With the recent Organized Play announcement and the Pioneer Showcase Qualifier this weekend, Pioneer is a format that’s been getting a lot of attention. Lotus Field Combo is, in my opinion, quite easily the best deck in this format. The channel lands from Neon Dynasty made the deck incredibly resilient to the hate that shut it down earlier, and in the wake of that improvement, several pilots of the deck have made considerable innovations over the last few weeks that have put the deck leagues ahead of where it used to be. While I don’t know who is responsible for specific innovations to the deck, the list I share below is my variation on a list by Cain, and my understanding of the archetype and resulting decisions, not to mention several innovations played across current lists, are thanks to Lydia. 

I’m fairly confident with my list in its current form, but would not be surprised if the archetype saw further evolution over the next few weeks, so this isn’t going to be a stock deck tech with a sideboard guide. Instead, the purpose of this article is to cover the intricacies of play with Lotus Field Combo, as the deck has a lot of complicated lines and several counterintuitive heuristics. 

If you’re not familiar with Lotus Field Combo, the game plan for the deck can be summed up as follows:

• Find and play a copy of Lotus Field.
• Copy that Lotus Field with a Thespian’s Stage.
• Use Hidden Strings, Pore Over the Pages and Vizier of Tumbling Sands to generate extra mana with the two Lotus Fields you have.
• Through some combination of Emergent Ultimatums and tutors, put an Omniscience into play
• Cast a Wish effect to get Approach of the Second Sun from your sideboard and cast it.
• Cast a tutor to find Approach, cast it again and win the game.

This may seem like a convoluted game plan, but in reality it’s quite reliable, since the deck has a lot of powerful top-end that is interchangeable once you have the mana. In Game 1 in particular, the only thing that really matters is making sure you get a timely Lotus Field and Stage (which you have tutors and a lot of card selection for), and then comboing is fairly simple.