Historic Roiling Canopy Titan: Fun & Jank Episode 94

Howdy ladies and gents!

Welcome back to Fun & Jank!

Reality Fracture is finally here, and it couldn’t have arrived at a much better time for Historic. The end of Alchemy has shaken up the format, a bunch of previously rebalanced cards have been restored to their original versions, and now we have an entire new release throwing even more cards into the mix. Historic is in one of those wonderful periods where it feels like nobody is quite sure what they’re supposed to be playing yet.

So, naturally, that means I have a ridiculous number of decks I want to build.

We’ll get to them.

On release day I couldn’t really decided which deck to test first. So i threw darts blindly at the board and landed on a card that had lots of people excited on its initial preview.

This our color shifted version of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. At first glance, Canopy isn’t the easiest card to build around. It’s a tapped land, and while giving a creature +3/+3 whenever a Forest enters the battlefield is a pretty substantial payoff, there’s an equally substantial condition attached to it: we need to control at least five other Forests before it does anything.

Six Forests is a lot to ask for, particularly when Historic is a pretty fast format these days and we lack efficient land-fetching ramp like Search for Tomorrow.

Fortunately, there’s a land that makes that requirement considerably less intimidating.

And once I (and many others) realized just how well those two lands worked together, there was only one sensible thing to do.

Make a Primeval Titan as large as humanly possible and smash someone with it.

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Roiling Canopy’s ability is powerful, but building around it normally comes with an awkward restriction. We don’t simply need six lands. We need Roiling Canopy plus five other Forests, and we then need additional lands entering the battlefield to actually trigger it. You could certainly build a mono-green deck and call it a day, but Historic has access to far too many useful lands for me to be particularly excited about filling the deck with basic Forests.

That’s where Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth comes in.

Yavimaya makes every land a Forest in addition to its other land types. Suddenly, Roiling Canopy doesn’t care what our mana base looks like. Our utility lands are Forests. Our dual lands are Forests. Roiling Canopy itself is a Forest.

Most importantly, our Canopy enabler doesn’t require us to dedicate spell slots to making the combo work. Yavimaya is simply another land we can build directly into the mana base. That immediately led me toward Primeval Titan.

Titan decks are hardly new to Historic, and neither are decks trying to abuse lands entering the battlefield. Scapeshift is a perfectly viable strategy alongside Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, while various Primeval Titan shells have been around for quite some time. Traditionally, those decks are interested in turning their lands into direct damage. Find Valakut, dump a bunch of Mountains onto the battlefield and start throwing triggers at your opponent until they stop moving. However, one advantage over these shells is that we don’t have to dedicate slots to cards like Dryad of the Iliysian Grove, making our enablers harder to interact with.

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The Plan

Once Roiling Canopy is active, Primeval Titan does almost everything we could possibly want. The main problem, of course, is actually attacking with Titan once everything is set up. If our entire plan is to make an obscenely large creature, passing the turn and giving our opponent an opportunity to untap and kill it seems unnecessarily polite.

In order to fix that I took inspiration from the Through the Breach Titan decks that have seen competitive play in Modern. And that’s how Kavaron Consumed ended up in the deck. Kavaron lets us cheat Primeval Titan onto the battlefield with haste. We get Titan’s enters-the-battlefield trigger, attack immediately, and then get its attack trigger as well. That means we get 4 land triggers in one turn and a Titan to attack with.

Assuming we have enough lands to play Kavaron Consumed, the win looks like this:

1.) Cast Kavaron Consumed, putting a 4/4 Primeval Titan into play
2.) Titan triggers, fetching Roiling Canopy and Yavimaya, pumping Titan.
3.) Attack with Titan, fetching two more Roiling Canopies.
4.) Titan is now a 28/28 with Trample.

Neat!

Outside of this little interaction though, Kavaron Consumed has nothing else to hit. So, we threw in a few Emrakul, the Aeons Torn as a reasonable plan-b. Its rather unfortunate that it perpetually becomes a 4/4, but hitting someone with Annihilator 6 is still pretty good. Its also nice if our opponent boards in something like Alpine Moon against us because we can pivot to a plan that doesn’t care about lands.

With all the ramp, there’s also a reasonable assumption that we’ll eventually be able to hardcast Emrakul if the game goes on long enough.

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First Draft

The original list contained the full four copies of Roiling Canopy, Yavimaya, Primeval Titan, Kavaron Consumed and Emrakul, our main core. From there, the goal was mostly to get enough lands onto the battlefield to make everything work.

