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08-03-2001
 Clearing the Land
And here I was, innocent young lad that I am--evidence to the contrary will be denied as mass hallucinations--thinking that tutoring was powerful. Wrap your laughing gear around this combo:
Clear the Land (2G)
Voila, five mana gets you five more land, if you Scouting Trek on Turn 2, then put 6 land on top of your deck so that you draw one and still have five for the Clear the Land.
I'm struggling not to turn this into a Coalition Victory article because everyone knows that's a 'kiddie combo'.
I think that there would be some kind of divergence in decks using this mechanism. There are decks that would work off getting many different types of mana into play. These decks would also use:
and cards like:
Then there is the milling deck which might focus more on Green/Blue interactions, eg using Clear the Land, Denying Wind, Lobotomy, Rootwater Thief, Worry Beads and Prosperity to totally trash the opponent's library. Oh yes, Blue has Mystic Tutor which can Tutor for sorceries. :-)
With Ankh of Mishra and Circle of Protection Artifacts you could even punish the opponent for having the temerity to gain anything from the Clear the Land. With a more mono-green approach we want to gain something from having all that land. Jolrael, Empress of Beasts is a great way to make use of it. If we get dirty and go multi-color there are a variety of effects to turn all lands in play into creatures, play Spidersilk Armor and then Earthquake (or Dry Spell or Tremor).
Dream Thrush finally makes all those Spreading Algae you got in Urza's Saga worth playing. Dream Thrush also works well in the *cough* Coalition Victory *cough* style decks. Of course, if you are going to revisit Extended there is an old favourite lurking out there, ProsBloom, which this combo may or may not actually help.
Interestingly, this combo does really address one of the big questions with Green, that being: "Now that I have all this Mana, what do I do with it?" By allowing you to pick and choose your lands you don't even need to worry about double or even triple colour requirements. You can do huge amounts of direct damage, you could put a muckload of Swamps into play and then do any number of broken things, you could start Wrathing away, you could create lots of tokens ... you could for instance include some of the common multicolour knights, some Worldly Tutors to get the creatures, some Mystic Tutors to pull out the combo, and some Enlightened Tutors to pull out the Coalit... oh wait. Sorry, my bad.
Rick |
