Turboland/Oath

[meadbert]

So I took Zvi old list and made what I thought would be a killer deck for Richmond back in March. It destroyed slaver and stax and had a decent matchup against Gifts. The trouble is it had trouble with Grim Long and rolled over and died to IT, Pitch Long and Dragon so I had to abandon it.

Here is the list

4 Forbidden Orchard
2 Savannah
3 Tropical Island
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Windswept Heath
3 Ancient Tomb
3 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
1 Cephalid Colliseum
1 Nomad Stadium
1 Bazaar of Baghdad
1 Glacial Chasm
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
3 Null Rod
4 Crucible of Worlds
4 Horn of Greed
4 Intuition
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Echoing Truth
4 Oath of Druids
4 Exploration
1 Fastbond
1 Krosan Reclamation
1 Regrowth
1 Life from the Loam
1 Battlefield Scrounger
1 Enlightended Tutor
2 Argivian Find

In theory you go for the Turboland win. There are so many combos:

Fastbond + Horn of Greed + Life from the Loam = Draw your whole deck. Just play 2 lands. Dredge Loam. Waste your own land. Play Loam to get back 3 lands. Replay them drawing more cards.

Fastbond + Crucible = play infinite lands. Infinite mana is obvious. Infinite Strip shafts your opponents. Nomad Stadium allows infinite life gain. It is better than Zuron Orb because it does not dies to Gorilla Shaman, Null Rod, Chalice of the Void etc.
Play Savannah -1
Play Wasteland -1
Play Stadium -1
Tap Savannah for w
Waste your Savannah
Sac stadium, +4
If you repeat that you get infinite life.

If you have Fastbond, Crucible, Bazaar and wasteland then you have infinite mill. With Loam you can quickly dredge into Glacial Chasm or Nomad Stadium and then you get your infinite life.  After infinite life you dredge/mill into Cephalid Colliseum.

Cephalid Colliseum is the main win condition. You can just deck your opponent by activating it infinite times. Play a Null Rod and Strip all your opponents lands first.

Bazaar and Life from the Loam allow you to draw 2 cards a turn.

So that is the Turboland combo. So what is Oath for?

Easy. Turn 2 play Oath. Turn 3 Oath out Scrounger. Turn 4 put your library in your graveyard. Activate Scrounger putting Bazaar, LIfe from the Loam and Timewalk in your library. Draw Bazaar. Play and activate Bazaar. Keep time walk. Play timewalk. Now every turn you can taken infinite turns by putting Timewalk and 2 other cards on the bottom of your library each turn. Beat face with a 6/6 Scrounger and win.  You can actually get any two card you want.  Just put Loam on top.  Draw Loam.  Play Loam.  Activate Bazaar drawing the two cards you want and discard the 3 lands.  This is useful if you are in extra time and want to just get Crucible and Fastbond and win right now.

Scrounger is great. He is almost Swords proof. When he comes into play the putting of cards in your library is part of the cost of activating him. This means even if they stifle the ability you still get the cards. You don't get the +3/+3 though.

Intuition is amazing. You can Intutiion for 3 Crucibles, 3 Oaths, 3 Horns 3x Null Rod or 3 Orchards.
You can Intution for 2xArgivian Find and Fastbond to get Fastbond.
The best Intuition pile is Bazaar of Baghdad, Life from the Loam and Strip Mine. This way you get a draw engine on line and Strip Lock your opponent at the same time.

So why is this deck bad?

Ancestral Recall. If you opponent knows what he is doing he can just Recall you when your library is empty and kill you by decking you.

SB: There are bunch of board options. One option is to go the Symic Skyswallower route and just play Oath. Another route is to board out all Oath stuff and bring in Vinelasher Kudzu instead. In this case you need to take out Orchards.

Krosan Reclamation is not too important but sometimes needed if Scrounger is in your hand.  I might replace it with Scrounger#2 but that slows down the goldfish.

