Archetype of Imagination: Assault Loam

Hi guys, Eddie here!  Archetype of Imagination is going to be my weekly column on Modern Brew of the Day. The plan is to explore the different archetypes of Modern and explore them to develop a deeper knowledge of what makes decks tick. Hopefully while we go over the different archetypes, we'll figure out now only how to play them, but also how to beat them. In my opinion, Modern is a format where knowing your potential foes is probably your most valuable weapon.

This isn't legacy where necessarily knowing your deck more than playing the best deck will lead you to victory, or Standard where the meta-game often is clear Rock-Paper-Scissors. Instead, this is a very finesse format where it's important to know what's best positioned in the meta-game, and where being able to anticipate the meta-game at any event will benefit you more than playing an objectively good deck. Today, we're going to begin a series on Loam decks, and the whole time we're going to ignore what Travis Woo has to say about the archetype! To begin with, let's look at two of the most important cards, the ones that make this deck work, the ones you'll probably want to bring the sideboard hate for.

First, Life from the Loam...

This card alone does the majority of the work in the deck, but it's only part of the puzzle. To see why this card is so good, we need to understand that it's nearly like playing Crucible of Worlds, except we often don't need or want to play the lands in our graveyard. We'd rather do other things with them. That's where Seismic Assault comes in.

Getting three lands back every turn effectively means that you can throw 6 damage wherever you want for 1G, though it's typically limited to once per turn that you get to do this. These two cards make this beast of a deck work. Once you land Seismic Assault your graveyard becomes an extension of your hand, even more than it was with just Life from the Loam. It only get's better when you start adding in more and more pieces of support for the Life from the Loam plan. Retrace and flashback work pretty spectacularly here, and it becomes very easy to break the symmetry of cards like Liliana of the Veil and Smallpox because you're able to recur the things you lose quite often. Let's look at the cogs in the machine here. We'll start with Retrace effects.

• Raven's Crime is pretty much the quintessential retrace card featured in Assault Loam. After a few turns it can become Mind Twist every turn, especially in the late game. While it's not necessarily as strong as Duress-style effects that reveal the hand, when you're able to simply strip their hand it becomes a bit unnecessary to go after specific cards in hand.
• Flame Jab serves a roles as an early piece of removal with a pretty limited scope, though it can turn into quite a variety of other removal spells if you're holding enough lands.
• Syphon Life is a relatively narrow card that doesn't see too much play, but can serve as an alternate win condition if for some reason you would stray pretty far from the archetype and drop red entirely.
• Worm Harvest is the last reasonable inclusion, but even so the worms only ever seem to feel like win-more tokens to me. Typically the aggro match up is lopsidedly in your favor, so having to generate a lot of blockers seems irrelevant.

Cards with flashback definitely take up a smaller portion of the deck, since having flashback really only means we don't care when they get milled by dredging Life from the Loam. The most important flashback card is pretty obvious: Faithless Looting. The ability to draw multiple cards per turn or, more importantly, dredge multiple times per turn is invaluable in decks that aren't running blue. To be honest, very few cards are typically considered that have flashback. Looking over a quick search, only a small number seem to be even remotely relevant to any match up, or useful in the main deck. However, of course Ancient Grudge cannot be ignored. It's probably the most important card when fighting against Affinity no matter what deck you're playing, so long as you have green and red. If you're straying from the typical Jund list and playing a four color build, splashing white for any number of extra options, you also have access to Lingering Souls and Ray of Revelation out of the sideboard, both of which can be useful in a myriad of situations. Lingering Souls also serves as just an incredibly efficient source of damage.

There are a small number of alternative engine cards that can be used to generate advantage or board presence off of discarding lands, though the primary ones are Borborygmos Enraged and Zombie Infestation. Borborygmos Enraged typically replaces Seismic Assault and requires the white splash for Unburial Rites, but does offer a slight amount of resiliency: if Borborygmos gets milled, you unbury him; if he dies, you unbury him; if you mill Unburial Rites, same. However, you do open yourself quite extensively to losing your engine to creature removal which just seems poor, and your engine comes down an entire turn slower, AT THE FASTEST. Definitely not ideal in a meta-game like the current one. Zombie Infestation has the benefit that you get to generate blockers and comes down a turn earlier, but doesn't really differentiate much from Seismic Assault, except for the fact that you can't actively remove any creatures.

