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With Deathrite Shaman long gone from Modern I thought I'd dust off the shell of an old deck I have played in various formats and see if I could make a budget version of it in time for the Holidays.Being a Budget build there is no 'goyf or fetch and I ditched Black entirely as Bob and Liliana are anything but Budget and with running only 2 colors the land base becomes much more Budget friendly.With Black gone and taking Raven's Crime, (and to a lesser degree Smallpox), with it the possibility of making it anything but a pure Aggro version was pretty much it. Now that said, here I had an opportunity to make a TRUE Aggro Loam and not the midrange builds that normally get tagged with the name...
For those of you not familiar with Loam decks I'll do a quick rundown of the basics:Life from the Loam is at it's core a self containing engine. After you have played the first one you will instead of drawing a card each turn activate its Dredge and in effect "draw" Life from the Loam every turn, (or even more often then that if you have cards that let you draw more often), and play it again at least once every turn. Now you have consistency built into your deck by playing 4 of one single card!So the goal here, (in simplistic terms), is to play the same Sorcery as often as we can. Now, how do we take advantage of that?Pretty easy when we have already decided to play aggro:Kiln Fiend grows bigger every time we play a Sorcery or Instant, so does Monastery Swiftspear. The other benefit of playing Loam every turn is that you return lands from your graveyard to your hand all the time and an obvious outlet for a hand full of lands is Seismic Assault. Together they often make for a game ending 2 card combo.Now, besides hoping to dredge lands into the yard we need more reliable ways of putting them there. If we were not a budget deck then stuffing your yard full of fetchlands would be easy but a somewhat painful solution. Self sacrificing lands that we can take advantage of however are Ghost Quarter and Tectonic Edge. Use on opponent to deny resources or on yourself to load a Loam.Besides being Lightning Bolt 5 and 6, Shard Volley also fits the bill.Which brings us to the final Aggro creature in this budget version, Countryside Crusher.In this build he is a "Tarmogoyf" that does not need any help as he fills the graveyard for your engine and himself! How many of him that is the right number is debatable but 3 seems fine...The final piece needed to take advantage of all the aspects of Loam is to add something that can be played out of the the graveyard repeatedly when it gets dredged into it. Enter Flame Jab. Cheap, effective and feeds off Loam, perfect!How about doing this loaming thing multiple times each turn, Faithless Looting makes that happen AND drops lands into the yard. Aggressive Mining is another Enchantment that looks like it could finally find a home in this decktype with its ability to yank Loam out of the yard at instant speed in response to graveyard hate, but I have not had a chance to test with it yet so I'll leave its inclusion, or not, entirely up to you.
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Man this is looking awesome! The only thing i could suggest is think about adding some kind of man land. I'm not saying go crazy with them or anything, but even just running 1 gives Loam even more value.
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Agreed, Inkmoth Nexus would be awesome but I might be pushing the "budget" moniker a little to far?
Just played this in a local Modern tournament and it did surprisingly well!Match 1 was against a UR Aggro where I had tempo advantage the whole time and he could not stick Delver or YP. 2-0. Allstar: SwiftspearMatch 2 I ran into Tron and between Ghost Quarter and a couple of well timed Assaults it was never a match. 2-0. Allstar: 50/50 split between GQ and Assault.Match 3 was a blowout against a Jund list with 3 Ooze main deck and Relic of Progenitus in the SB. 0-2. Allstar: His Scavenging Ooze.Match 4 turned out strange against a rougeish UW control build that I could not quite figure out and whiffed on my sideboarding for game 2 and likely gave that one away but recovered in game 3 by simply going all out aggro with Stoke the Flames as a curve topper. Allstar: Young Pyromancer.Finished preliminary rounds in 3rd position and were set for playoff against the deck ranked 2nd.Playoff semi-finals I got to face off against what I normally play in this format, Death and Taxes! However this D&T build had Wingmate Rocs in it? After the game he stated that the idea of flickering a Wingmate was just too sexy a prospect for him not to try. That said, the rest of the deck was hating in all the wrong places when paired up against mine, (no Dryad Militant), so it ended up being a relatively simple affair as soon as Assault came online. 2-0. Allstar: Assault.Finals against the same Jund list that wiped the floor with me in the preliminary rounds and I managed to steal game 1 by outracing his removal before he Reliced up and it was all over. 1-2. Allstar: His sideboard.As long as this deck does not get hated out like the Jund list did to it I would say that it has some merit and is set to surprise quite a few decks that are running light on the graveyard hate. It was surprisingly stable game 1 and in most all games I never really felt I was out of it until the yard hate hit. Not bad for a budget build with next to no playtesting behind it!