Strategy

The goal of a Ponza deck, in Magic, is to execute a midrange plan patterned on the sequential goals of ramp, resource disruption, and threats. Extremely comprehensive consideration of a Modern Ponza deck can be found here, in case the history is of interest. Our plan here is fundamentally the same. Plan A is to turbo out some very early site destruction to keep the opponent struggling for threshold and mana while we amass sufficient threshold and mana of our own to deploy a threat. Plan B is to ramp sites so aggressively as to box the opponent in, destroying their sites in order to flip ours onto the rubble with Geomancer. Plan B requires very risky Avatar positioning. Try to do the thing fast if you can instead, but know that a long game is playable and extremely winnable if you're careful. Avoid Trading Two For One Whenever Possible. That's generally true to begin with, but here our minions (especially our Threats) are precious. There are not many of them. I will break down the cards in the deck according to these categories in the following section.

Strengths

Attack on an axis most decks aren't prepared to defend!
Holds up fairly comfortably against other midrange decks or control decks looking to play a longer game!
[[Geomancer]] provides significant early-game spellbook access!
Rubble becomes a high-value resource!
Earth has a surprising number of ways to move sites around, so it's often possible to simply change the location of an opposing defensive site (or move one of ours into a usable position from an unlucky [[Geomancer]] flip if there isn't a way to destroy it.

Weaknesses

Lots of aggro decks people run right now are very low to the ground and it is almost trivial to get underneath this one.
A three phase plan requires drawing the right kinds of cards in the right order, and sometimes you just draw ramp in the late game or won't find a threat in time.
There is no hope for keeping a one-element deck off of threshold, so mono fire or mono water will laugh at your attempts to disrupt them. Mono earth ramp is troublesome for the same reason plus you can't realistically keep their mana disrupted.
[[Order of the Sacred Oak]]
Ward on sites is very hard to manage if you can't slip in an attack to break the ward. Be very cautious with a list like this if warding sites becomes common practice in your local metagame.

Card Packages

Ramp

Sites that offer extra value

[[Imperial Road]] (notably EXPLOSIVE against [[Pathfinder]] or an [[Imposter]] wearing one).
[[Mirage]] lets you reposition a site, replay for a Genesis ability, or even save a valuable one in hand to get ready for a [[Roots of Yggdrasil]]!
[[Rift Valley]] can be huge for scooting a [[Sinkhole]] that little bit closer, getting a rubble from nearby to adjacent, moving one of our minions into range for an attack, moving an enemy minion out of range to defend, getting a defensive site out of the way...

Just Play An Extra Site, LMAO

[[Sow the Earth]] doubles the mana and threshold from a site on TOP of just letting us flip one from the atlas onto a void square.
[[Clay Golem]] needs to die to do it but it's a flip off the atlas anywhere it dies as long as there's a void or rubble handy.
[[Landmass]] drawing a site means it's usable even without one in hand to choose from.
[[Frontier Settlers]] let you gamble exactly like your Avatar.
[[Star-seeds of Uhr]] honestly isn't particularly good but for one mana and one threshold on one card it's possible to seriously damage a voidwalk plan out of nowhere while still providing a lot of options for [[Geomancer]] flips. It's a little magic christmas landy but if you can Star-seeds with a [[Baba Yaga's Hut]] under your avatar you can just scooch yourself all around your back row and flip sites instead of drawing them for several turns.
[[Conqueror Worm]] by the time you're deploying these you probably don't need the extra mana, but you DO get some.

Drawing Isn't Ramp But It's Relevant

[[Kettletop Leprechaun]] is awesome for keeping a site in hand, letting your Avatar keep up the pressure by continuously drawing from your spellbook. Be cautious of keeping [[Lady Iseult]] nearby, though, because her replacement effect prevents the deathrite ability from triggering.
[[Land Surveyor]] does all that, draws you the site immediately, and isn't turned off by [[Lady Iseult]]. Only one power, though.
[[Tithe]] draws three sites. The three threshold is a lot, but

Disruption

Removes at least one site next turn if left unanswered

[[Castle's Ablaze!]] almost certainly blows up something very good.
[[Hamlet's Ablaze!]] is occasionally dead if your opponent runs a very expensive atlas or only draws the elite/unique half of it. Very good against the threshold-fixing double-affinity sites.
[[Year of the Blaze]] takes up to four sites with it and everything on them. Minions, artifacts, auras, the whole deal. Easily clears the path to a flawless victory. Four threshold is a lot, but by the "spend seven mana" turns it's either achievable or getting cast off a Mix.
[[Asmodeus]] is real hard to answer with the Stealth.
[[Lord of Destruction]] does a ton of damage while destroying a site.
[[Conqueror Worm]] is often beefy enough to clear a site of whatever minion is defending it and claim it on its own.

