Budget Magic: $100 Pioneer Caves
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! Nearly a year ago, right after the release of Lost Caverns of Ixalan, we played a Standard Caves deck for Budget Magic, and it was super sweet. So, today we're going to see if we can make Caves work in Pioneer! In many ways, Caves are like Gates—a perfect budget archetype—because rather than needing to play a bunch of expensive rare dual lands, we get to overload on random common and uncommon Caves, which lets us keep the deck's price down near $100 even though we're playing an 80-card main deck so we can have Yorion, Sky Nomad as our companion. The deck's goal is to ramp out a bunch of Caves and then win with Caves themselves thanks to Cavernous Maw and Cosmium Confluence, by triggering Bat Colony and Felidar Retreat a bunch of times to make a massive board of tokens, or just by slamming a huge finisher like Zacama, Primal Calamity or Genesis Ultimatum. Are Caves good enough for Pioneer on a $100 budget? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
Budget Magic: Pioneer Caves
The Deck
Why play a deck full of Caves? There are actually a few answers here. The first is the Caves themselves. While they are mostly commons and uncommons, some of them are actually pretty powerful, and doubly so since we can tutor them out when necessary with Cosmium Confluence (but more on this in a minute). Cavernous Maw is one of our best finishers against slower decks and is a surprisingly powerful creatureland, assuming you have enough Caves to activate it. The Hidden Caves offer card advantage in the late game, when we can sacrifice them to discover four, while Sunken Citadel lets us activate our other Caves on the cheap and Pit of Offerings offers some sneaky graveyard hate. We even have Captivating Cave to grow our creatures, although honestly, I've never actually sacrificed it. Four mana and a land for just two +1/+1 counters doesn't feel great...
While we do get some extra value out of our Cave mana base, this alone isn't a reason to build a Cave deck. The real power of the Caves archetype is a handful of cards that reward us for playing a bunch of Caves in our deck. The first is Cosmium Confluence. In the early game, Cosmium Confluence is a ramp spell—and a good one—giving us three Caves for five mana, which means we can scag creaturelands, discovery lands, graveyard hate, land hate, and more. Then, Cosmium Confluence becomes one of our best finishers in the late game by turning our Caves into creatures and adding a massive nine power to the battlefield by surprise! Oh yeah, and it can randomly blow up enchantments too for some reason, which isn't relevant often but every once in a while ends up being a huge deal!
We back up Cosmium Confluence with a couple of additional ramp spells. Lotus Cobra leads to some huge turns if we can get it on the battlefield before we Cosmium Confluence and also ramps us into some of our big plays a turn or two early, while Escape to the Wilds offers an intoxicating mixture of card draw and ramp thanks to the extra land drop it offers. Meanwhile, Spelunking is a good ramp spell in general, but it's even better in Caves since it gains us life when it ramps, and a decent number of our lands come into play tapped. Having cards like Hidden Courtyard and the lands we ramp out with Cosmium Confluence enter untapped is incredibly powerful!
Cave payoff number two is Calamitous Cave-In, which is an incredibly powerful sweeper. For just four mana, it deals damage equal to the number of Caves we control (and Caves in our graveyard) to each creature and planeswalker. Since our deck is pretty good at ramping extra Caves on the battlefield, it's typically a hard sweeper, killing everything on the battlefield. And unlike some other wraths, it even has upside against decks like UW Control thanks to its ability to take down planeswalkers.
Backing up Calamitous Cave-In is a bit more removal. Farewell needs no introduction—it's expensive, but it's one of the most devastating wraths in all of Magic if you can live long enough to cast it. Meanwhile, Cut // Ribbons is oddly good in our deck. As removal, it's medium, dealing four damage to a creature at sorcery speed for two mana. But the aftermath drain of Ribbons is actually a pretty effective way to close out games since our deck often ends up with absurd amounts of mana thanks to all of our ramp and creatures like Lotus Cobra and Omnath, Locus of Creation. It pressures our opponent's life total in a unique way: even if they can deal with our creatures and keep us from beating down with our Caves, unless our opponent has a counterspell, Cut // Ribbons is an almost guaranteed way to end the game if we can get enough mana.
For our last Caves payoff, we have Bat Colony, which joins with Felidar Retreat to give us two finishers that reward us for having extra lands enter the battlefield by making tokens and growing them with counters. For just three mana, Bat Colony gives us three 1/1 fliers, assuming all the mana we spend on it comes from Caves (which it should), which is actually super strong. While we're playing for the late game most of the time, Bat Colony can sometimes give us weird aggro wins where we make three fliers, grow them with counters, and beat our opponent down. Felidar Retreat is similar, making tokens and putting counters on our team as lands enter the battlefield, giving us redundancy for the effect. A single Cosmium Confluence with these cards on the battlefield can build an almost unbeatable board or allow us to close out the game with one huge attack.
Rounding out our deck are our big haymakers. Omnath, Locus of Creation is an absurd card, and doubly so in our deck, which is pretty good at having multiple lands enter during one turn to trigger its mana-making mode. Toss in life gain to stabilize against aggro and card draw to grind against control, and Omnath is one of the best value cards in our deck. Meanwhile, Kenrith and Zacama are just one-ofs, but both can take over the game more or less by themselves if left unchecked thanks to their activated abilities, which do just about anything imaginable. Finally, Genesis Wave offers a huge burst of card advantage and, since it lets us put all the permanents it finds on the battlefield, gives us another way to put extra Caves into play to trigger our payoffs like Bat Colony and Felidar Retreat.
Wrap-Up
So, funny story about the deck. It actually started off as a 60-card deck from an infamous small Japanese tournament. I played the original build a bunch, but it was pretty clunky. A lot of the best cards in the deck were three-ofs rather than four-ofs, and I eventually realized the problem: there simply wasn't enough room to play all the Caves we need plus four copies of our payoffs. The solution to this problem was going 80 cards and playing Yorion as a companion. While our deck is a pretty bad Yorion deck—I guess it can blink an Omnath or Spelunking, although we don't get much value out of its enters trigger in general—playing 80 cards is weird...unless you have Yorion; then, it's just another Yorion deck. Basically, we don't really need Yorion; we need 80 cards. And playing Yorion is an easy way to justify playing a bigger deck than necessary.
The good news is that the updated build of the deck did well! We went 6-2 overall for a 75% match-win percentage, which is solid overall, and doubly so for a budget deck! While the deck looks a bit underpowered on paper, it turns out that the Cave payoffs are actually really strong, even all the way back to Pioneer! If you like Caves or ramping into big finishers, keep the deck in mind. It just might be the perfect budget Pioneer deck for you!
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.
