I Played Every Land-Destruction Spell on Magic Arena. Here's What Happened.
There are 24 land-destruction spells on Magic Arena. Most of them are pretty horrible. What happens if you put every single one in a Historic Brawl deck with a singular goal of blowing up as many of the opponent's lands as possible? Let's find out!
All the LD
The Deck
I'm not going to even try to break down the entire deck—there isn't much of a point anyway because it really only cares about one thing: casting as many land-destruction spells as possible. We have literally every single card on Magic Arena that says "destroy a land" or "destroy a permanent," which, unless I miscounted, is 24 in all. Most of these spells kill just one land, like Stone Rain or Bedeck // Bedazzle, although they often come with a random upside, like Star of Extinction sweeping the board, Rubble Reading scrying, or [[Casualties of War] blowing up multiple permanent types.
Cards that can kill multiple lands are super rare on Arena. The best is probably Sundering Titan, although Fall of the Thran and Haphazard Bombardment can also potentially destroy more than one land. We also have a few land-destruction spells that replace the land they blow up with a basic land, like Cleansing Wildfire or Assassin's Trophy, which is pretty annoying considering we're trying to blow up our opponent's lands, not downgrade their lands to basics, but Aven Mindcensor can help turn these into real land destruction.
The good news is we do have a way to cheat a bit and get the cost of our land destruction down a bit: spell copying. Take Galvanic Iteration, for example. If we have enough mana that we can cast it and then follow it up with a land-destruction spell, we're technically turning Galvanic Iteration into two-mana land destruction—basically building an Arena-legal Sinkhole! Cards like Double Vision and Chandra, Hope's Beacon are great as well since they can copy a land-destruction spell every turn they sit on the battlefield. While cards like Seismic Shift, Smashing Success, and Demolish might not be great land destruction because they cost four mana, they actually become quite powerful when they are blowing up two lands because we managed to copy them.
So, how do we actually win the game? Our primary win condition is blowing up so many lands that our opponent just scoops the game because they can't do anything. But if we actually need to kill our opponent, we can literally Troll our way to victory with Waking the Trolls, which is actually a payoff for blowing up lands. The more lands we can blow up, the further ahead on lands we'll be and the more 4/4 Trolls we can make. Ideally, we'll be adding 20 or more power to the battlefield once the third lore counter resolves, which will hopefully be enough to let us finish the game in just a couple of turns with Troll beats.
Last but not least, we have our commander: Niv-Mizzet, Supreme. Sadly, despite the fact that Wizards seems to be printing legends for almost every niche archetype imaginable, they still haven't made a five-color land-destruction commander yet. Of the five-color legends that exist on Arena, Niv-Mizzet, Supreme is the best option for our deck. Even though most of our land destruction is mono-colored, we do have a few two-color land-destruction spells, like Casualties of War and Bedeck // Bedazzle, which we can recast from our graveyard with Niv. This sort of makes Niv a land-destruction spell itself, if you squint hard enough.
Wrap-Up
So, does playing every single land-destruction spell on Arena actually work? Sort of. We did get some wins with the deck, although overall, I'm pretty sure we lost a bit more than we won. We do fine against slower midrange and control decks, but if our opponent is playing something aggressive, we're likely to be run over with a bunch of mostly useless land-destruction spells rotting away in our hand. We did play some hilarious games with the deck though. My favorite was probably the matchup against Soul of Windgrace, which is hilariously bad for us since our opponent's commander can reanimate lands, which ended up leading to a wild game of Historic Brawl! Basically, I don't think playing all the land-destruction spells on Arena is a good strategy, but it is a funny one, and you can even win some games with it when things go well!
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.