Removes at least one site this turn

[[Salt the Earth]] is awesome. Being able to both immediately remove a site and prevent its replacement is brutally punishing.
[[Raze]] also removing artifacts is outstanding value for four mana. Needing to maneuver a unit into position to do it isn't necessarily trivial, but it doesn't target them so you can move a burrowed [[Root Spider]] in and raze from below, which is cute.
[[Sinkhole]] is great. Being able to destroy a site diagonally is good, making two rubbles in a turn is good, and popping it when your geomancer is adjacent can break you even while costing your opponent a site without skipping a spell draw.
[[Craterize]] may cost a site from hand and will probably kill a bunch of our own guys but sometimes you gotta drop the orbital nuke.

Increases mana costs

[[Maddening Bells]] is exceptional as a follow-up to a [[Hamlet's Ablaze!]] going off to delay recovery even longer.

Resets Everything

[[Roots of Yggdrasil]] (with the sheer volume of ways to destroy a site in the deck, having a reset button available is very nice).

Generalized Removal

[[Root Spider]] is maybe the best in the game at what it does, and what it does is "force aggro to answer it or take a turn or three off".
[[Hillock Basilisk]] can turn off a path into our span of land early, and a disabled enemy can't strike back.
[[Pudge Butcher]] is a menace. Also, critically, can be used to move your own units, including your [[Geomancer]] to get adjacent to a rubble.
[[Asmodeus]] blows up everything on a site.
[[Balor of the Evil Eye]] does a bunch of damage, and is 6 mana for 6 power.
[[Infiltrate]] is stupid good. Game-ending good.
[[Earthquake]] might not deal with things on water sites, but it can open a path and very effectively remove threats that make it onto our territory. Considering that our game plan involves aggressively expanding our territory toward our opponent, we will usually find it threatened sooner or later.

Threats

Ways To Get Someone To Door

[[Boudicca]] turns even your [[Frontier Settlers]] into serious problems.
[[Gargantula]] is four mana for four power, so we can get it pretty quick and disabling an enemy minion on the way in can complicate an aggro plan.
[[Lord of Destruction]]
[[Rhitta Gawr of Snowdonia]] is six mana, six power, and brutally hoses enemy minion plans. Also hoses our minion plans. Deploy with care.
[[Conqueror Worm]]

Ways To Kill Someone On Door

Have minions nearby and enough removal to seal the deal. It's not flashy, it's not exciting, but it does the job.
[[Pudge Butcher]]
[[Craterize]]
[[Asmodeus]]
[[Balor of the Evil Eye]]

Other Utility

Site Movement

[[Mover Of Mountains]] as mentioned in the strengths of the deck, being able to scoot a defensive site out of the way and something of ours into an advantageous position can be massive.
[[Rift Valley]]
[[Earthquake]]

The Rest of the Deck

Spellbook

[[Lady Iseult]] is nice to have because we are heavily reliant on very expensive threats. She enables the reuse of [[Frontier Settlers]], gets a [[Root Spider]] back to force a deck to find yet another way to get rid of it again, and so on. She's great when you find her. Even if she's removed the next turn, it's often possible for the two mana she cost to let you reuse at least two minions. She turns off [[Kettletop Leprechaun]] and [[Clay Golem]] though so keep an eye out.
[[Toolbox]] does everything. It's too good.

Atlas

[[Active Volcano]] lets us breathe a little easier about some of the greedy triple-threshold fire spells (and [[Year of the Blaze]])we're running.
[[Endless Fence]] isn't relevant in anything like every game, but it can buy a surprising amount of time in games where it turns out to matter. Easy slot-in as a unique.
[[Fertile Earth]] probably isn't actually necessary, but three Active Volcanoes means I get queasy if I break the symmetry. You can probably run something better.
[[Gnome Hollows]] is one of the best defensive sites in the game. We can't move a bunch (most? any? depends on how you count them) of our own threats through it but it pretty reliably buys time.
[[Great Wall]] is a one-way road block.
[[Kor Crematory]] punishes cemetery decks extremely effectively.
[[Steppe]] dual-threshold site. Not interesting but reliably good.

