I am just such a huge fan of this Sasaya deck I made. There's 2 sides to this deck: One side is otherwise bad land-to-hand cards and card draw, the other half is X-cost things and mana sinks.
In the beginning, you want to develop a hand with 7+ lands in it while having 3+ lands in play. There are several cards which help achieve this. Cards such as Sylvan Ranger, Gatecreeper Vine, and Nissa, Vastwood Seer
are good in early game because they replace themselves with forests while standing as blockers for you. Thaumatic Compass
can give you forests in hand for 3 mana once per round. Kodama's Reach, Cultivate, and Nissa's Pilgrimage replace themselves with forests while putting one down to help with ramp. Nissa, Vastwood Seer
, Thaumatic Compass
, and Abundance, in particular, provide benefits for both this early strategy and after we've transformed Sasaya.
In addition, I have a lot of card draw in this deck. Elvish Visionary and Wall of Blossoms will draw a card upon entering the battlefield. Endless Atlas helps to draw cards early. Some cards, such as Harmonize, allow us to draw multiple cards. While these are one use effects in comparison to the atlas, these can still help us achieve our early-game goals. Mazemind Tome, Reckoner Bankbuster, and Sunset Pyramid also help draw cards and scry for a limited time at efficient rates. One of the few repeatable card draw effects in the deck is Book of Rass, which can come in handy after Sasaya transforms. We also have Holistic Wisdom, which can essentially turn cards in the hand into anything previously used (like basic lands into cycle lands). This deck is desperate enough for card draw that running utility lands is necessary. Mikokoro, Center of the Sea will draw everyone cards, but the benefits for us are worth it. War Room and Arch of Orazca exclusively draw us cards. With that we can draw cards while playing lands, which is very good as the game goes on. When Sasaya transforms and we don't need as many lands in hand, we can cycle some of them away, like Blasted Landscape, Desert of the Indomitable, Slippery Karst, and Tranquil Thicket. To compensate for the card draw, we have Reliquary Tower, and we can use Sylvan Scrying or Nylea's Intervention to fetch it.
Sasaya is unique in the way she separates play into 2 phases: We are either building up to a hand of 7+ lands or we are building up threats in our hand, and this is dependent on Sasaya's status. Once we get Sasaya's enchanted form out, we need to find ways to protect ourselves. Crawlspace and Moment's Peace are easy ways to protect ourselves. In addition, if our Thaumatic Compass
has transformed, we can stop creatures from attacking us. Cards like Jade Mage and Ant Queen can provide blockers to help protect us. In addition, if our opponent is actively threatening us, we can use cards like Introduction to Annihilation, Beast Within, and Scour from Existence to take out threats. There is also a strange boardwipe in this deck called The Great Aurora. It reshuffles our board and hand into our deck and we draw that many cards and play as many lands from our hands as we want. This can easily put us in another position to cast and transform Sasaya immediately after use.
How does this deck utilize all this mana efficiently? We can sink our mana into a threat like Walking Ballista or Goblin Cannon to win the game immediately by pinging away at our opponents. To do this, we typically need 100+ mana, which is not too hard to do with this deck, but it might take something special. Summer Bloom and Wrenn and Seven expedite our land drops, but Animist's Awakening will almost always get us there. If we pay 20-30 for X we can typically get 5-20 lands, which will most likely untap with spell mastery. There are also plenty of ways to get threats from our deck into our hand. Ring of Three Wishes and Planar Portal both achieve this, and we can use them on the same turn we play them thanks to Sasaya. Planar Bridge is very similar, except the card must be a permanent and it goes onto the battlefield. Provided you can pull it off, there is an interesting combo to do if you can't afford to play a tutor and win on the same turn. We can tutor all the other tutors with one, and finally tutor and play Seedborn Muse. If we do Ring of Three Wishes + Planar Portal + Planar Bridge + Seedborn Muse, our permanents untap at the start of the next turn, letting us use our mana and tutors on their turns. With this, we can tutor up blockers or responses to the prevailing board threats. By the time it is our turn, we can tutor up combos such as Animist's Awakening + Goblin Cannon
or Animist's Awakening + Walking Ballista
.
Some of our win conditions, such as Nemata, Grove Guardian or Jade Mage, require we wait until our upkeep or until the creatures can attack. If opponents see this, you will definitely be taken down by all of them. A good way around this is either using the Planar Bridge or by using and sacrificing Emergence Zone. This land card lets us cast spells the turn we sacrifice it as though they had flash, but one turn is all we need. Casting a huge threat on end of turn of the player right before us allows it to stick more easily due to the lack of time everybody else has to respond to the threat.
This is probably one of my favorites, as I feel like this was the first deck I personally took and concocted. I hope everybody else also enjoys what this deck has to offer!
