Selesnya Landfall Wins Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven — Nathan Steuer’s Deck Tech

Standard has a new king. Nathan Steuer just hoisted his second Pro Tour trophy at Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven, piloting the most explosive deck of the post-Avatar: The Last Airbender meta: Selesnya Landfall. Better still for deck-tech nerds, finals opponent Christoffer Larsen — the reigning Pro Tour champion — ran the same archetype, pushing the match to a deciding Game 5. Four of the Top 8 played some flavor of Landfall. The answer this weekend: drop lands, double counters, attack for lethal.

Why Selesnya Landfall is the deck to beat

This isn’t your grandma’s Omnath ramp pile. The Avatar: The Last Airbender Standard set handed green-white a brand-new engine — earthbend — that turns lands into creatures with +1/+1 counters, then re-fires every landfall trigger as those “land-creatures” enter and re-enter the battlefield. Pair that with Edge of Eternities’ Mightform Harmonizer (which simply doubles a creature’s power on each land drop) and you have a deck that goes from “I cast Llanowar Elves” on turn one to “I attack for 24 trample damage” on turn four without doing anything illegal.

The marquee card is Earthbender Ascension. Three mana, comes down, immediately ramps you a basic, and then every land drop afterwards puts a quest counter on it. Four quest counters? Pump a creature and give it trample for the turn. In a deck running 25 lands plus Fabled Passage and Escape Tunnel, hitting four counters happens by turn five almost every game — and that’s before you start cracking Badgermole Cub triggers that turn lands themselves into creatures, doubling landfall triggers on the way in.

Nathan Steuer’s winning decklist

Selesnya Landfall — 1st Place, Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven
Pilot: Nathan Steuer (Team Cosmos Heavy Play)

How the deck wins games

Turn one is almost always Llanowar Elves. Boring, classic, perfect. It pushes a 3-drop into turn two slot, which is where the deck really comes online.

Turn two you slam Badgermole Cub. The Cub earthbends a land into a 1/1 with haste (it enters with a +1/+1 counter, so it’s actually a 1/1) and — here’s the broken part — every time you tap a creature for mana, it adds an extra green. That’s not a typo. Llanowar Elves now produces two mana. The earthbent land-creature you just made? Two mana when you tap it. Suddenly you’re playing Modern-speed ramp in Standard.

Turn three is Earthbender Ascension + something. You search a basic, it enters tapped, and the Ascension already has a quest counter on it from your turn-three land drop. From here the deck folds in on itself in the best way.

Turn four is where Steuer closes games. Mightform Harmonizer resolves, you crack a Fabled Passage, the landfall trigger doubles your creature’s power, the Ascension fires a quest counter, the Cub earthbends — every single permanent on your board is now generating value off one land drop. Mossborn Hydra out of the sideboard against control decks turns this into a literal one-card win condition: enters as a 2/2, doubles to 4/4 with the same land, swings as a 4/4 trampler, and is uncounterable thanks to Surrak.

Key card choices to talk about

Sazh’s Chocobo over more elves: the Chocobo from the Final Fantasy set gives you a mana dork that also ramps a basic into play when it attacks. It’s a turn-one play that becomes a turn-three land drop, which means more landfall triggers, which means more Harmonizer math. Four-of, no questions asked.

Erode as a four-of is the spice. It’s a flexible green removal/utility piece that handles the Izzet Spellementals and Izzet Lessons matchups by clearing out their key threats before the Ascension goes online. Notice Steuer cut down on Surrak from the maindeck (only one copy) — the meta read was that he didn’t need uncounterable threats game one, but he wanted four in the 75 for the post-board Azorius Tempo matchup against Zevin Faust’s deck.

Sheltered by Ghosts out of the board is the answer to Selesnya mirror finishes — exile their Mossborn Hydra, protect your own creature, win the race. Three copies is a lot, but with four Landfall decks in the Top 8, this slot earned its keep.

Should you play it at FNM?

Yes. Absolutely yes. Selesnya Landfall is fast, resilient, and rewards good sequencing without being so combo-dependent that one missed land drop loses you the game. The deck is also reasonably affordable for a tier-one Standard build — the only real chase cards are the Hushwood Verges and Temple Gardens, both of which we stock at the shop and reprint regularly.

Get the cards at Mana Riot Games

Want to sleeve this up before next weekend’s RCQ? Swing by Mana Riot Games — we’ve got singles in stock from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Edge of Eternities, Final Fantasy, and Foundations. We can also build a tournament-legal version for you on the spot, or order any pieces you’re missing. Visit us in store or check out our latest restocks on manariotgames.com.

See you at the tables. — Shella & Michael, Mana Riot Games