General Points
Aggro Loam is a deck built on synergy and redundancy; many of the cards it plays are individually mediocre, but become significantly more powerful within the context of the deck. At the heart of this is Life from the Loam: most of your card choices are made to synergize with the Loam engine. Your general game plan will involve ramping in the first few turns, preferably with a Mox Diamond and a Loam to recur fetches and other lands; simultaneously, you’ll be setting up a defense, removing problem permanents, and looking for a Seismic Assault and/or Punishing Fires (for the builds that run it). You then close out the game with burn and large creatures.
Specific Points
Playing around graveyard hate: At the current point in time (March 2012), the main forms of graveyard hate in the format are Surgical Extraction, Scavenging Ooze, and to a lesser extent, Bojuka Bog and Tormod’s Crypt. Each of these cards sees play in different places and require different strategies to play around. In order:
- Surgical Extraction: Sees play often as a foil to Snapcaster Mage. Unlike Extirpate, you can respond to it, making it far less of a threat. If you suspect your opponent has access to them (and decks with Snapcasters will often have them), try to dredge conservatively and limit the number of Loams in your graveyard. Keep at least one cycle land and mana up as often as you can. Keep track of Surgicals in the opponent’s graveyard as well, and be aware that two open mana on your turn may represent Snapcaster, flash back Surgical. It may be worthwhile to Surgical the opponent’s Surgicals if you are worried.
- Scavenging Ooze: This seems play most often in decks running Green Sun’s Zenith (mostly Maverick at the moment). Maverick’s mana can be susceptible to Wasteland if you can keep them off of Birds/Hierarchs, which limits how many times Ooze can go after your Loams. If it becomes bothersome, it’s worth saving removal for Ooze, but if you can limit the amount of green mana your opponent has then playing around Ooze becomes the same as playing around Surgical.
- Bojuka Bog: This sees very little play outside of decks looking to pair it with Knight of the Reliquary, and then it is often just a one-of in conjunction with other pieces of removal. Basically, if the opponent has an untapped Knight, be mindful of what you’re doing with your graveyard.
- Tormod’s Crypt: The best use of Crypt is to sandbag it and then use it to empty a full graveyard of Loam targets, but I’ve had people play Crypt preemptively before. If you suspect your opponent has Crypts, it’s more important to protect Loam targets than Loam itself; you will draw more Loams, but losing a big chunk of your Wastelands and cycling lands will hamper you more in the near-term. If you can, try to keep a Loam in hand at all times (and use another to get lands back).
Stacking Crusher and Bob triggers: If you specifically do not want to draw a land off of Bob, stack Bob, then Crusher on top of it. This is often the best call because it will grow Crushers the most and fill your hand with gas, especially if you are going to dredge Loam on your draw step. However, in matchups where the opponent can put a lot of pressure on your life total, you may want to stack the triggers the other way: with around half of an average Aggro Loam’s list costing zero mana, you are less likely to lose life off of a random Bob flip. Here’s some slightly older math by luma for those who want it.
When to go for it and when to play conservatively with Loam: This depends on a couple of things: whether you suspect graveyard hate, whether you have a Bob, whether you have Assault, and what your targets for Loam are. If you suspect hate, it is usually correct to play conservatively with Loam unless it is close to the end of the game, in which case you may just want to go for it anyway. If you have Bob, there is little cost to dredging on your draw step, since you’ll be seeing a fresh card off of Confidant. If you have Assault, whether you want to go for it or not depends on your opponent’s life total; if you can kill him this turn, do so, but if you can, Loam once or twice to build up some lands and then go all-in as soon as your opponent is within lethal Assault range. As for Loam targets: cycling lands are best used on the opponent’s turn unless you need cards right now. Not only do they help you dodge removal for Loam that way, but it’s worth leaving mana up in builds that run EE, Punishing Fires, and Terminate. Loaming to draw is slow, mana-intensive, and clunky as well, so you will rarely have the mana to cycle cast a Loam, cycle a bunch of cards, and then cast another Loam on your own turn unless it is very late in the game and the board is clear of pressure (or you are trying to pump Crushers enough to win).
Concerning Chalice of the Void
Discussion about Chalice of the Void occurs regularly in the thread, particularly when builds without it do well. For a long time, Chalice was a staple card in Aggro Loam, and it continues to be good in the abstract in a format that plays many of the game’s most powerful one-drops. I personally do not like the card, but I want to lay out the reasons for and against it first before I discuss that.
Reasons to run Chalice:
- Many decks rely on 1cc spells to operate. A short list of such cards includes Brainstorm, Noble Hierarch, Spell Snare, Spell Pierce, Ponder, and others.
