Deck Tech: 4C Aggro Loam with Burning Wish

          

Introduction
Aggro Loam is a land and graveyard-centric midrange deck that essentially revolves around Life from the Loam and Mox Diamond. Aggro Loam has existed in Legacy for a long time and has assumed many different forms over the years. This is a version that first appeared throughout 2013 in the hands of Jeff Hoogland, its principal developer. Hoogland's style of list was characterized by utilizing Chalice of the Void, White and Black splashes for Knight of the Reliquary and Abrupt Decay, and a full Burning Wish package. These characteristics were rarely all found together in an Aggro Loam deck before, but Hoogland was able to weave them together to achieve several strong tournament results and leave a lasting impact on the archetype.



Deck Theory
At its core, Aggro Loam is designed to utilize Mox Diamond to "cheat" on mana in order to cast powerful spells while using cards like Life from the Loam to generate advantage. Life from the Loam negates the "downside" of Mox Diamond while conveniently synergizing with Wasteland, one of the most powerful cards in the format. There are a host of other "lands and graveyards" matter cards that can be abused in this shell, not to mention powerful two-mana spells that can be cast on the first turn with Mox Diamond.

Hoogland placed at Star City Games events with several very similar lists. Here is one of Hoogland's lists, which earned a Quarterfinals finish at the SCG Invitational in July, 2013:

4C AGGRO LOAM, 7/29/13
Creature Spells (7) 2x Tarmogoyf 1x Gaddock Teeg 4x Knight of the Reliquary	Noncreature Spells (27) 4x Mox Diamond 4x Chalice of the Void 2x Sylvan Library 2x Green Sun's Zenith 3x Life from the Loam 4x Burning Wish 3x Abrupt Decay 3x Punishing Fire 2x Devastating Dreams
Lands (26) 4x Wooded Foothills 2x Taiga 1x Badlands 1x Bayou 1x Savannah 1x Dryad Arbor 1x Forest 2x Grove of the Burnwillows 1x Horizon Canopy 2x Tranquil Thicket 2x Forgotten Cave 1x Bojuka Bog 1x Nantuko Monastery 1x Maze of Ith 1x Karakas 4x Wasteland	SB: 3x Thalia, Guardian of Thraben SB: 1x Gaddock Teeg SB: 1x Ethersworn Canonist SB: 1x Chainer's Edict SB: 1x Devastating Dreams SB: 1x Dreadbore SB: 1x Life from the Loam SB: 1x Maelstrom Pulse SB: 1x Massacre SB: 1x Perish SB: 1x Shattering Spree SB: 1x Slaughter Games SB: 1x Thoughtseize

Hoogland's style of list may appear jumbled at first, but is actually finely tuned and packs an excellent suite of support cards for the archetype.

• Chalice has seen ebbs and flows of use in Aggro Loam, but Hoogland opted to play the full amount. Chalice slots quite naturally into Aggro Loam as it can be cast on the first turn and the deck's own key spells cost 2 or 3 mana. Since Chalice is typically set to 1, it generally prohibits playing 1 mana spells of your own and thereby informs many deckbuilding decisions. 

      
          

• One strategy that has perennially appeared in Aggro Loam is to accelerate into a large creature such as Terravore, Countryside Crusher, or Tarmogoyf, or Knight of the Reliquary, and follow it up with a Devastating Dreams. 

• Hoogland has incorporated this strategy with Knight of the Reliquary and Tarmogoyf as the large creatures of choice. Knight is excellent in a Loam shell, which can grow it to a large size and supports a toolbox of utility lands like Maze of Ith, Bojuka Bog, Nantuko Monastery (surprisingly effective against control decks in particular!) and Karakas very well.

          

• Ideally, Devastating Dreams functions as both a Wrath of God and Armageddon by destroying all your opponent's creatures and lands, leaving you with a huge threat in play to close out the game in short order. 