Echoing Truth is needed to bounce your own Horns so you don't deck yourself.

Argivian Find gets back all of your relevant cards.
Enlighten Tutor tutors up Oath, Crucible, Fastbond etc.

Against a DSC you can bounce it with Echoing Truth or use Glacial Chasm to fight it off indefinitely.

There are a few games you can play with Glacial Chasm and Nomad Stadium.  With Exploration out and a way to recur lands you can use Chasm forever and not lose life.
Chasm and Stadium with no exploratin allows 2 life loss every 3 turns.

turn 1 play chasm, sac land
turn 2 play back sacced land (pay 2 life to chasm)
turn 3 sac nomad stadium for 4 life.  Pay 4 life to chasm, play back stadium.

Anyway this turns DSC into a 30 turn clock.  They either have to bounce your Crucible (without Chain of Vapor or Rebuild) or they have to start countering Life from the Loam.

Glacial Chasm randomly wins so many games. Ichorid has no solution for it. Goblins hates it. Just wait for your opponent to stack his library with 4 Gobos. Then drop Chasm and you have 5 turns to Goldfish.

This deck is VERY hard to control.   You pretty much need to counter the Crucibles, the Oaths and the Intuitions.  Many control decks also need to counter Null Rods.  That still leaves Exploration and Horn of Greed unchecked.  Alone each is harmless but together they are a great draw engine.

The problem is this deck can totally be raced by combo deck. This is its main weakness.  You will lose to Meandeck Gifts, any Long variant and Dragon.

Once boading strategy is 1 Battlefield Scrounger, 2 Chalice, 4 Brainstorm, 4 Force, 4 STifle. This combats Tendrils Comb and protects you from Tormod's Crypt at the same time. The problem is you are limited with your original win conditions.  The token Battlefield Scrounger is so you don't die to Ancestral Recall but it slows you down a turn.

Anyway I originally was working on this over a year ago as a possible deck for Richmond.  I thought it was a pretty good answer for Control Slaver.  Once Intuition reared its ugly head I decided to abandon it.

Also thanks to Teknaught and MagicPlaya10 from SCG who helped with some of the testing and had some good boarding ideas (including boarding out Intuitions for In the Eye of Chaos)

[chrissss]

liek you said, it is weak against combo, but I must say I like this build. most turboland oath I have seen in T1, where extended/legacy type decks which were "vintaged" which sucked a**.

how does this deck do against fish? isnt a meddling mage difficult for you?

what about an oath in mirror match?

[meadbert]

Fish in general is not a problem because controlling Turboland is difficult and as a combo deck it is just faster than Fish.

Meddling Mage naming Oath of Druids could be annoying but it does not touch the Turboland/Combo method of winning.

A token Barbarian Ring can make a big difference.  I used to run it as the win condition, but I switched to Colliseum because it can produce blue.

This build does not do Oath so well.  Back in the winter of 05 I was running Ray of Revelation which improved the matchup a great deal, since it can be Intuitioned for.  I think I also used Seal of Cleansing back then because Stax was more prevelent and Flame Vault Gifts was running around.  Seal could be tutored for With an Intuition (Seal + 2 Argivian Finds).

Still, you have two options versus Oath.  Option 1 is to win the token War.  Since you have Life from the Loam and a full set of Crucibles this is somewhat in your favor.  Unfortunately you do not have as many of the cheap tutors.

Option #2 is to just try to combo out with the Turboland Combo.

Most of my testing against Oath was over a year ago when it was common to see 3 Oxidize and 3 Annul in the boad.  Back then Oath was less eager to set Chalice@1.  Now it is more eager to do that.  I am not sure how Chalice@1 would play out.

You also have a silver bullet in Glacial Chasm that can annoy Oath for a few turns till it finds a Wasteland.

