Hello and welcome back to Episode 3 of Fun & Jank! I’m Plum and I hope you brought your time machine because this week we’ll be exploring a deck with roots stretching all the way back to the extended format from 2002!
The History
Although Premodern tournaments are few and far between these days, I often look at old tournament results to get ideas for new brews. One such list caught my attention at the beginning of the year, commonly referred to as “Low-Land Stompy” or “10-Land Stompy”. Now way back then, the extended meta was home to an array of combo and control decks. Stiflenought, Aluren, and Landstill Control were all popular and powerful choices. If an aggro deck wanted to compete it needed to have an efficient and fast clock to ourtace your opponent.
In order to do that, a new take on aggro was developed. The idea was to use cheap creatures with above-average stats (even with drawbacks) to lower your mana curve enough that you could run fewer than 18 lands. More spells and such a land-lean deck meant you had more fuel to deal 20 points of damage to your opponent before they could stabilize or combo off. On top of this, these new decks had access to a few key synergies to make sure they could keep up despite the lack of mana.
Now that we know a little bit about how the concept of 10-Land Stompy came to be, let’s take a gander at what an average list looked like back then:
The deck is pretty straight forward. Cast cheap threats, pump them, and turn them sideways. If that doesn’t work, rinse and repeat until it does or you lose. Notice the deck plays some mana dorks like Llanowar Elves or Elvish Spirit Guide to help cast threats on curve, but there’s a card I’d like to highlight that really makes this deck tick.
Quirion Ranger is the heart of 10-Land Stompy for two reasons: 1.) Returning a forest to your hand means you can still double-spell each turn. You can play a 1-mana threat like Skyshroud Elite (and yes that was considered threatening in this deck), then use Ranger to return and replay the Forest you tapped to cast something else. 2.) Quirion Ranger untaps your mana dorks. Combined with the above ability it meant that a combination such as Ranger, Llanowar Elves and a single Forest could essentially make 4 mana together.
These synergies alongside some other nifty interactions like playing Harvest Wurm after Rogue Elephant gave the deck some real power. When you throw in cheap pump spells like Bounty of the Hunt you get a clear picture of how this deck provided such a quick and aggressive clock.
The Deck
As I browsed various builds of these stompy decks, I started making mental notes of cards available in the Timeless card pool that could play similar roles. After a few weeks of tinkering I was able to piece together a deck list that I ended up taking to Mythic sporting a 73% win-rate. (original reddit post)
Although 10-Land Red looks a little different, mainly because it’s red and not green, we’re applying the same concepts mentioned earlier to create something with blistering speed. We have cheap and efficient creatures, pump spells (along with some burn), and we’re still playing 10 lands just like it’s Premodern ancestors did.
If you’d like to see some gameplay, check out fellow content creator MTG Joe’s Video on my list.
If you squint your eyes and believe in the heart of the cards, the two images above are the exact same. Just kidding! But they occupy the same role in both decks. Guide-Beast is an efficient 1-mana threat with haste and trample, but he comes with a drawback of returning a land to your hand. However, the “drawback” is actually something we get to use to our advantage here. Once it connects with our opponent it bounces a land back to our hand and we can replay it after combat. In essence it’s our pseudo Quirion Ranger, giving us two mana off 1 land.
The one other card that glues this deck together is everyone’s favorite red monkey, Ragavan. Dealing damage, gaining card advantage, and ramping is quite a lot for 1 mana. It’s everything you want in an aggro deck, especially one with only 10 lands. Our pirate primate is an all-in-one package, most importantly providing us with extra mana in the form of treasure tokens. He was an auto-include from the moment I drafted up the early versions of my list and has been in every variation since. He’s just so darn stylish in those little goggles of his.
The rest of our creature base is made up of cards popular from red decks of the past. Monastery Swiftspear, Dragon’s Rage Channeler, and Kumano Faces Kakkazan are the most efficient 1-drops we can run. Providing both our clock and other beneficial things like card filtering (Dragon’s Rage Channeler) or pump (Kumano Faces Kakkaan). I consider these 3 “must-haves” in any variation of the deck running red.
Bomat Courier isn’t quite up to par with the other guys in terms of stats, but this little robot does a great job providing card advantage. Being a 1/1, he sneaks damage in quietly as our opponents use their removal on the bigger threats mentioned above. It’s common to sacrifice him for 3-4 cards which usually gives us plenty of gas to finish the opponent off. As an added bonus, he’s both an artifact and creature to help turn on Delirium for Dragon’s Rage Channeler.
Now the last creature I’ll talk about here may have you scratching your head. Spear Spewer might seem a little out of place but I promise you this 0/2 Defender does some heavy lifting in our list. A 1-drop that draws removal or deals 3-5 damage over the course of the game is a pretty good deal in my opinion. Plus he turns on Spectacle for some of our spells. Doesn’t matter if we’re hurting ourselves with his ability as long as it also hurts our opponent. He’s definitely a bit of a sleeper in this list and you shouldn’t knock him ‘til you try him.
The rest of the deck is a mix of burn, pump, and card advantage spells. We have the classic duo of Lightning Bolt and Skewer the Critics as added reach that doubles as removal.
Mishra’s Bauble is great for Delirium and easily looped late game (if we somehow make it that far) with Lurrus of the Dream-Den. We also have a 2-of Furor of the Bitten as an additional card type for Delirium that plays well with a flying Dragon's Rage Channeler or a trampling Guide-Beast.
Our mana base is nice and simple. There’s not much room to maneuver with just 10 lands, but we wanted to make sure Lurrus was castable and the fetches help us turn on Delirium faster.
There’s a few primers on the Premodern version of this deck that talks about the general balance between creatures and spells. It’s widely agreed upon that 30:20:10 is the best proportion of creatures, spells, and lands respectively. It provides a nice balance to make sure you have enough spells to finish off the opponent when your creatures can’t.
Closing Thoughts
10-Land Red is similar to most other aggro strategies. Jam creatures with a good power-to-cost ratio and try to reduce your opponent’s life to 0. However, even though 10 lands makes extra room for additional spells, we still want to make sure our card choices are as effective as possible. I tried all sorts of combinations of cards but each creature was chosen for a very specific reason in the final list. They’re the best and most efficient at what they do, and that’s what gives the deck so much speed and consistency despite only running 10 lands.
So give it a try! It’s fun breaking away from the norm and going against traditional deck building concepts. I have a few other versions I’ll be talking about in the future (mono green and mono black), but 10-Land Red was by far the strongest. I believe the deck can only get better as more and more creatures are printed so I highly encourage looking for new “best in slot” replacements with every set release.
Feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below! Make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!
Happy Brewing!
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Plum is the creator of the Jank Tank.
He started playing at the ripe old age of 12 and immediately fell in love with the infinite possibilities that deck building could lead to.
He truly understands that jank is a mindset, and spends most of his free time brewing and concocting new and exciting deck lists to help inspire and promote creativity within the MTG community.
