August 31st Deck Tech [Elfwave]

August 31, 2012

More Building on a Budget this week. I try to keep the costs low so you can build the deck for around $20.

The Standard card pool is the largest it’s ever going to be, so that means we get to exploit a few more combos and interactions than we otherwise would be able to. This week is one of everyone’s (statistically) favorite tribes, Green Elf-Wave.

It’s been a busy week, and I’m under the weather, so no hyperlinking of cards this week, if you need a refresher, feel free to look it up on the Magic Gatherer, or the mousover pop-ups on the Tapped-Out link.

The main objective of this deck is to generate obnoxious amounts of mana very quickly, and then cast Genesis Wave for huge board advantage.

Our main mana ramp engine is “Elvish Archdruid”. We seek to maximize our elves count to get tons of value out of each activation of Archdruid. To go along with Elvish Archdruid we have a few other elvish mana generators. ” Llanowar Elves” and “Arbor Elf” are our standard mana dorks, they help us get to our bigger drops faster irregardless and add to our elves count for Archdruid value. “Avacyns Pilgrim” is just another mana dork, with how important getting to at least 3 mana, and the small fixing that it comes with, it’s a worthy inclusion. Ideally the Pilgrims would be Birds of Paradise, but they’re a bit out of our budget.

We have a few utility Elves to keep adding to our elves count while developing our board. “Ezuri’s Archers” is mostly as an out against flyers, Spirit Token spam and Delver of Secrets all fall to the might of your 1 drop elf. “Elvish Visionary” cantrips as it enters the battlefield, so it helps us dig for our combo pieces if we don’t have them, and helps us generally accelerate our board position. To back up your other Elves and offer an extra win condition, there’s “Ezuri, Renegade Leader”. You can regenerate other elves to guard against removal, keep note that you cannot have Ezuri regenerate himself. He can also Overrun on all of your elves, since this is a mana ability you may activate it at any time letting you use it to protect against burn and other nasty combat tricks, and it can be activated multiple times in a row.

Now that you have a lot of cheap elves and a lot of mana, you need things to do with them. “Soul of the Harvest” can give us card advantage, when it’s out each creature we plan cantrips, this helps us keep digging for answers while we keep spamming out more and more little elves. “Craterhoof Behemoth” is your biggest drop, with how many elves we’ve been putting on the board to drop this as early as possible it should give us a HUGE swing in board power letting us instantly swing for lethal. While not a large drop, it does help us combo into more mana, “Village Bell-Ringer” untaps all of our creatures, so if we can generate more mana than it costs to cast the Bell-Ringer we can make some extra mana by abusing the untap effects.

Of course, we don’t really want to simply hard-cast each of these cards, We intend to get all of them out at the same time via “Genesis Wave”. Genesis Wave can be more than just a win-condition, it can also work as an engine to help us develp board position. In dire circumstances we can Wave for 3, this gets us Archdruis, Ezuri, Lands, and other small elves. Ideally we want to wave for at least 8 to hit everyting in our deck, but more wave means more cards, means more advantage.

We can order what comes down in what order, and choose not to put something into play, this mostly applies to Ezuri and the Legend rule. But for things in order, we can put down “Soul of the Harvest” down before all of the other revealed creatures and get plenty of extra draws, and we can put “Craterhoof Behemoth” last so we get as much boost out of it as possible, we also hope to hit “Village Bell-Ringer” with Genesis Wave so that all of the mana creatures we tapped to wave are now hopefully huge bodies able to smash with.

If you have the extra budget to spend on this deck, a few MAJOR improvements can be made. Most Importantly, “Green Sun’s Zenith” is exactly what this deck wants. It helps us find the all-important Elvish Archdruid, but can also be used to tutor for Craterhoof Behemoth when you have a lot of mana ready to go. With that on board we don’t need to run as many copies of Ezuri and Soul of the Harvest. If you include a few “Sunpetal Grove” and “Razorverge Thicket” to replace “Evolving Wilds” you can also reliably drop a land to make room for one more Green Sun’s Zenith. As I mentioned above “Birds of Paradise” should be in place of “Avacyn’s Pilgrim”, a big flying trampler is better than a grouded trampler, and tapping for whichever mana we need and not being color locked is very helpful. With a better mana base as well, you can also use “Restoration Angel” it lets you blink target to protect against targeted removal, it also lets you abuse ETB triggers most notably Craterhoof Behemoth to give more buffs to your team.