Farseek is perfect for that job, while Explore gives us another way to accelerate our land count without requiring us to go all-in on traditional mana creatures. Studious First-Year gives us another early accelerant, and Archdruid’s Charm offers a ton of flexibility while helping us find the pieces we need. It’s Particularly strong if we already have an active Roiling Canopy as it can give us a landfall trigger at instant speed.

I also included two copies of Courser of Kruphix. Courser is a generically good, albeit outdated card, in a land-heavy deck, giving us some incidental life gain while potentially letting us play additional lands from the top of our library.

For interaction, the original list ran four Sweltering Suns. We’re spending the first few turns ramping rather than establishing much of a board, which gives aggressive decks a pretty obvious opportunity to murder us before our giant Titan shenanigans ever get started.

Sweltering Suns gave us a way to reset the battlefield while having cycling available in matchups where three damage to everything wasn’t particularly useful.

Finally, I threw in an assortment of utility lands for Primeval Titan to find, including Lair of the Hydra, Castle Garenbrig and Arena of Glory.

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Gameplay

(note: this is an earlier version that evolved into the list posted above)

So uh.

We didn’t do too hot on stream.

The good news is that smashing people’s faces with Prime Time is still fun as hell. Yavimaya made the five-Forest requirement considerably easier to meet than it initially looked, and Primeval Titan was every bit as silly alongside Canopy as I’d hoped.

The rest of the shell was a little bleh. I couldn’t really find the right mix of ramp and support that I needed. We definitely needed to trim some fat and streamline our card choices to support our Plan-A.

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Version #2

That brings us to the version I’m playing now.

This is a Primeval Titan deck. Everything else exists to get us there.

The four Yavimayas dropped to two. We absolutely need access to Yavimaya for our Canopy turns, but drawing multiples of a legendary land doesn’t accomplish much. Between our tutors and Titan itself, two copies should give us enough access without clogging our hand.

Meanwhile, Castle Garenbrig went from a singleton to the full four copies. If Titan is the card we care about most, we might as well build our mana base around casting it.

Of one the other biggest additions, though, is Turntimber Symbiosis.

Turntimber is exactly the kind of card this deck wants because it lets us cheat on deckbuilding space. When we need another land, that’s what it is. But once our mana is established and we’re desperately looking for a Titan, Turntimber becomes another way to dig for one. We’re effectively increasing our threat density without having to decrease our land count, which is particularly valuable in a deck where hitting land drops is so important.

I also added two copies of Perilous Iteration to help dig toward the pieces we’re actually interested in rather than relying on Courser to slowly generate value. I ended up swapping Sweltering Suns to Anger of the Gods as I expect graveyard-centric (yawg darklight phoenix, etc) strategies to be popular in the coming weeks. Cycling Suns away was occasionally useful, but when we actually need our sweeper, I’d rather make sure the creatures stay dead.

The gameplan is pretty simple.

Ramp.

Explore, Farseek and Studious First-Year help us develop our mana quickly, while Archdruid’s Charm and Perilous Iteration help find what we’re missing.

Then we want to establish Roiling Canopy and Yavimaya.

From there, we have two options.

We can cast Primeval Titan normally, use it to find whatever lands we’re missing, and start generating Canopy triggers. Or we can use Kavaron Consumed to send Titan screaming onto the battlefield with haste, grab two lands, attack, grab two more and make it absolutely enormous before combat damage.

We’ll be taking this second version of the deck for a spin on stream this week, but I think its already an improvement over the initial build.

Closing Thoughts

While there are certainly more traditional ways to take advantage of a Titan putting multiple lands onto the battlefield, traditional isn’t really what we’re here for. I could play Valakut and turn those land drops into damage. Instead, I’d rather turn Primeval Titan into a 28/28 and see what happens.

I also like where the deck ended up after the first round of changes. The original list taught me that the core interaction was worth pursuing, but also that we didn’t need to turn every possible lands-matter synergy into another piece of the deck. The second version is simpler and more committed to what we’re actually trying to accomplish: ramp quickly, find Titan, and get our Canopies online.

Reality Fracture has given us plenty more cards to experiment with, and I’ve already got a growing pile of brews I want to try. But for our first trip into the new set, this seemed like a rather straight forward build that highlights Canopy well.

Thanks for reading!

As always, feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below. And make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!

If you’re interested in more fun content, come join me on stream and help brew our next deck! Until next time, have fun, play jank.

Happy Brewin’!