The Collection:

I don't like auto-includes. I think that the game is made worse for [[Toolbox]] leveraging the collection as a pool so versatile that any almost deck is made strictly better for swapping out a copy of a few four-of ordinaries subtracts from the space of interesting choices to make when building a deck, but I also understand that a best-of-one game means you have to have answers available without being able to sideboard. I earnestly hope that more effects like [[Legion of Gall]] and [[Bureau of Occult Control]] see print. That said, I swapped out some four-of ordinaries to make room because I have a tournament I'm taking this deck to.

[[Carrion Beetles]] banish three cemetery cards for one mana and make a blocker.
[[Dispel]] classic [[Toolbox]] card. Staple in the genre for a reason.
[[Unravel]] because I have a foil copy and maybe a [[Necromancer]] gets sloppy or something. Extra artifact hate handy won't likely hurt.
[[Vile Imp]] can kill someone on door or mess with an attacker's plan by blowing up a small guy and leaving a blocker.
[[Rescue]] is kind of like an extra slightly different [[Toolbox]]. Might be excellent, might not matter. Which makes it perfect for the collection.
[[Hamlet's Ablaze!]] is a fantastic collection card and it was weird to run 4 in the mainboard to begin with. Still kind of weird to run three but the point of the deck is denying mana.
[[Heat Ray]] is here as a door finisher.
[[Boil]] is here because water is extremely common and can produce some nasty boys in a hurry.
[[Smite]] is both a door finisher and banishes Evil if we need something gone.
[[Angry Mob]] very efficiently handles many massive threats.

Mulligans

The main plan has three phases. Ramp, then Disruption, then Threats. You absolutely need disruption in your opening hand. Ramp is nice to have, but not having it isn't necessarily a deal breaker as long as you can start blowing up sites by turn four at the latest. If you can't destroy a site, answering minions with a [[Hillock Basilisk]] ahead of schedule is almost as good. You don't need or generally want a threat in your opener, but if all you've got is [[Maddening Bells]] [[Conqueror Worm]] and [[Craterize]] you probably want to ship everything but the [[Conqueror Worm]] and roll the dice on getting a good site. The early game plan should be to use [[Geomancer]]'s flip ability to as much effect as possible. Keep earth sites, even ones that aren't immediately helpful, so that you can be making and using rubble without skipping spellbook draws.

Changes

2026-06-17: cut artifact mana ([[Ruby Core]], [[Key to the City]], [[Onyx Core]], [[Philosopher's Stone]]) [[Maze Minotaur]] and [[Sinterfee]] to reintroduce [[Toolbox]], add [[Land Surveyor]]s as extra copies of [[Kettletop Leprechaun]], swap in [[Gargantula]], and try [[Clay Golem]] for the local cornerstone. This may make the list too slow. Cores and key could come back in instead of some top-end or threshold-hungry threats. Still want to sneak in the second [[Craterize]] and [[Saint of Redemption]]. With the toolboxes, it's tempting to add Mixes back with [[Scavenging Fiend]]s to greedily reuse that stuff.
2026-04-27: cut [[Mix Ignis]], [[Four Waters of Paradise]], [[Hellstar]], [[Bodach Bogeyman]], [[Ancient Dragon]] for [[Tithe]], [[Maze Minotaur]], [[Hillock Basilisk]], and [[Rhitta Gawr of Snowdonia]]. I've never loved the Mixes even if a turn one [[Salt the Earth]] is bonkers because I largely prefer ramp that provides ongoing value rather than a one-time benefit. This also swaps some top-end threats for things more accessible in the mid-game to try to prevent aggro from getting in under us too fast. Updated this primer to reflect prior changes (oops lol).
2026-04-22: [[Locusts of Illyria]] out for [[Balor of the Evil Eye]]- better capacity to end games, one less threshold, much more immediacy in the threat presented.
2026-04-20 (nice): add Maybeboard cards to reflect some ideas for updates to address the weakness to fast aggro decks like fire [[Pathfinder]]. Lower cost and lower power threats that are themselves disruptive to minion plans could prove very valuble. Look out, [[Bodach Bogeyman]] and [[Ancient Dragon]] and [[Hellstar]], you're on thin ice.
Revision 2026-04-18:
cut the [[Toolbox]]es and [[Silver Bullet]]s back out because I am a woman of principle.
Filled the collection with avatars so I can run [[Imposter]] with [[Geomancer]] in Alliance games to plan around putting on a [[Pathfinder]] mask instead of building a [[Pathfinder]] atlas.
Still had a bunch of the cards to build a [[Pathfinder]] atlas that seem worth running; added [[Mirror Realm]], [[Fields of Camlann]], [[Mount Ussar Sanctuary]],[[Pillar of Zeiros]], [[Smokestacks of Gnaak]], and [[Vesuvius]].
Swapped [[Mix Terra]] for [[Sow the Earth]] and [[Key to the City]]. I'm confident Sow is worth it. Less sure about the key.
[[Golgor]] out for [[Hellstar]] and [[Bodach Bogeyman]] to increase range and scale of the removal they represent.
[[Baba Yaga's Hut]] out for [[Great Wall]]
Revision 2026-04-10: gave up on this not being a [[Toolbox]] deck. Swapped in [[Silver Bullet]]s. Cut [[Mordric Druids]] because they were here to take advantage of a [[Pact with the Devil]] the deck no longer runs. Trade in [[Kor Crematory]] over a second [[Cornerstone]].
Major Revision 2026-04-02: decided to start this log noting significant shifts in either this primer document or in the deck. Caught primer up to earlier swap from [[Harbinger]] to [[Geomancer]] and the associated change from Air/Fire to Earth/Fire.

