Deck Primer / Description

Hello, there, everyone! Here is a Caves deck that we have been trying and have had quite a bit of success on in Gold and Platinum on Arena. The deck is Explorer and Historic legal, and seems to doing equally well in both queues (although we have mostly been using it Historic to avoid the Cascade matchup).

As a general gameplan, you usually want to be hitting one of your 3-drops every game, so be willing to sacrifice your 1 and 2 drops to tapped caves whenever possible. Getting out 3 bats through the Bat Colony and having a proactive play in Spelunking frequently compensates for having a slower start.

Remember, for the most part, you are going to be winning by activating Cavernous Maw, as it is the deck's most resilient threat, and its most consistent. Don't be afraid to sacrifice your bats for the greater good, they are here to pressure life total slightly and provide effective blockers, not close games. Your Leech is also never there to win you the game, really, just provide a crucial bit of lifegain in more aggressive matchups and provide a body that can't be Fatal Pushed.

All of these threats should tee up a Cosmium Confluence quite nicely, which is the main star of the deck. You are almost always going to be using the 1st mode 3 times, unless you can directly win almost immediately, as those lands get killed quickly, and having 3/3's that come out tapped just isn't proactive enough. Some quick words on what to grab:

-Cavernous Maw: Almost always the right choice, grab at least one, as that should facilitate a win later down the road. When you have a lot of mana, don't have to respond to any board state concerns, or already have two Sunken Citadel, go for all 3.

-Sunken Citadel: Considering that it acts as a mana accelerant, this is the best card to grab if you want to be holding up removal, or are beginning to transition into the Maw beatdown phase of the game, as you can activate two Maws once you have both copies tutored out. Be sure to see which type of mana you don't have a Painland source for, as balancing your lifetotal is crucial in a deck that frequently wins with a small margin of error.

-Forgotten Monument: You will almost always have a copy of this already when you are Confluencing, but if you don't have one, you definitely should!

-Pit of Offerings: Don't sleep on this card, remember that you always have 3 cards worth of graveyard hate at your disposal when ready!

-Volatile Fault: How you beat Gates. We only have this as a 1-of because you frequently only need to destroy two lands at most, the other of which gets destroyed by your Boseiju, Who Endures.

You also have Echoing Deeps as any of the above.

We have tried both Nissa, Who Shakes the World and Blossoming Tortoise in the same slot, and we have come to the conclusion that the Tortoise is better, due to the fact that it can be hit off of your Caves discovering (which you are mostly doing if you are desperate, anyway), provides a buff for your Caves as creatures the same as Nissa, and lets you recycle your already used Caves again. We have Nissa in the sideboard as a more consistent threat for Control, as just getting a single cave frequently isn't enough to win those matchups in the lategame.

A quick word of advice on Discovering with your Caves -- directly discovering with Bat Colony doesn't give you any bats! Put it into your hand instead.

Finally, the sideboard. We play Bo1, so this is just our guess, but the main problems are removal-heavy decks picking off your Maws (hence the Tomik, Distinguished Advokist), Affinity (hence the Brotherhood's End, also for aggro), and not having direct answers to creature combos (hence the Get Lost). We included Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines for lifegain matchups, as we still want to have all of the powerful cave ETB effects on our side while blocking theirs.