• Devastating Dreams can still be a truly devastating play even without a big creature on the field, and with access to Loam and Sylvan Library, the deck is capable of recovering from the self-inflicted damage of Dreams better than most.

    

• Cycling lands provide something to do on turn 1, and can generate card advantage in conjunction with Life from the Loam later in the game.

          

• Green Sun's Zenith is a nice addition that can function as a turn 1 play (which the deck is a bit light on due to a lack of 1 mana spells) fetching Dryad Arbor, scale to fetch a Knight of the Reliquary in the late game, and even enable a small toolbox of utility creatures like Gaddock Teeg.

• Gaddock Teeg functions as a game 1 anti-combo card to complement Chalice, which is facilitated by Green Sun's Zenith. While often boarded out, it offers a tutorable defense against combo strategies which can beat Chalice on 1 or Karakas.

• Burning Wish is interesting technology for a Loam deck. It is essentially used as a tool for increasing consistency in a deck that can suffer from disjointed draws by granting you the ability to "draw" from  a selection of cards in your sideboard when you cast it. One potential downside of this is being unable to Wish for a card and cast it the same turn since you have to pay an extra 2 mana, but a deck with Mox Diamond and Loam is well suited to create a mana advantage that enables this.

• Another advantage of the Wishboard is it lets you keep a copy of Loam insulated from effects like Surgical Extraction. Devastating Dreams is a card that is situational in nature, so it too benefits from having a copy to choose from out of the Wishboard rather than just more in the maindeck.

          

• Outside of Dreams and Loam, the Wishboard presents a suite of options that can be grouped into two main categories: removal and combo hate. 

• Removal should be mostly self-explainatory, and is intended to offer outs to a variety of scenarios and permanent types.

• The two principal combo hate cards are Thoughtseize and Slaughter Games. You won't always have a Chalice out, so Thoughtseize can be a great option to buy time before landing more impactful hate. Slaughter Games has a very strong effect, but is generally prohibitive to cast in Legacy due to the fact that it costs 4 mana. This deck is capable of casting it on turn 2!

• Some newer cards that could have a home in the Wishboard include Toxic Deluge and Council's Judgment, and Collective Brutality.

     

• The non-Wish portion of the sideboard consists exclusively of more hatebears to fight combo decks. Resolving any of them on turn 1 with a Mox is backbreaking against many combo decks.

• Dark Confidant is a fantastic card advantage engine in a Loam deck, which has a low average CMC and is happy to improve draw quality by drawing a lot of cards. Hoogland eventually removed it from his deck, likely because it plays poorly with Devastating Dreams.

         

• Aside from specialized Wish targets, Abrupt Decay is the primary reason to splash Black as one of the best removal spells in Legacy.

• While ignored until now, the Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows engine is yet another powerful aspect of the deck that plays very well with Knight of the Reliquary and Loam.

     

          

     

• The rest of the manabase consists of a mix of dual lands (Taiga being the most important) and one basic Forest tied together by Wooded Foothills.

Conclusion & Other Resources
Unfortunately, development on this interesting take on Aggro Loam has mostly stagnated since early 2014 when Hoogland quit the deck after over a year of playing it. Additionally, Niklas Kronberger developed a new Aggro Loam variant that took down the Bazaar of Moxen main event in May 2014. Kronberger's version has since become established as the dominant one, and has experienced much success since then. However, I would argue that Hoogland's version was crucial in establishing many choices that Niklas was able to build on, and thus still serves as the foundation of the modern Aggro Loam archetype. Hoogland's version is more complex than Kronberger's , but the versatility it offers is unparalleled, and I believe it can still be relevant today.