Updates Under Consideration

[[Baba Yaga's Hut]] can, notably, swap with an enemy-controlled site in your back row or with a rubble if one should find itself there.
[[Bureau of Occult Control]] is tempting considering how much I dislike [[Toolbox]] effects.
[[Old Mortimer's Den]] hasn't really impressed me the couple of times I tried it out but it disrupts threats and makes rubbles.
[[Key to the City]] is effectively free the turn it comes down and can be massively useful for slipping something oversized into a [[Gnome Hollows]] or whatever.
[[Ruby Core]] and [[Onyx Core]] are effectively free and providing affinity early can smooth out a lot of the greedier threshold requirements in the deck.
[[Philosopher's Stone]] lets you cheat mana costs a little up to twice a turn. Real solid.
[[De Vermiis Misteriis]] lets you ignore threshold on minion casts. 5 mana is probably affordable for a no-threshold [[Boudicca]] in a pinch.
[[Wiccan Tools]] lets you ignore threshold on spells cast this turn and draws to replace itself for 2 mana.
[[Awakened Mummies]] is very cheap to deploy and can substantially slow an early attack.
[[Mix Ignis]] offers symmetry with [[Mix Terra]] and lets you cheat out high-threshold but backbreaking stuff like [[Year of the Blaze]] way ahead of schedule.
[[Mix Terra]] appeals both for the symmetry against [[Mix Ignis]] and being able to cheat out high-threshold stuff like [[Sow the Earth]].
[[Peace Offering]] buys a turn if it lives after playing it.
[[Tithe]] seems worth thinking about if [[Star-Seeds of Uhr]] is good enough to run.
[[Saint of Redemption]] has weird impacts on some removal and card draw spells, but making minions enter the realm tapped turns off charge and makes it harder to defend against our strong minions who don't have charge anyway.
[[Cerberus in Chains]] is a solid undercosted blocker if we can't sit in a [[Gnome Hollows]].
[[Clamor of Harpies]] is pretty versatile- being able to teleport a [[Sinterfee]] somewhere safe (or somewhere it can block) and remove popular aggressive early game minions like [[Wild Fanatic]] or [[Vile Imp]] and then be an airborne blocker is solid.
[[Maze Minotaur]] is 4 mana for 4 power, restricts enemy minion movement, and only requires one fire affinity. Solid disruptive threat.
[[Royal Bodyguard]] is 4 mana for 4 power again, but the text on the ability mostly matters for dodging a death blow instead of preventing mid-game damage.
[[Stone-gaze Gorgons]] does [[Hillock Basilisk]] stuff but also sideways, at the cost of two more mana and one more affinity.
[[Bodach Bogeyman]] picking up from five squares at once every turn is bonkers, but without air to scooch em around it's not as incredible as it could be. Giving him voidwalk lets you step into the void and banish everything he's carrying which is buck wild. We don't have a way to do that here.
[[Locusts of Illyria]] offers significant end-game inevitability and massively available airborne blockers.
[[Ancient Dragon]] is splashy and cool and it's a dragon and it does damage diagonally without needing to attack. Classic top-end threat.
[[Golgor]] never disappointed me but I'm optimistic that the minions I slotted in are upgrades. Ready to swap back if I don't like how that shakes out.
[[Hellstar]] is a pet card but it's cool and big and scary.
[[Craterize]] destroys a site and can finish someone on door. Could be worth a second copy.
[[Peasant Revolt]] can destroy a bunch of sites and handle nasty threats at the same time. Hurts a lot of our atlas. Less bad for our spellbook.

Ponza!

@Anathema