Deckbuilding Contest Finalists - August 2025

Fact or Fiction | Art by Matt Cavotta

It's time to announce the finalists for this month's Archidekt Deckbuilding Contest!

In case you missed the announcement post, this is a monthly contest with a different theme each month. Your goal is to build a Commander-legal deck that fulfills the prompt in a creative or unique fashion. At the end of each month, three finalists will be selected for you to vote on. Whoever gets the most votes will be crowned the winner, although all three finalists receive a prize.

As a reminder, this month's prompt was to brew a Commander-legal deck with more than 50 lands or fewer than 30, counting modal double face cards.

We collected submissions from the Archidekt newspost and evaluated them based on their creativity, and how important the land count was to the strategy of the deck.

Now, it's your turn to decide who will be crowned the winner.

Read about each deck list below, then visit your favorite and upvote them on Archidekt. Whoever has the most upvotes by Wednesday, August 27, 2025 will be the winner, and receive $250 credit to cardsphere.com.

Second and third place will receive $150 and $100 cardsphere.com credits, respectively.

Finally, here are the three finalists chosen for this month's contest, presented in no particular order. Follow the link in each deck list to vote on your favorite!

Lantlaza by YoseiMorningStar

Most Pantlaza, Sun-Favored decks are packed full of Dinos to chain big creatures together and overwhelm their opponents. YoseiMorningStar has gone with a different approach, packing their deck with a whopping 78 lands instead.

The reason to play so many lands is to make it as likely as possible that Pantlaza, Sun-Favored discovers Astral Drift, Astral Slide, or a tutor to find them. Then you can use one of the 15 cycling lands to flicker Pantlaza and hope to hit Life from the Loam. This is the core engine of the deck, allowing you to re-trigger Pantlaza, exile any creatures attacking you, and continually dredge lands into the graveyard.

Once the engine is established, you're hoping to discover one of three cards that let you trade Pantlaza, Sun-Favored for a more impactful creature. Eldritch Evolution, Natural Order, and Reality Scramble all play a little differently, but the plan is essentially the same, trade Pantlaza for a more powerful creature.

Famished Worldsire and Lumra, Bellow of the Woods are both huge creatures that help you churn through your deck to find your best lands. Maze of Ith and Talon Gates of Madara help control the board, while Scavenger Grounds keeps graveyard decks in check.

Torsten, Founder of Benalia is a great way to refill your hand, and combos extremely well with Seismic Assault and Borborygmos Enraged. It also works nicely with Exploration and Manabond, if the lands you draw need to be in play instead.

Mirrorpool is also extremely powerful, copying Cultivator Colossus for another huge beater, or Torsten, Founder of Benalia to refill your hand and flood the board with chump blockers.

If, for some reason, Borborygmos Enraged and Famished Worldsire aren't enough to finish off your opponents, the deck can also turn to Inkmoth Nexus or Lair of the Hydra and Kessig Wolf Run. Thanks to Burgeoning, Exploration, and Manabond, this deck has no trouble getting plenty of lands into play, even without Lumra or Cultivator Colossus.

Getting Inkmoth Nexus up to ten power should pose no challenge at all.

Living End - High CMC Control by HydoMTG

But why play so many lands when you don't have to? In fact, HydoMTG thinks it's better to play as few lands as possible in order to weaponize the top of their library.

One of the key pieces of this deck is Living End, which means there are no cards with mana value less than five in this deck. Instead, HydoMTG relies on cards with cycling, channel, and evoke costs to dig through their deck in the early game and ensure they're still able to play a land every turn.

Then they cast The First Sliver to cascade into Living End and return all the big creatures they discarded to play. This is a powerful strategy, but much more fragile in Commander than other formats. Board wipes are prevalent, and synergistic decks can often outmuscle individually large creatures.

The real reason this deck wants to play so few lands, and as many high mana value cards as possible, is to take advantage of cards that want you to have big mana values on top of your deck. Not only is the average mana value of this deck 6.5, it also includes a ton of cards that pull lands out of the deck in the first turns of the game.

That means Sorin, Grim Nemesis and Baneful Omen are much more likely to hit your opponents for six or seven damage a turn. Triple Triad becomes a nearly guaranteed four free cards a turn. Combined with a healthy amount of recursion spells to help you recover from a board wipe, these spells are what keeps the deck alive through the mid and late game.

What really pushes this deck into overdrive, though, is Timesifter. What is usually an unpredictable bringer of chaos is a nearly assured way for this deck to take several turns in a row. Most commander decks have an average mana value of three or four, meaning this deck is very likely to win the Timesifter lottery.

And each extra turn is more damage from Sorin, Grim Nemesis and Baneful Omen, and another chance for you to attack with your biggest creatures.

 Super Doomsday! by TheTalonGates

Abundance is a powerful card, ensuring you never draw a land when you don't want to. But what if you didn't have any lands in your deck?

TheTalonGates crafted this deck around the effects of Abundance and Recross the Paths, which both let you reveal cards from your library until you reveal a land, put it into your hand, and place the other revealed cards on the bottom of your deck in any order. With no lands in the deck, however, this essentially mimics the effect of Doomsday, except you get your whole deck instead of just five cards.

Like all Doomsday decks, this one is looking for a combo. In this case, you need Aluren and Augur of Autumn (or any card to cast creatures from your library). Underneath that you can stack the other 59 creatures in the deck to play for free thanks to Aluren, and win the game by sacrificing them all.

Henry Wu, InGen Geneticist is a key piece of this combo, since you need a way to draw a card once you successfully stack your deck. Henry Wu is a convenient way to do that, and turns all your Human creatures into sacrifice outlets to fuel the aristocrats game plan.

Getting the occasional draw during your combo turn also lets you mix in some noncreature cards. Revitalizing Repast and Jwari Disruption can help protect key cards, while Sink into Stupor and Hagra Mauling can get rid of troublesome creatures, although this combo is extremely resilient. It can play around removal by simply continuing to cast creatures at instant speed, thanks to Aluren.

While this deck includes several tutors to find Abundance, it can also function without the combo. Henry Wu, InGen Geneticist is a solid draw engine, and the occasional Treasure token helps offset the low "land" count that results from relying on MDFCs.

And there you have it, the three finalists for the August 2025 Archidekt Deckbuilding Contest.

Which is your favorite? Be sure to follow the links in the headers of each section to visit the deck pages and upvote the one you think should win!

The final rankings based on your votes will be announced on Wednesday, August 27th, 2025.