More decklists:

Mike Pawliuk, Top8 @ Face to Face Games 1K, Toronto (7/18/2015, 40 players)

Roberto Oliveira, 3rd @ #SuperlegacyRS, Brazil (12/7/2014, 37 players)

Daniel Rassiner, 2nd @ Knight Ware Legacy, Los Angeles (1/12/2014, 34 players)

Kurt Crane, 8th @ Star City Games Open Cincinnati (9/1/2013, 277 players)

Jeff Hoogland, 9th-16th @ Star City Games Open Cincinnati (9/1/2013, 277 players)

Jeff Hoogland, 9th-16th @ Star City Games Open Columbus (6/16/2013)

Jeff Hoogland 2nd @ Star City Games Open Milwaukee (4/14/2013, 279 players)

Jeff Hoogland, 3rd @ Star City Games Open Atlanta (4/7/2013, 320 players)


Videos

Hoogland VS BUG Delver, Milawaukee Quarterfinal

Hoogland VS Merfolk, Milawaukee Semifinal

Hoogland VS Sneak & Show, Milawaukee Final

Hoogland VS Esper Deathblade, Invitational 

Hoogland VS Punishing Jund, Atlanta

Kurt Crane VS Shardless BUG, Cincinnati

Kurt Crane VS Belcher, Cincinnati


Other

Here is an article Jeff wrote for SCG about the deck.

Primer: Bant Stoneblade

             

Introduction
Bant (GWU) has a long and illustrious history in Legacy, with a tried and true formula of acceleration backed up by quality creatures and permission. However, the archetype has dwindled in favor due to a number of recent printings. The powerful and versatile combination of Deathrite Shaman and Abrupt Decay has enshrined BGx as the core of Green midrange decks in Legacy over GWx. Furthermore, the card True-Name Nemesis gave non-Green Blade decks a creature comparable to those offered by Green. Despite these challenges, Bant still offers some strong advantages over other modern Blue midrange decks and continues to enjoy modest success. This primer will focus on pure Bant midrange decks playing Stoneforge Mystic and Green Sun's Zenith.



Deck Theory
I will now discuss how to approach building a Bant deck, and most importantly, why you should play a Bant deck. It is easiest to start simply by looking at the strongest aspects of each color of the Bant shard in Legacy:

Green, or Green Sun's Zenith Package
- Acceleration via Noble Hierarch and Green Sun's Zenith
- Utility creatures like Qasali Pridemage and Gaddock Teeg
- Powerful threats like Knight of the Reliquary

White, or Stoneforge Mystic Package
- Stoneforge Mystic + Equipment
- Versatile removal in Swords to Plowshares
- Useful sideboard technology

Blue, or Force of Will Package
- Force of Will and permission
- Brainstorm and cantrips to improve card selection
- Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Looking at these strengths, one can quickly conceptualize a deck combining them: your Green creatures play well with Equipment, you can accelerate into a Jace, you have answers to combo decks, et cetera. However, one of these colors stands out as the most crucial. When combined with the others, Bant becomes greater than the sum of its parts and offers a unique advantage over other competitive Blue midrange decks today. This color is Green.

With Green enabling more than four turn-one acceleration plays, a Bant deck is uniquely poised to leverage a mana advantage to cast powerful spells and disrupt the opponent. No other Blue midrange deck in Legacy has this capability.

On a second look however, one can note these three packages are competing with each other. Green wants to play a certain number of Green creature cards, Blue wants to maintain a high enough Blue card count to reliably cast Force of Will for free, and on top of it all White wants to play with a number of colorless Equipments. These are certainly intimidating deckbuilding requirements when it comes to fine-tuning, and it was once thought by many that you could only incorporate two of the three packages successfully in a Bant deck.

At this point I would like to present the progenitor of the modern Bant Stoneblade archetype, Sam Black's Top 8 placing list from GP Washington D.C. (1698 players) in November 2013.

