MTG Salvation

I've been trying to understand this for a long time but Just can't. How can an Azusa deck run so much land and yet be consistent? I play an Azusa deck with 34 land in it and more often then not I'm drawing to much land. Could someone please enlighten me on the subject or point me in right direction.

Land, land, land, Asuza.

Landlandlandlandlandland, Ulamog.

It's the fuel for the deck. For some black decks, it's life. For green, it tends to be mana. Maybe you're not running enough ways to make use of stupid amounts of mana?

I suppose Horn of Greed is one of the reason.

I can give you the mathematical answer if you are interested -- though most players don't actually reason their Azusa builds this way. In a normal deck, decks are built to have a balanced probability of drawing resources (lands) and playable stuff (usually, nonlands but some lands apply). Due to the nature of Azusa's static ability, there is huge incentive for players to simply load their hands with lands just so that they can play them. That itself, does not mean that you should run 50+ lands in your Azusa.dec but it does mean that you will want to play many spells that help you actually load more lands into your hands just so you can abuse Azusa's abilities. This has the unfortunate effect of reducing the probability that you will draw more lands (due to the high CMC of their threats, generally, drawing more lands is not necessarily a bad thing). So, to normalise the distribution after, say, a Sprouting Vines, a simple fix would be to add more lands.

To illustrate, Seek the Horizon. Lets say you have 60 cards in the library, of which 20 are lands. The probability of drawing a land before and after you play Seek the Horizon is 0.3333 to 0.2833 (roughly a 15% difference). Now, to offset the 15% lowered probability of drawing a land, many Azusa decks offsets these changes in probability by including more lands. Now, you may rightly ask, "why draw lands when you can draw threats?" In many typical Azusa decks, the curves tend to be higher at the end rather than the middle so this somewhat justifies increasing the probability that you will draw lands just so that they can play their high CMC threats as soon as possible. Also note that some of the lands played in Azusa builds are threats or utilities in itself. You will recognise cards like this or this in some Azusa builds.

I don't play that much land in my Azusa deck. My playgroup uses partial paris rules for mulligans, and I just do an aggressive first mulligan for lands. The last thing you want is to be stuck drawing lands later on.

• Azusa
  
• Oracle of Mul Daya
  
• Burgeoning
  
• Explore
  
• Exploration
  
• Fastbond
  
• Gaea's Touch
  
• Rites of Flourishing

I may have missed one or two. But green has the best way to put additional lands into play. Not to mention the normal ramp spells like Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, Explosive Vegetation, Skyshroud Claim, etc, you could have a monster ramp deck.

At that point, every other spell is just big splashy effects. Tooth & Nail, Primeval Titan, Woodfall Primus, Eldrazi, Eldrazi, Colossus of the Blightsteel or Darksteel variety.

Quote from mellojoe

• Fastbond

Fastbond is BANNED !

But Azusa is a fast ramp and aggro deck. Just play lands or get some with sorcery cards. Get huge mana pool and play creatures.

Mana = big fatty dumb ass or many tokens + landfall = doom !!

From what I've noticed just looking at Azusa decklists, the 40ish range lists are often the ones that are more 'casual' if you will. Lots of land, blowing into fatties (sounds hot), using horn of greed to draw cards (likely more land), to ramp into the big gamebreaking spells like Tooth and Nail, Eldrazi, etc. The ones that I've seen that are closer to 50 usually compensate for the added land by running spells and permanents that cause everyone to sacrifice lands or tap lands less frequently (I.E. Winter Orb, Smokestack). As you will have MANY MANY more land than everyone else on the field, and it will penalize you a lot less than it will hurt everyone else on the field.

By only running 34 land in your azusa deck you are simply not using green's most powerful ability, and that is to have access to large amounts of permanent mana.

Using my buddy's Azusa deck as an example, a large number of the lands that he runs are nonbasics or answers to other silly things that people do over the course of a game. Couple that with the ability to Crucible of Worlds for a Strip Mine three or more times in a turn is just silly.

Well I have no idea who you play with or what they find "fun", but from a control player's aspect; take advantage of what your deck does well.

I figured that green has an abundance of permanents to sacrifice, so why not add Smokestack, Possessed Portal to your deck? In most cases, you will only play those cards when you have clear board position or the time is right to lock a player out of the game.

My goal was to have as much card advantage green has to offer.

I went with a control aspect of Azusa, but mostly focusing on Land destruction and Sundering Titan with sacrifice outlets and various ways to recur it. I ran Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to have the ability to destroy any land with Sundering Titan. It was lovely.
- Regrowth
- Eternal Witness
- Noxious Revival
- Restock
- Buried Ruins

I wanted to make my deck auto-lose to Wake of Destruction. My build ran 43 lands, but I ran 21 non basic lands. In most games, I only needed 4 Forest at most to play my deck since it was mostly colourless. It worked well for me and I won most my games, but my only goal wasn't too win. I wanted to see if I could make a Mono-G work and functional, and I was happy that I accomplished my goal.

Here's my hybrid aggro Azusa list:



I find this amount of land/mana to be pretty optimal. I run lots of draw and Cultivate-like effects so I'm never short on land in hand. I think running much more land than this isn't as good because you end up stunting your mid-game and long-game. I'd rather draw a card that will give me access to two or three lands in the next turn than just a single land now. I've also built in many ways to grab Primeval Titan. Finally, mana doublers are much more valuable than just another land later on. For reference, this deck can reliably generate disgusting amounts of mana by turn 5 or 6, which is when it usually "goes off." Of course, if you're on a budget, more forests might be a good solution.

Philosophically, the way I like to run Azusa is not to use her to drop lands all game long, but just to get two or three lands ahead early on. This is already a huge advantage. At that point, all you need is a mana doubler or a few extra cards to play almost anything you want, and things get exponentially crazy from there once you find a way to draw many more cards. It's at that point that you might want another round with Azusa to drop more lands from your hand, but you really shouldn't need more than two turns with her each game.

If someone really wants to run lots of forests, why not just run Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant.