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Much Abrew: Mono-Green Land Destruction (Modern)


Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week, we have sort of a strange episode of Much Abrew. Next week, we'll have new Ikoria cards to play with, but we didn't have Instant Deck Techs last week due to spoiler content, so in some sense, this week is a free roll. So we're playing a deck that I've really been wanting to play: Mono-Green Land Destruction!

You might remember similar decks from a couple of places. More than a year ago, we played a budget version of Mono-Green Land Destruction, but that was before War of the Spark gave us Karn, the Great Creator, which is one of the best cards in the current build of the deck. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we tried to play Mono-Green Land Destruction on stream but didn't really make it through a meaningful number of matches since we kept crashing Magic Online by locking Liliana, the Last Hope's emblem under Ensnaring Bridge, which apparently causes the game to crash once there are more than 200 Zombie tokens on the battlefield. (Somehow, this happened twice in just four matches!) 

So today, we're finally going to give non-budget, post–War of the Spark Mono-Green Land Destruction a fair shot in Modern! How good are cards like Plow Under and Acidic Slime in a land-destruction deck in a format as powerful as Modern? How good is Karn, the Great Creator in the deck? How many unsuspecting opponents can we Trinisphere lock? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Much Abrew: Mono-Green Land Destruction

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The Deck

  • Thankfully, we managed to avoid Liliana, the Last Hope, which is a win in and of itself.
  • Record-wise, we actually crushed it with Mono-Green Land Destruction, finishing with a 4-1 and potentially ending up a single land-drop away from going 5-0 (against GR Ponza in game three, we kept a one-land three-mana-dork hand but never drew another land and died with a bunch of Plow Unders and Primal Commands in hand). 
  • One of the most interesting and powerful aspects of the deck is its pseudo-land destruction in Plow Under and Primal Command. While these cards don't technically destroy a land, putting a land (or two) on the top of our opponent's deck instead, this is actually better than destroying a land in a lot of matchups since it forces the opponent to skip a draw or two along with being down mana on the battlefield. 
  • Here's a quick rundown of the deck's various land-destruction and lock loops:
  • Mwonvuli Acid-Moss is just straightforward land destruction that also ramps us and thins our deck. It can come down on Turn 2 with the help of Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl
  • Plow Under gives us pseudo-land destruction by putting two lands on top of our opponent's deck, which is also pretty straightforward. 
  • Primal Command can Time Walk our opponent for several turns with the help of Eternal Witness. We can cast Primal Command to put a land on top of our opponent's deck and tutor for an Eternal Witness. Then, the next turn, we can do it again by using Eternal Witness to get Primal Command back from the graveyard. After we run out of Eternal Witnesses, we can use our last Primal Command to get Stampeding Serow to bounce Eternal Witness every turn, essentially locking our opponent out of ever drawing another card (and if we have Trinisphere, potentially from casting any spells as well). 
  • Stampeding Serow can also combo with Acidic Slime to blow up a land every turn. 
  • We also have Repudiate // Replicate, which is basically a two-mana green Stifle. While I'm not sure if it's actually that good in the deck, it is a Mana Tithe–level "gotcha" card. No one expects Stifle in Modern (and even less so from a mono-green deck), so it's pretty easy to "counter" a fetch land (which is basically land destruction).
  • Finally, Karn, the Great Creator is basically more land destruction. We can tutor up Liquimetal Coating to turn our opponent's lands into artifacts and then kill them with Karn's +1. If we have enough mana, we can also tutor up Sundering Titan to blow up several lands (depending on the matchup) while also leaving behind a massive body. 
  • Trinisphere is great in the deck. If we can keep our opponent to two or less mana, they can't cast any spells. This makes cards like Plow Under even more devastating. 
  • As far as actually getting our opponent's life total to zero, we often don't have to—a lot of opponents scoop in frustration once they are locked out of the game. If we do have to kill our opponent, we have Hornet Queen and Walking Ballista in the main deck, while Wurmcoil Engine was really solid from the sideboard, not just closing out the game but also stabilizing the board with its massive, lifelinking, hard-to-remove body.
  • So, should you play Mono-Green Land Destruction? I think the answer is a clear yes. The deck felt really solid. It's super unique and really fun to play. While I enjoyed the Mono-Red Land Destruction deck we played a few weeks ago, the Mono-Green build felt even better. If you like making opponents not playing Magic and doing it in a unique way, Mono-Green Land Destruction felt more than competitive enough to 5-0 or league (we came super close!) or win an FNM-level event while also randomly wrecking opponent's with cards like Repudiate // Replicate that they most certainly will not expect!

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.



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