a 1-drop on the draw, so we have to rely on Into the Flood Maw to manage the early drops until we can ambush our opponent with Aetherize. Once sonmeone gets hit with Aetherize it changes every attack step afterwards (similar to Settle the Wreckage for my fellow olds).

First off, yes, you should side this out against every Black deck you play. Cut Down is a nightmare for Loot, though he may start to pop up more once it rotates. Both of his abilities play well here, and he provides an engine for the Landfall mechanic with Arid Archway. Just play it and return itself to get a couple landfall triggers and surveils every turn. His activated ability can easily reveal Tatyova, or one of your 6-drops, at the end of your opponents turn.

This card has been great. I started out with a miser single copy and I'm up to three in the main deck now. Being able to drop a land into play at instant speed, or find a Fabled Passage for multiple landfall triggers can drastically change the board state, and I've won more than a handful of games when an opponent thought that they had time to answer a Mossborn Hydra only to see it grow large enough to kill them after I cast Archdruid's Charm. The flexibility this card provides is amazing, as long as you can mee the mana requirement.

Landfall may still be 1-2 cards away from breaking through to the competitive ranks (it really needs another good play on turn one or 2), but I am going to continue tinkering with the deck. It's a lot of fun to play, and has some amazing games.

You can find more of my musings on X/Twitter: @travishall456 and at Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/anakinsdad.bsky.social