- Most of the removal in the format costs one mana. Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, and Lightning Bolt are (currently) the most prevalent of these spells, but there are many others.
- Locking opponents out of their 1cc bracket has historically been proven to be quite good. The most recent example of this was the brief period when Mental Misstep was legal.
- Aggro Loam otherwise lacks ways to interact with the stack. Since Aggro Loam’s interactive cards deal exclusively with permanents, the deck is soft to spells.
Reasons to not run Chalice:
- You cannot run your own 1cc cards. This makes you squishier in the early game, especially when you do not have an early Mox Diamond.
- Getting a turn one Chalice at one is rare. The longer Chalice takes to show up, the more 1cc spells the opponent can cast (thereby weakening Chalice’s value) and the more answers your opponent is likely to have.
- Subsequent Chalices are dead draws. You can cast backup Chalices at one in case the opponent answers the first one, but in general you would rather not draw another Chalice once you have resolved the first one.
- Chalice is easily answerable if the opponent deems it a problem. Green Sun’s Zenith for Qasali Pridemage, Krosan Grip, Ancient Grudge, Shattering Spree, and Spell Snare are all cheap, effective answers for a resolved Chalice at one.
- Chalice’s value is matchup-dependent. Decks relying on many 1cc creatures are often better dealt with via removal, while some decks are more resilient to losing 1cc spells than others.
Chalice is good in decks that can support consistently casting one early as part of a concerted denial strategy: MUD and Stax decks that run Ancient Tomb and City of Traitors in addition to Moxen can often cast a Chalice in their opening hand on turn one. However, Chalice’s value diminishes as the game goes on and your opponent uses his 1cc cards. Particularly given the (current) prevalence of Spell Snare and Spell Pierce, not having a turn one Chalice means some decks will have significantly more ways to stop you when you do try to cast it; on the flip side, you can argue that a counter used on your Chalice is a counter that is not available to stop another bomb. However, there are a considerable number of worthwhile counter targets in your deck, enough that using Chalice as bait is not a good use of Chalice.
It’s also important to realize that not all 1cc spells are of equal worth. Some cards your Chalice can counter will be significantly more meaningful to you than others; countering an StP is going to be a lot better for you than countering a Noble Hierarch, for example. Furthermore, some 1cc cards your opponent runs will matter very little to you: Stifle out of RUG Tempo, for example, is actively bad against Aggro Loam after the first few turns, so being able to counter it is more of a bonus than a compelling reason to run Chalice.
Thus, the true number of cards for which you care about having Chalice in a given matchup is usually smaller than the total number of 1cc cards your opponent has. It may be helpful, when thinking about whether you want Chalice for a given matchup, to list all of the cards that Chalice can counter and then compare to all of the cards you really care about Chalice countering; if those two lists are similarly sized, Chalice is going to be useful. However, if the list of total CMC-1 cards is much longer, you may want to consider other cards that could be more useful. For example, against Maverick, Chalice stops Swords to Plowshares, Mother of Runes, Noble Hierarch, and Birds of Paradise, but you only really care about StP and sort of care about Mom. It may be better to accept that your opponent’s StPs will be live and use the space you get from dropping Chalices to run better cards for the matchup (like Bolt, Lavamancer, Dreams, or others).
It’s also worth remembering that, as good as a card’s highs may be, it’s more instructive to look at that card’s averages. While Chalice at one on turn one is certainly powerful, it requires both two specific cards (Chalice and Mox Diamond), two non-specific cards (two lands, one of which must come into play untapped), and three other cards that aren’t bad (that is, a Chalice, Mox, and five lands is usually a mulligan). The far more likely scenario is that Chalice is cast sometime between turns two and four. Revisiting the point above (that the true number of cards for which you want Chalice is smaller than the total number of cards you can counter), and keeping in mind that the second, third, and fourth Chalices are usually dead draws, you may want to seriously ask yourself how much Chalice will help you in games where you don’t get it very early. The overall benefits of the card may be lower than they appear on paper.
Concerning the Blue Splash
Discussion about switching the black splash to a blue one comes up occasionally, so it’s worth addressing some of the issues with the blue splash here. The usual arguments for the blue splash can be summed up as follows:
1) It gives you access to counters, which improve the combo matchup;
2) It gives you access to Brainstorm, which is a powerful card drawing spell;
3) It gives you access to Intuition, which is a powerful tutor.
I want to address my specific issues with each of these three points and then add a few general comments on the blue splash.
