The Desert Bloom deck is one of four preconstructed Commander decks released alongside the Outlaws of Thunder Junction set. It’s a Naya (Red, Green, and White) color identity deck built around getting lands into your graveyard to reduce Yuma, Proud Protector‘s cost, draw cards, and make tokens.
Upgrading the Deck
Remember last time when I made some kind of bad but fun upgrades to the Grand Larceny precon? Well this time around we’re going in a sliiiightly different direction. Do you like having friends? No? Then I’ve got a great deck for you to start playtesting! If you’re a newer player, or your playgroup is comprised of them, certain things are…. frowned upon which older jerks like myself grew up on and think are perfectly fine if played responsibly. Things like blowing up all of the lands in play. Now again, I want to reiterate, a card like Armageddon is not meant to be fired off as soon as you get to 4 mana, and slamming it without a plan to close out the game in short order is as much of a time wasting dick move as people claim it is.
Instead, this should be viewed as a finisher, preferably with our Splendid Reclamation in hand and enough mana to float to cast it immediately afterwards for a clearly game ending amount of advantage. Failing that, you need at least one of the recursive Crucible of Worlds effects, preferably with a way to make multiple land drops per turn like Oracle of Mul Daya as well. At that point you should have Yuma out and be able to bury the table in card advantage and tokens as you rebuild two or three or more times faster than they can.
For a more traditional plan, we have stuffed the deck right to the gills with Deserts and ways to get cards in our graveyard to trigger Yuma as early and often as we can. This is backed up with card draw effects like Elemental Bond to keep our hand full, ways to double up on the tokens we’re creating like Doubling Season, and ways to turn those tokens into damage like Purphoros, God of the Forge. We also have backup token engines like Hazezon, Shaper of Sand and Omnath, Locus of Rage, general recursion pieces like Sun Titan, and protection like Constant Mists.
As currently constructed I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually pull a few underperforming pieces out for some additional removal, but I like to go heavy on the theme in the first draft to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Along those lines, we have both Spelunking and Amulet of Vigor to help with how many of our lands enter tapped natively, but I would bet that the deck can benefit from a couple of cards like Idyllic Tutor to make sure we have them in hand more often.
Finally we have a couple of dredge cards in Life from the Loam and Golgari Grave-Troll to really power up our yard, and some sneaky tricks we can pull with free or nearly free ways to get lands in the graveyard at instant speed like Nimble Mongoose, Zuran Orb, and Crop Rotation. Pro tip: Rotation into Glacial Chasm will make a lot of decks really sad forever. The list has been very heavily rebuilt, and if you give it a try I’d love to hear feedback! As long as that feedback isn’t “my playgroup booted me out because I kept blowing up all of the lands and then not winning.”
Cut List
- Evolving Wilds
- Escape to the Wilds
- Angel of Indemnity
- Chromatic Lantern
- Genesis Hydra
- Decimate
- Bitter Reunion
- The Mending of Dominaria
- Nesting Dragon
- Valorous Stance
- Vengeful Regrowth
- Elvish Rejuvenator
- Turntimber Sower
- Kirri, Talented Sprout
- Nantuko Cultivator
- Eccentric Farmer
- Rumbleweed
- Satyr Wayfinder
- Springbloom Druid
- Requisition Raid
- Descend upon the Sinful
- Unholy Heat
- Angel of the Ruins
- Avenger of Zendikar
- Explore
- Wreck and Rebuild
- Winding Way
- Bovine Intervention
- Perpetual Timepiece
- Harrow
- Return of the Wildspeaker
- Electric Revelation
- Embrace the Unknown
- Scaretiller
- Marshal’s Anthem
- Crawling Sensation
- Sevinne’s Reclamation
- Forest
- 2 Mountain
- 3 Plains
- Terramorphic Expanse
- Sunscorched Divide
- Sheltered Thicket
- Krosan Verge
- Jungle Shrine
- Scattered Groves
Add List
- Boseiju, Who Endures
- Wheel of Fortune
- Smuggler’s Copter
- Network Terminal
- Crop Rotation
- Armageddon
- Faithless Looting
- Greater Good
- Tectonic Reformation
- Sylvan Safekeeper
- Elvish Reclaimer
- Anger
- Noose Constrictor
- Azusa, Lost but Seeking
- Constant Mists
- Reforge the Soul
- Golgari Grave-Troll
- Purphoros, God of the Forge
- Aftermath Analyst
- Cataclysm
- Global Ruin
- Zuran Orb
- Altar of Dementia
- Tiller Engine
- Splendid Reclamation
- Scapeshift
- Realms Uncharted
- Life from the Loam
- Anointed Procession
- Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
- Conduit of Worlds
- Amulet of Vigor
- Spelunking
- Annie Joins Up
- Garruk’s Uprising
- Elemental Bond
- Arid Archway
- Sunscorched Desert
- Desert
- Sandstorm Verge
- Field of the Dead
- Endless Sands
- Grasping Dunes
- Cradle of the Accursed
- Dust Bowl
- Strip Mine
- Glacial Chasm
- Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
- Crucible of Worlds
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