[OfficeShredder]

You have no way to disrupt your opponent, or to protect your own combo.  You say the deck is difficult to control, but on the other hand merely countering fastbond stops everything, and you're left scrambling for answers before your opponent combos out in your face.  I like the scrounger option, but it still takes you an extra turn to win (since you need to oath twice), and again, without counters that extra turn is pretty lethal, and you're reliant on your battlefield scrounger not getting killed or bounced, which you can't stop either.  Overall, you're running a slower combo deck that doesn't have disruption, probably not the best idea.

You can probably win games because your opponent doesn't realize what needs to be countered, but the surprise factor seems to be the only advantage here

[meadbert]

Fastbond being countered is not a problem.  You still have 4 Oaths to win the game along with Regrowth and Argivian Find.

The whole, Kill the Scrounger plan has its own risks.  I can still Oath next turn and Flashback Krosan Reclamation or just go for the Turboland win.

You are right about there not being enough disruption though.  The lack of counters is a problem.

Null Rod, Strip Mine recursion and Waste recursion are annoying but they are not enough to stop Combo decks.

[rgbeatskeeper]

barbarian ring? no? just thought i mention that it gives you another combo option and kills meddling mage.

[meadbert]

I originally used Barbarian Ring.  In most Turboland decks I use it.  This list has so many ways to win and can recur bounce.  I really wanted something that could produce blue and that is why I chose Cephalid Colliseum.

[rgbeatskeeper]

I used to play turbo land alot, when it was extended zvi version of the deck, I loved it ran great, it just looks like your trying to do to manay things at once, and from experiance that never works out right, for me anyway. I once ran the extended deck in a type one turny and lost to keeper, he swords my Battlefield Scrounger and I couldn't get the loop off. So how do you win without the Scrounger? You can still combo and get all the turns you want but you cant win with out him, if im reading this right. Try tree top village mabe? This way with your build if they waste the village you can get it back, and you can bounce any blockers they may have. Its a hard deck to play good luck.

[meadbert]

If they swords Scrounger then you go for Turboland win and by decking them with Colliseum.

One advantage of Barbarian Ring is you can recur it 2 or 3 times a turn with Explorations out.

Colliseum does not have this option.

[rgbeatskeeper]

I trew this together looks awfull I goldfished it a few times its pretty fun, same idea kinda Ifigured if i posted it people can see the awfullness and fix it lol.

4 Horn of Greed
        1 Platinum Angel
        1 Pentavus
        1 Mindslaver
        1 Triskelion
        1 Sundering Titan
        4 Goblin Welder
        1 Fastbond
        4 Exploration
        4 Life from the Loam
        4 Crucible of Worlds
        1 Barbarian Ring
        1 mana crypt
        1 Black Lotus
        1 Mox Sapphire
        1 Mox Pearl
        1 Mox Ruby
        1 Mox Jet
        1 Mox Emerald
        1 Glacial Chasm
        1 Strip Mine
        4 Forgotten Cave
        4 Tranquil Thicket
        4 Gemstone Mine
        4 City of Brass
        4 Wasteland
        4 Bazaar of Baghdad

[OfficeShredder]

If they swords Scrounger then you go for Turboland win and by decking them with Colliseum.

One advantage of Barbarian Ring is you can recur it 2 or 3 times a turn with Explorations out.

Colliseum does not have this option.

You can't recur barbarian ring if you only have it to tap for red mana.... then you need three explorations to shoot for 2 damage every other turn with a wasteland... that's just bad business. 

[meadbert]

Exactly.  You could drop the fetch mana base and play City Of Brass, Gemstone Mine and Undiscovered Paradise and that makes Barbarian Ring much better.

The fetch mana base is nice in that with one fetch land you can pull all your duals out of your library.  This allows you to run fewer mana sources and more business.

If you go to a rainbow base then there are all sorts of bombs such as Yawgmoth's Will, Demonic Tutor that can be added.  In that case you do not really need Oath of Druids any more.  You can just go straight for the Turboland Combo always. 

[OfficeShredder]

You're right meadbert..... we need to make five colors green a force again.

Viva la revolution!