True-Name Bant, GP D.C. 11/2013
Creature Spells (15) 4x Noble Hierarch 3x Stoneforge Mystic 1x Scavenging Ooze 1x Qasali Pridemage 4x True-Name Nemesis 2x Knight of the Reliquary	Noncreature Spells (23) 3x Green Sun's Zenith 4x Brainstorm 4x Swords to Plowshares 2x Ponder 3x Daze 4x Force of Will 1x Jace, the Mind Sculptor 1x Umezawa's Jitte 1x Batterskull
Lands (22) 4x Misty Rainforest 4x Windswept Heath 1x Flooded Strand 3x Tropical Island 2x Tundra 1x Savannah 1x Forest 1x Island 1x Dryad Arbor 1x Karakas 3x Wasteland	SB: 1x Envelop SB: 1x Ethersworn Canonist SB: 1x Gaddock Teeg SB: 2x Humility SB: 1x Relic of Progenitus SB: 1x Spell Pierce SB: 3x Swan Song SB: 1x Sylvan Library SB: 1x Tormod's Crypt SB: 1x Umezawa's Jite SB: 2x Vendilion Clique

This list, designed by Reid Duke, was able to meld all three packages together using the power of the then-recently released True-Name Nemesis. While a potent addition to other decks, TNN slots very naturally into a Bant shell for a variety of reasons:

• Can be cast on the second turn off an accelerant (with your accelerant offering insulation from Edict effects, which are one of the best answers to the Mefolk Rouge).
• Synergizes well with Stoneforge Mystic + Equipment.
• Adds to the Blue card count for Force of Will while being a threat. Before TNN was printed, Force was frequently seen only in the sideboard of Bant decks because there weren't enough Blue cards maindeck to support it, but this is no longer an issue.
• Bant can turn TNN into a decent clock without Equipment thanks to Exalted triggers.

It easy to see why Duke turned to Bant when finding the best shell to play TNN in before the GP. His list has become the logical starting point for the Bant archetype moving forward.

Notable Disadvantages of Bant

• Vulnerable to -x/-x effects: These effects have become common in Legacy with the ubiquity of Elves, Death & Taxes, TNN, and Young Pyromancer. They wipe our your acceleration and TNN, your otherwise most resilient threat. A diversified threat-base including Knight of the Reliquary affords some resilience to this type of effect.

• Incongruous gameplan: Bant has access to aggressive tempo plays like acceleration, mana denial, and soft permission, but doesn't have the fast, efficient threats of an aggro deck. On the other hand, it has a narrow selection of creature removal that is unbefitting to a control deck.

• Over-reliance on a turn 1 accelerant: With a deck built around your strongest advantage, a turn 1 accelerant, hands without one can play out relatively anemically. 

• Unavailability of quality sweeper effects: Bant lacks the colors of mana for efficient, quality sweeper effects of its own, which can make a Bant deck vulnerable to swarm and tribal decks.

Deck Construction
Bant has assumed many different forms over the years, and even today there are a great number of card choices available. Below I will briefly summarize what I believe should be core cards in the 75 of any Bant Blade deck.

   
   

Green:
Green Sun's Zenith, Noble Hierarch, Dryad Arbor
Qasali Pridemage - Provides removal for some noncreature permanents alongside the relevant Exatled ability.
Scavenging Ooze - Provides graveyard hate and lifegain, and can become a large threat.
Knight of the Reliquary - Large threat that is very dangerous in conjunction with Wasteland.
Gaddock Teeg - Hatebear that shuts down many strategies, tutorability makes it a very efficient sideboard slot.

     

White:
Stoneforge Mystic, Swords to Plowshares

   
   

Blue:
Force of Will, Brainstorm, True-Name Nemesis, Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Daze - This card may look strange to someone unfamiliar with the archetype, but is one of the best ways of leveraging your mana advantage.

     

Artifact:
Batterskull, Umezawa's Jitte - The two most powerful Equipment offering the best range of effects.

Land:

Karakas - Very effective against strategies centered around Legendary creatures such as Reanimator and Sneak & Show, and can be tutored via Knight of the Reliquary.

Wasteland - This Legacy staple is particularly potent in conjunction with Knight of the Reliquary.

          

          

          

Fetch lands, Dual lands & Basic lands will make up the majority of your manabase.


Sample Bant Stoneblade Decklists
Here are some decklists showcasing developments made since GP DC. These also exhibit other possible card choices.

