Against the Odds: Teaching Arena Zoomers about Strip Mine (Timeless)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Out of the blue, Wizards printed my all-time favorite land onto Magic Arena for the first time in Edge of Eternities: Strip Mine! The iconic land is banned or restricted in basically every format because a land that can sacrifice itself to blow up a land is pretty brutal and very abusable, if you're willing to build around it a bit! As such, we're heading to Timeless today to teach some Arena Zoomers about the power of this 30-year-old land by (hopefully) blowing up their mana base, one land at a time! Was adding Strip Mine to Arena a mistake? How many early scoops will we get when Zoomers realize they don't have enough lands to play the game? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Teaching Arena Zoomers about Strip Mine
The Deck
Today's deck is all about one thing: blowing up as many lands as possible with Strip Mine! While even a single copy of Strip Mine can greatly disrupt your game plan, a single copy isn't enough for us. The goal of our deck today is to find Strip Mine and then be able to use it multiple times each turn! Here's how!
First, we've got a bunch of ways to find Strip Mine because even though we're playing the full four copies, we can't always count on drawing one naturally. Elvish Reclaimer and Knight of the Reliquary give us above-the-curve creatures that can also tutor up lands, while Sylvan Scrying and Demonic Tutor can tutor Strip Mine to our hand.
Once we find a Strip Mine, Icetill Explorer is the perfect emblem for what we are trying to do with the deck: play Strip Mine multiple times each turn from our graveyard. With just an Icetill Explorer on the battlefield, we not only get an extra land drop but also can play lands from our graveyard, which means we can Strip Mine our opponent twice each turn!
We also have a few cards that are essentially half of Icetill Explorer as backups (which I guess shows just how pushed Icetill Explorer really is). Azusa gives us two extra land drops each turn, while Ramunap Excavator and Crucible of Worlds let us play lands from our graveyard. If we don't have Icetill Explorer, we can essentially build our own version with some combination of these cards. And if we do have Icetill Explorer, Azusa is pretty absurd since it offers two more Strip Mine activations each turn!
Outside of a bit of interaction in Thoughtseize and Fatal Push, we've rounded out the non-lands in our deck with Tireless Tracker and The One Ring for card draw and Deathrite Shaman and Chrome Mox as ramp. Chrome Mox admittedly looks a bit weird in a land-focused deck, but Timeless is such a fast, degenerate format that it felt like a necessary evil to speed our plan up a bit.
Finally, if we actually have to kill a Zoomer or two, we have a single copy of Field of the Dead as a finisher, although in reality, we're way more likely to win from opponents scooping when they realize that it's really hard to play Magic if you don't have any lands...
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 7-4 with the deck, good for a 64% win percentage. More importantly, almost all of our wins came from either destroying all of our opponent's lands or destroying a bunch of them and having our opponent scoop in frustration before we could finish off the rest, which is exactly what we were going for! It turns out that Strip Mining multiple times each turn is still a pretty effective way to win a game of Magic, even in 2025.
On a more serious note, as much as I love Strip Mine, I'm honestly not sure the play pattern is a healthy one for Standard. I think dedicated Strip Mine decks like ours are fine. But it turns out that a lot of people are just running Strip Mine for value in random decks, which can lead to some awkward games where one player draws multiple Strip Mines and the other keeps a land-light hand and basically just doesn't get to play Magic at all because of random bad luck. It will be interesting to see if Strip Mine actually sticks in Timeless. I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up restricted eventually, like it is in Vintage, although Timeless is such a degenerate format that maybe people will just embrace Strip Mine as another degenerate card in an already super-degenerate format.
In the meantime, at least, you'll find me in Timeless, blowing up the lands of hapless Arena Zoomers.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