Addressing #1: I think it’s helpful here to look at decks with a historically strong combo matchup (which Aggro Loam does not have) and differentiate what they do from what Aggro Loam does. For this analysis, I’m going to use RUG Tempo (or Canadian Threshold, as it was once called), but decks like Merfolk and some control decks have had positive matchups against combo as well. RUG Tempo is characterized by the following things: a high density of counters (usually some combination of Daze, Force of Will, Spell Snare, and Spell Pierce), cantrips (Brainstorm and sometimes Ponder), a fast clock (most recently Delver, but also Mongoose, Tarmogoyf, and Vendillion Clique, backed by burn), and a low mana count (usually under 22 mana sources). A generic RUG versus combo matchup, won by RUG, will typically play out as follows: the RUG player disrupts the combo player’s mana in the early turns, counters key setup spells, and sticks one or two creatures that then beat down while the combo player tries to cobble together a good enough hand to go off through any remaining opposition. These games are not usually attrition-based; the combo player is favored going long, especially if he has access to disruption. The important thing to notice here is that the pressure applied by the RUG player is early, applied often, and is backed by a fast clock. By the time RUG runs out of disruption, the combo player should be under too much pressure from creatures to draw into a good hand.
The problem with adding counters to Aggro Loam is that Aggro Loam doesn’t have the ability to apply pressure early or often, and its clocks - while powerful - generally take several turns to get to full strength. Most combo decks are built to be resilient to a few counters; some, like Painter, run their own counters and will be able to fight back. Aggro Loam decks are also typically close to 50% mana between lands and Mox Diamonds, which means they have far more draws that don’t pressure the combo player than a deck like RUG. The combination of these factors results in what we can call a “strategic weakness” to combo: Aggro Loam’s core strategy of card advantage, attrition, and board control have little to no effect on stack-based combo decks. Adding counters doesn’t adequately compensate for deeper problems, like the higher percentage of mana, the large number of late-game cards, and the tendency of “unfair” decks to trump “fair” ones.
It’s also worth remembering that “combo” is not a monolithic entity. When many players talk about combo, they mean something like TES or ANT - storm-based combo decks - but Dredge, Reanimator, Painter, Burn, various Show and Tell builds, and Elves can all count as combo decks. Some of them, like Dredge, are naturally resistant to counter-based hate plans; others run their own counters and are in a much better position to win counter fights than you are.
Addressing #2: Brainstorm is certainly powerful in the decks that run it, but it’s worth trying to untangle why, and the easiest way to do that is to take a large number of random three-card samples from the various decks that run Brainstorm and compare them to random three-card samples from Aggro Loam. While many players would argue (correctly) that Brainstorm is a powerful card in and of itself, it’s also important to remember that Brainstorm can be made better or worse by the cards around it. An Aggro Loam Brainstorm will tend to draw a large amount of mana because the deck runs a large amount of mana; it will also draw a large number of mid- to late-game cards because Aggro Loam runs a large number of mid- to late-game cards. Brainstorm is very good in the decks that normally run it because it tends to draw a healthy mix of cards, and is therefore very good at all points in the game: at finding mana and setting up power plays in the early game, helping you consolidate your board or come back from behind in the midgame, and finding ways to seal the deal in the late game. Aggro Loam, as a linear strategy primarily focused on attrition, synergy, and powerful late-game plays, will have weaker overall Brainstorms than many blue decks.
On the other hand, reusable card advantage spells like Dark Confidant and Sylvan Library tend to be better than Brainstorm on average because their effects add up over several turns. They feed in well to Aggro Loam’s focus on going long in a way isolated Brainstorms typically don’t.
Addressing #3: Intuition is certainly a powerful card, but I think it strays too close to “the danger of cool things” territory. It is not often that an Aggro Loam deck will want to leave three mana open to cast Intuition, or to sink time into casting a three-mana tutor and then spending additional mana to cast the spell the tutor finds. Entomb, on-color for most Aggro Loam lists, does something very similar for a fraction of the mana.
Intuition may be more attractive in blue builds that want to keep mana open for counters, but such builds end up being torn between wanting to cast powerful proactive cards (Assault, Loam, Crusher) and reactive ones (counters), and keeping mana open while maximizing the strength of your proactive core can be a difficult task. I am not convinced that counters are sufficiently rewarding to make this plan viable.
Stepping back a bit, I think it’s important when proposing major changes to a deck, such as the choice of tertiary colors, to ask yourself what problems you are solving and what problems you are creating by doing so. The Jund formula (and non-blue formulas in general) have proven themselves to be consistent performers, but they are far from perfect decks. Any major changes made to the deck need to address its weaknesses without losing too much ground elsewhere; you want to maintain strong matchups against other fair decks while also boosting your performance against combo and other decks that can ignore or neutralize your linear plan.