2001)

With the up and coming Peasant Format tournament planned for GenCon, I thought it was a great time to write up one of my favorite commons decks. If you are unfamiliar with Peasant format, it is basically a full commons only deck, with the exception that it allows 5 uncommon cards to be in your deck.

Every color has a few strong common cards to be exploited. These are usually great starting places when building a deck for commons or peasant format tournaments. I have chosen green and the obvious choices for inclusion are: giant growth, rancor and llanowar elves. Many stompy decks have been built with green commons and they are very strong. The idea for this deck is to take a mana acceleration approach, which is green's other big strength.

The deck started out as an Elf deck that used Coat of Arms as the kill card. This is a very powerful finisher, but one that can not be duplicated in commons format. The big question then is, ´´Why Elves?´´ The simple answer is that they are amazing for accelerating mana and the more detailed answer is ´´Priests of Titania´´ and ´´Llanowar Sentinel´´. These cards alone are so good that they make you want to run a bunch of elves in your deck. Below is the deck list and I will go into detail about why each card was chosen and how to play the deck.

Peasant Format Elf Deck:

4:Llanowar Elves - 1cc
4:Fyndhorn Elves - 1cc
4:Priests of Titania - 2cc

4:Wood Elves - 3cc
4:Llanowar Sentinel - 3cc

4:River Boa - 2cc
1:Taunting Elf - 1cc
1:Treetop Rangers - 3cc

4:Rancor - 1cc
4:Invigorate - 3cc/0
4:Giant Growth - 1cc

Uncommon Block
3:Overrun - 5cc
1:Hurricane - GX
1:Sylvan Messenger - 4cc

4:Land Grant - 2cc/0
13:Forest

The deck starts out with 4 Llanowar and 4 Fyndhorn elves. Each of these elves have the ability to TAP and add one green mana to your pool. These both are great turn one plays to excellerate your mana. Next we have the awesome Priests of Titania. This card costs 1G and lets you tap it to add one green mana for each Elf in play. Since almost all of your creatures are elves, this can lead to some serious mana acceleration.

The next creature block contains the card Wood Elves. This card costs 2G for a 1/1 weenie, but it also brings a forest from your deck directly into play. This is great for thinning your deck further and also lets you cast another 1cc spell this turn. Next is the Llanowar Sentinel, which is the other MVP of the deck after Priests of Titania. It is a 2/3 for 2G that has the ability: pay an additional 1G to fetch another Llanowar Sentinel directly into play from your deck. I don't have to tell you how good this is!!! With the Priest you can usually get huge amounts of mana and bring all three of this elf's brothers into play at the same time giving you four 2/3 creatures and some serious deck thining.

The final creature block contains four River Boas (common in Visions) which are just too good to pass up. They are cheap with a 1G casting cost, have regeneration for one green and built in Island walk. This block also has one Taunting Elf for a massive combat trick and one Treetop Rangers in case you run into some brick walls you cannot get past. The Taunting Elf says that any creature able to block it must. You can then pump him to kill off all your opponents creatures (poor man's creature control) or pump your other creatures that get through while your opponents blockers are busy. The Treetop Rangers reads that it can only be blocked by flyers. Also, included later is our first uncommon, Sylvan Messenger. This is a new Apocalypse card that lets you look at the top 4 cards of your library and put into your hand any elves, and put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your library. This card also gives you a 2/2 creature with trample for 3G. With the huge amounts of mana available to you, you want to have ways to fill your hand because it is easy to cast everything.

The next block of cards is the pumping block. It has four rancor (+2/+0 and trample), four Giant Growth (target creature gets +3/+3) and finally four Invigorate (target creature gets +4/+4 for 2G). Most people understand how to play the rancors. They should be used to give your non-mana producing creatures a +2 on power and some trample beats. The giant growth should not always be used for offense though. This deck's biggest enemy is red... It is so easy to burn off all of your 1/1 creatures, so you should keep giant growths around to save your Priests of Titania and other mana producers for a turn or two. This deck thrives when it gets 3-5 elves out, but just plain sucks when it has one. The spell, Invigorate, can be alternately cast for free by having your opponent gain 3 life. Sometimes if you are tapped out and you need to save an elf from a lightning bolt, or want to do a combat trick to kill your opponents creature with your 1/1 elf, this card will come to your rescue.

The uncommon block has 3 Overrun and 1 Hurricane. The Hurricane is for minor flyer control and also as a finishing card for you. This deck sometimes has a chance to deal 8-12 damage in the first 3-4 turns using giant growths and attacking like crazy. If you are in this position and still have the mana around, you can use Hurricane as a finisher. If you don't, the big finisher of the deck is Overrun. It costs 3GG and gives ALL of your creatures +3/+3 and trample until end of turn (as a sorcery). Now all your 1/1 elves just got huge. If you are playing a counterspell deck, they will probably counter this, but it doesn't matter because you can beat them to a pulp really slowly with all your 1 cc stuff like Llanowar Elves and giant growth. It is very hard for a counterspell deck to counter everything in a deck like this because there is no obvious targets - everything is pretty much as good as everything else and because the mana curve is so low.

Finally we have only 13 lands and four Land Grants (which you can feel free to cast for free). You don't really care if your opponent sees your hand in this kind of deck... you just start accelerating mana and attacking whenever you can and the rest of the game takes care of itself. Land Grant is another great way to thin your deck and you will find that 13 land is plenty and you should be drawing good stuff almost all of the time based on the extensive thining used in this deck.

A sample ideal draw might look like this:
turn 1: forest, llanowar elf -
turn 2: forest, Priests of Titania, Llanowar Elf -
Turn 3: forest, Llanowar Sentinal, tap priest for 4 mana and both elves for 6 and get all three brothers -
turn 4: forest, tap elf and 4 forests for Overrun and attack with 5 creatures for a total of 24 damage (all trample-able).

Not a bad turn 4 kill.

I hope you enjoyed the amazing mana acceleration and thining techniques used in this deck. There are many other elves that could have been used in this deck (like the Skyshroud Sentinel or Quirion Sentinel), but there were plenty of elves already and the River Boa is just too strong to ignore. Blastoderm can be substituted in place of River Boa fairly easily, but it cannot be targeted by most of your pumping spells. Overrun will still work though and an 8/8 non targetable trampler is nothing to be ashamed of.

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