Hey Dolf,
This is a standard deck I have been working on and it works
pretty good at FNM, but it has problems with fast decks,
flying decks and has no sideboard.
Instants and Sorceries
4 Overwhelming Stampede
4 Lightning
Bolts
4 Fireball
4 Cultivates
4 Explore
Creatures
4 Llanowar Elves
2 Jorga Treespeaker
4 Rampaging Baloth
4 Engulfing Slagwurm
4 Omnath Locus of mana
Land
16 Forests
4 Mountains
4 Rootbound Crag
Maybe Board
Steel Helkite
Natrulize (sideboard)
----------
Ethan,
Thanks for the deck submission and info. When you're able to
let me know exactly what is causing you problems like this
it makes it so much easier to try and fix it. Looking over
the list it's fairly solid and I can definitely tell that
you had a specific goal and built towards that. Specifically
you're looking to pump out lots of
mana and use it to get out some nasty critters quickly and
finish the opponent with a Fireball or some trampling
goodness thanks to Overwhelming Stampede.
Overall you have a pretty good list here and the idea behind
it is solid. On a card for card basis your creatures are
likely going to be better than what you'd see from the more
aggressive decks you have problems with. The problem here
being that they can put a lot of pressure on you very
quickly and kill off your little mana producers to hamstring
you while bashing in for the win. To counter this what I'm
going to recommend is that we make your own deck more
aggressive while still utilizing the benefits of having lots
of mana.
First thing we want to do here is cut your deck down to 60
cards from 62, you really want to always keep your decks to
60 cards as a rule of thumb simply because it's going to
force you to evaluate every card and only keep the best
ones. It then also increases the chances of you drawing your
best cards because there isn't extra filler. As such I'll be
making a couple cuts likely to the higher end of your curve.
To get the more aggressive theme going we're going to want
to dip slightly more into red so that you can run Plated
Geopede. The geopede has great synergy with this deck as
you're going to be playing lots of lands anyway which will
pump him up. He's also a two drop with first strike so he
can give you the early game presence you need. The other
change we can make here is to cut some copies of
overwhelming stampede and bring in some copies of Garruk
Wildspeaker.
Garruk provides a similar effect to the stampede with
his ultimate ability but also provides much more utility.
His other abilities will allow you to ramp up more mana or
create 3/3 beast tokens which you could use to contend with
those aggressive decks. Another card we could put in here
would be Obstinate Baloth which comes down on turn 4 (likely
sooner here), has a decent size body, and nets you 4 life
which can be crucial against fast aggro decks.
The last thing I'll mention to counter aggro decks is of
course... Pyroclasm, which will wipe the board of all their
weenies. The only problem with this being that it will also
hit your own little guys (though if you played a land that
turn the geopede will live). This can thus be a sideboard
card and you shouldn't need to use it unless playing against
some really insane ultra aggro decks in which case yo might
want to bring out the tree-speakers and some other high end
spells to board these in. If the llanowars can ramp you into
even one decent creature or spell they've served their
purpose and are worth the sacrifice if you need to pyroclasm.
Now for the other weakness. I was looking through to see
what we could do to counter heavy flyer decks and a couple
of cards stood out to me that will likely reside in your
sideboard until you need them. The first is Plummet which is
a pretty straightforward creature kill card for flying
creatures and will take down anything your lightning bolts
can't. The other card is Gravity Well. This card will pretty
much make it so that if your opponent wants to attack you
his flyers will be forced to engage your beefy creatures to
do so. You may also want to try boarding in the pryroclasms
I mentioned above if they're smaller flyers.
Let's take a minute here to discuss Omnath. Because we're
dipping into red more his usefullness will be more limited,
if he dies all that mana you had floating (that you could've
used for other stuff) goes away, and he has no sort of
evasion or protection of any kind. If you can't tell I'm not
a really big fan. I think that in your deck Protean Hydra
would be much more awesome. You can customize his size as he
comes in based on how much mana you have available, so you
can play him early if you need it, and his ability is just
awesome giving him more size and survivability in combat and
making him more of a threat as the game goes on.
Also I added Raging Ravine just because it gives you an
additional way to smack your opponent and adds further mana
fixing. Finally I'd also ask you to consider possibly
running Harrow instead of Explore. The reasoning for this
being that you aren't guaranteed that you'll draw and thus
be able to play two lands when you cast it. With Harrow you
know for a fact that two lands will hit the board that turn
(and possibly a third if you had one to play already). This
could potentially trigger the landfall ability on your
geopedes and baloths 3 times in one turn which could be
devastating. With explore you're only ever going to get 2
triggers.
So with the modifications we could be running a list that
looks something like this:
18 Creautres
4x Llanowar Elves
2x Joraga Tree-Speaker
4x Plated Geopede
2x Protean Hyrda
2x Obstinate Baloth
2x Rampaging Baloths
2x Engulfing Slagwurm
18 Spells
4x Lightning Bolt
2x Fireball
2x Overwhelming Stampede
4x Cultivate
2x Garruk Wildspeaker
4x Explore
24 Land
12 Forests
6 Mountains
4 Rootbound Crag
2 Raging Ravine
Sideboard
4x Plummet
3x Gravity Well
2x Steel Hellkite
2x Obstinate Baloth
4x Pryoclasm
As always do some play-testing to finalize your numbers.
-Dolf