David Nolan, 3rd @ SCG IQ (9/4/2016)

Matt Krouti, 9th-16th @ SCG Premier IQ (11/22/2015, ~100 players)

Nathan Goya, 3th-4th @ Eternal Extravaganza 3 (10/24/2015, 304 players)

Robin Mesmin, 5th-8th @ Last Chance Coupe de France, Lyon (10/10/2015, 145 players)

Alex Gellerman, 1st @ SCG Premier IQ (2/22/2015, 137 players)
This impressive result flew under the radar, but Gellerman managed to come out on top with Bant in a competitive field during the high-powered Dig Through Time meta. Note the decreased emphasis on True-Name Nemesis compared to the full set in the GP D.C. list.

Vicent Gregori, 7th @ GPT Paris in Barcelona (1/14/2014, 71 players)

Sam Black, 5th-8th @ GP Washington D.C. (11/6/2013, 1698 players)
Discussed under "Deck Theory" above and in Black's article below.

Reid Duke, 1st @ SCG Invitational (10/2013, 388 players)
This list is the immediate predecessor of the GP DC list. You can read more about it in the article section below.

Other Bant Midrange Strategies
I would like to recognize other Bant midrange strategies that have been successful relatively recently.

Deathbant/Hexproof
This build plays Deathrite Shaman instead of GSZ and Arbor for extra acceleration. Without GSZ, Green creatures are mostly eschewed in favor of Geist of St. Traft to complement TNN. This build's plan is turn 1 accelerant, turn 2 hexproof creature. Black mana sources also enable some sideboard cards, perhaps most importantly Zealous Persecution.

Noble Fish
Developed by Mark Koenig (aka Bahra), a notable MTGO player, this interesting deck packs a lot of cheap evasive creatures, disruption, and card advantage. Koenig put down the deck by summer 2015 as he felt it had no place in the Dig Through Time meta.

Brave Sir Robin
This deck burst onto the scene at an SCG Legacy Open in November 2015 with a Top 8 finish in the hands of Bant veteran Steven Schlepphorst. The card that made this deck possible was Retreat to Coralhelm from the Battle for Zendikar expansion. With the Retreat and an active Knight in play, it is possible to "go off" activating Knight and repeatedly Twiddling it with the Retreat trigger to grow it to a lethal size. Retreat is also a Blue card to pitch to Force, and provides incremental advantage even if you aren't executing the combo. Schlepphorst is continuing to develop this deck.

Shardless Bant
The brainchild of Paul Lynch, this take on Bant has only a very light splash of Green, and focuses on assembling the Thopter-Sword combo using Shardless Agent and Stoneforge Mystic. Some other players have adopted the deck and had successful finishes with it. While technically Bant-colored, this deck has more in common with a UW Blade control deck than a classic Bant deck.



Other Resources

Article: Sam Black on Bant @ GP DC

Article: Reid Duke on Bant @ the SCG Invitational

Video: Sam Black VS Todd Anderson (Esper Deathblade) @ SCG Invitational, 12/13/13

Video: Sam Pardee VS Elves @ SCG Open Oakland, 12/7/13

Video: Reid Duke VS Eric Froelich (Storm) @ GP DC

Video: Sam Black VS Craig Wescoe (Death & Taxes) @ GP DC Quarterfinal

Video: Sam Black VS Owen Turtenwald (Delverblade) @ GP DC Semifinal (2nd part of video)

Video: Sam Black VS Elves @ GP DC 

Video: Reid Duke VS Chris Andersen (Elves) @ SCG Invi

Video: Reid Duke VS Ben Friedman (Delverblade) @ SCG Invi Final

Video: SCG VS Series, Deck Tech & Games with Gellerman's IQ winning List

Video: Deck Tech of Duke's Invitational deck

Bant Thread on The Source Legacy Website
This thread isn't very active and its primer is outdated, but plenty of useful information can be gleaned from it by going through old discussions.