Deckbuilder's Challenge XVIII (Poll): Premodern Times

{Comments}This deck is all about using creatures and enchantments to lock down your opponent's creatures and damage while sneaking in damage using Soltari Trooper or Diving Griffin.

All cards are pre-modern, but are not legal in pre-modern pauper because Monk Idealist was reprinted as a common way later.

{Comments}

It's decks like these that make me glad the kitchen-table Magic environment is still a thing; when I first rolled Plant Elemental, I was honestly thinking "How the heck is this going to work?" A good portion of my time spent trying to build this deck involved some kind of Threshold engine which inevitably made me throw my hands up in frustration because Plant Elemental was both slow and not helpful for getting more expensive Threshold cards onto the board.



Turns out having a chance to try out an idea I viewed as really dumb during a very chill game was exactly what I needed to hit on something that felt fun to play. Basically, we flip the idea of Ramp on its head by playing a bunch of enchantments that let you play extra lands. We're intentionally running extra Forests because we want to start with a decent number in our hand +1 of the above enchantments to start racing them out ahead of time - if we do it fast enough, we can slam down a Growth Elemental on turn 1, making it almost a super janky Tarmogoyf of sorts!




The rest of the cards follow through on a similar logic - whether we're bouncing out own lands with Bull Elephant or flinging trees with Heartwood Giant, the deck simply wants to get ahead of the curve and beat face like any true MonoG Stompy. It does so in a rather bizarre way that might not seem obvious until you play the deck, but once you do I think it's a great twist on the type of deck I'd want to break out against newer players.

There is one particular disadvantage this deck suffers from, and that's pretty much the age old "Dies to removal" problem. You'll probably have an easier time against Blue and Red decks: Counterspells won't leave you high and dry of lands, and the players rocking the best spells will often have to spend 2 Lightning Bolts to kill your creatures. It's probably best suited for more casual games where people don't want their stuff removed and want to play more "battlecruiser magic" online - in which case, you can break out this deck and see if your Thelonite Druid's army of Forests will get around their Obsianus Golems and Krosan Cloudscrapers before they can lumber their way onto the battlefield. That said, if you don't mind lowering the odds of having a good burst opening hand (which this deck is admittedly reliant on - Green wasn't getting a ton of card draw back in these days!), you could swap 4 Forests for 4 Avoid Fate to try and keep your fatties better protected from Terrors and Pacifisms.

Good luck with your uprootings!