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The Magic Chest 24: Excavation
In casual play, every deck should have a few ways to put excess lands to good use. Most of the time, a simple Fireball or Jayemdae Tome fills that spot, but Waterfront Bouncers work as well to discard extra lands to for a useful effect. Excavation looks like another good option at first, but it gives your opponent the same ability, which makes it too risky to just throw in any deck. Still, there are a few cards Excavation works well with, one of which is Planar Birth. Planar Birth gets you your basic lands back, but it does the same for your opponent. To limit that, it's necessary to use a card like Tormod's Crypt or Phyrexian Furnace to empty the opponent's graveyard at the right time. So far, so good, but how does the deck win? Simply drawing more cards than your opponent isn't enough. A card like Stormbind would be good, but Stormbind requires red mana and the discard is random instead of chosen. Adding red to a deck which already needs white and blue and should have mostly basic lands (for the Planar Birth) might be stretching it a bit. Green is a good base color for the deck for the land fetching, so perhaps simply using Hurricane as a kill card would be a good idea. The drawback of damaging yourself as well can be overcome with a bit of lifegain. Excavation: Three of these should be enough with Enlightened Tutors in the deck. Enlightened Tutor: To get an Excavation. The deck should have a few single copies of useful cards to tutor for as well. Planar Birth: Can't be fetched by Enlightened Tutors and it's not worth adding Mystical Tutors as well, so I'd use four. Phyrexian Furnace: These stick around to keep the graveyard empty, but there's nothing like a Tormod's Crypt to empty a graveyard quickly. Both are useful in their own right, so I'll use two of each. Yavimaya Elder: An incredibly useful card to get extra land and the right color mana. The deck-thinning effect will help as well. Against a weenie deck, you can often get four cards advantage from it. Harrow: More mana acceleration. The sacrificed land helps feed your Planar Births. Wall of Blossoms: Early defense keeps you alive long enough for the deck to start working. Planar Collapse: With an Excavation in play, weenie decks will sacrifice spare lands for more creatures, which makes it vital to have a way of dealing with them. As a bonus, Planar Collapse is cheap to cast and can be fetched with Enlightened Tutors. Gaea's Blessing: So you don't end up decking yourself and to reuse Planar Birth and other useful cards. Force of Will: A bit of countermagic would be nice to have, but the deck doesn't have enough blue cards for Force of Will and it usually won't be able to keep mana open for normal counterspells. Defense Grid: A few in the sideboard will help against counterspells. Whetstone: This seemed like a good kill card at first, because it mills your opponent and helps get more land in your graveyard at the same time. It doesn't work well with Gaea's Blessing, though. You could easily end up shuffling all the lands you collected in your graveyard back into your library. Hurricane: Kill card and useful against creatures that fly over your walls. Zuran Orb: To stay ahead in life and to sacrifice your tapped lands to when you're casting Planar Birth. Ivory Tower: Another way to get some life. Seal of Cleansing: A Disenchant that can be tutored for. One in the main deck is enough for me, it depends a lot on what you expect to be playing against. Swords to Plowshares: Always a good way to deal with annoying creatures. I couldn't make room in the main deck, so I put four in the sideboard. Constant Mists: Four of these in the sideboard helps a lot against most creature decks. With the Planar Births and Gaea's Blessings, you should be able to keep up the Mists indefinitely if your opponent can't get rid of it through counterspells or discard. Arcane Laboratory: Against combo decks. The finished deck usually plays like this: At the five mana mark, tutor for an Excavation and cast it. Sacrifice any lands beyond three for cards, keeping at least one Plains. Three mana is enough to cast any card in the deck and by sacrificing extra land, it'll be easier to find a Planar Birth. When you do, cast it to get all your lands back and start sacrificing them again to look for another Birth and repeat until all the lands in your deck are in play. Tap them all for a big Hurricane, sacrificing some of the tapped lands to Zuran Orb to stay alive if necessary.
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