Frontier Bivouac: Standard Temur Deserts

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Before We Start

The Gates deck from Ravnica Allegiance held a place in Standard at the time with its steady performance and friendly price. The Desert theme of Outlaws of Thunder Junction looks to have plenty of potential, but how exactly should it be built? Let’s leave that question to that dashing man!

Deck Introduction

The Desert theme design of Outlaws of Thunder Junction combines the Gates theme and the Domain theme of the past, and adds an enter-the-battlefield “poke one” trigger to set off this set’s crime mechanic. Although it isn’t as brutally powerful as Gates, it is still viable in Standard. Since lands are the theme, using green as the base for the build is a given. This article uses Temur colors as the example:

Decklist

The main creatures are Bonny Pall, Clearcutter, Borborygmos and Fblthp, and the star of this set, Oko, the Ringleader. The flaw in Oko, the Ringleader’s ability set is that you need to keep triggering crimes to get the full effect, and the two-color Deserts (Bristling Backwoods, Lush Oasis, Eroded Canyon) happen to make up for it: playing the land satisfies the crime condition so the +1 can reliably refill resources. Borborygmos and Fblthp is a mainstay that provides both removal and card refilling in decks with many lands, and the lands it discards are left to Bonny Pall, Clearcutter to recover. Bonny Pall, Clearcutter not only has the Growth Spiral that triggers when you attack, drawing a card and then putting a land onto the battlefield from your hand or graveyard, but also makes the powerful finisher Beau on entering, and its 6/5 reach body can also stop the offense of Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal, making it a very fitting top end for the mana curve.

Although it’s called a Desert theme, the only Desert-mechanic card this deck uses is Outcaster Greenblade, which is also the deck’s core fighter. He is like a combination of the Gates deck’s Civic Wayfinder and Gatebreaker Ram: he searches for a Desert on entering, and besides fetching the two-color Deserts for fixing, he can also fetch Arid Archway or Conduit Pylons to adjust your land-drop tempo, while growing in size according to the number of Deserts, easily reaching double-digit stats in the mid to late game, which also makes him the best copy target for Oko, the Ringleader. To keep a deck with as many as 17 tapped lands running smoothly, I also added Kellan, Inquisitive Prodigy, who traveled far and wide to find his father, Azusa’s Many Journeys and Beanstalk Wurm, for a total of eight two-mana land-ramp options.

Given that this is a slow deck, for removal we chose Fires of Victory, Seismic Wave and Ill-Timed Explosion. Fires of Victory is the red instant-speed single-target removal with the highest ceiling in the Standard card pool, and with kicker it can refill a card, which is quite practical for a slow deck with a big hand and high removal needs. Seismic Wave is a godsend against go-wide aggro: whether it’s convoke tokens or Blue-Black small fliers, it can sweep them up at instant speed for three mana, and it can also take along three-toughness creatures like Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor. This slot could also use an instant-speed three-mana sweeper like Vampires’ Vengeance, but in my view, in the current Standard meta the difference between sweeping one and sweeping two is small, and Seismic Wave can hit any target directly so it never becomes a dead card in non-creature matchups, so I ended up choosing Seismic Wave. Ill-Timed Explosion is a dual-purpose spell for card refilling and sweeping. This deck’s creatures are fairly large, so when sweeping it has a good chance of being a one-sided sweep, and it’s not uncommon for a big creature to finish the opponent in one hit right after the sweep, which also makes up for the main creatures’ lack of trample.

Gameplay Demo

The video is an early version; the slot of Vampires’ Vengeance is now Seismic Wave

The demo video is against Black-Green midrange. Basically I used Fires of Victory and Ill-Timed Explosion to sweep away the small and medium threats the opponent played, then relied on Deserts to trigger Oko, the Ringleader’s crime to steadily gain resources, and afterward used the flagship creature or Oko, the Ringleader’s transformations to finish the opponent quickly. Because playing a Desert deals damage, when I swung for the first time the opponent was at only 11 life (two of which came from the opponent’s own pain-land damage), so about two hits would probably end the game.

This game was this article’s example version against the star-studded Selesnya Counters. Although early on one Ill-Timed Explosion swept away three of the opponent’s threats at once, the Ajani, Sleeper Agent and Dusk Legion Duelist the opponent played next showed amazing rebuilding ability, and together with Quirion Beastcaller and Clay Champion built up a solid line that pressured me for a while. Unfortunately, after trading with the later Outcaster Greenblade and Beau I ran out of fighting power, the Goldvein Hydra grown to 17/17 managed only a one-for-two, and Clay Champion was even dismantled painlessly by Kellan, Inquisitive Prodigy; in the end only a few creatures that hadn’t had time to grow were left, and I had to concede.

Conclusion

This article shows an example of a Temur Deserts deck. Because it is a more economical build, I didn’t include the channel lands, which keeps the main deck’s cost at only $22, and with the sideboard just $27, and in actual play it performs quite well. The main deck handles go-wide decks decently, and the lifegain from Ancient Cornucopia means little in front of double-digit bodies. Because of the color restrictions, single-target removal is weak, so sometimes you still run into things you can’t remove, which can only be patched up in sideboarded games. In my view, the Desert theme is a Gates deck with relatively high building flexibility. If you don’t like Temur colors, you can also go Abzan, Sultai or other color combinations and save the cost of multicolor lands directly, which would be a good choice for players on a limited budget.