Moving on from the spells, we need to investigate the creature base, because when the Seismic Assault plan doesn't manage to go off, you still need some way to block, generate card advantage, or just generally smash your opponent. The top contenders here are very cheap creatures with very strong abilities.

• Tarmogoyf. The most efficient beater in the format has an easy time finding a spot in a deck that usually has a pretty full graveyard. It's not hard to have a creature, land, sorcery, planeswalker, and sometimes an enchantment here for 'Goyf to be pretty large.
• Knight of the Reliquary. A similar card to 'Goyf, and usually replaces it, KotR gives you some additional advantage with the toolboxing it enables, and by being larger than 'Goyf more often than not.
• Dark Confidant. Bob is pretty reasonable in a deck without many high cost spells, and he serves as a very important source of card advantage when you're dredging frequently and actually only hoping for a Seismic Assault.
• Young Pyromancer. This guy has been making lists relatively frequently on MTGO, in particular with Smallpox, since Pyromancer's triggered ability allows you to break the symmetry of Smallpox to some extent.
• Countryside Crusher. Definitely an all star, but really shines in lists that are a bit heavier on lands than spells. Travis Woo went ahead and popularized his ridiculously high land count list, but we're most certainly going to ignore that. It gives you a pretty decent amount of card advantage each turn by filling up your yard with lands, which is pretty great when it's actually just like drawing them.

The mana bases for this deck tend to be a little bit all over the place, since a need for RRR on turn three limits you pretty greatly. There aren't many shock lands, even though there's an overabundance of fetch lands that typically make their way into these lists. 

Moving on from there, we come to our final pieces of the puzzle. The planeswalker(s). Honestly, the only walker that sees any amount of play on MTGO in this archetype is Liliana of the Veil, for hopefully obvious reasons. We get to easily break her symmetric +1 and more often than not, that's about all you need her for. Repeatable discard is very strong in Modern, especially with as many combo decks as there are in the format. All that said, I have an interesting idea that I'll be testing out for next week with the following list.

4 Dark Confidant 4 Knight of the Reliquary 4 Abrupt Decay 3 Raven's Crime 2 Flame Jab 4 Life from the Loam 3 Lingering Souls 3 Seismic Assault 2 Liliana of the Veil 3 Inquisition of Kozilek 4 Blackcleave Cliffs 4 Verdant Catacombs 2 Fire-Lit Thicket 1 Raging Ravine 2 Graven Cairns 1 Overgrown Tomb 1 Marsh Flats 1 Blood Crypt 1 Horizon Canopy 2 Stomping Ground 1 Swamp 1 Forest 1 Temple Garden 1 Misty Rainforest 2 Tectonic Edge 1 Godless Shrine 1 Ajani Vengeant 1 Faithless Looting SB: 2 Ancient Grudge SB: 2 Anger of the Gods SB: 1 Thoughtseize SB: 2 Gaddock Teeg SB: 1 Maelstrom Pulse SB: 1 Bojuka Bog SB: 1 Thrun, the Last Troll SB: 1 Golgari Charm SB: 1 Ray of Revelation SB: 2 Devour Flesh SB: 1 Faithless Looting
I'm opting for an increased amount of discard from what I had originally mentioned, including extra copies of Inquisition of Kozilek for some amount of directed discard. I think Thoughtseize is definitely not the best main deck card for this list, especially with a bunch of shocks and fetches. I don't want to always be "playing Jund" and starting at 15.

Splashing white for Knight of the Reliquary lets us have access to Lingering Souls in the main as well as Gaddock Teeg and Ray of Revelation out of the sideboard, both of which are pretty stellar. More importantly, it's going to let me try my small innovation, which I have yet to get any opportunity to test: Ajani Vengeant.

I'm going to leave it here, and get on off to testing this bad boy. Good luck to anyone who picks up my list; I'd love to hear some feedback if you play it at all. Make sure to check back in next week when I go over how I fared with the list and check out the next list I post!