Man, I planned this badly. I didn’t realize that:
1. This article would go up the day before my birthday, and that
2. This Saturday, Future Sight went live.
I’m doing what I can to not type while livid, and I will be trying to approach the subjects that are, as we speak, brewing, so I can be doing so in a fair and balanced fashion.
God, what a mess.
Anyway – we have a lot of ground to cover, and I’m actually trying to be as brief as I can be this week. Right now, I’m looking at it in the unedited form, at seven pages, and realize that, just maybe, brief isn’t happening. I’ll talk about Future Sight next week, and then fatties (and Green fatties specifically) the week after that, I promise. But I have to finish this up, and I can take you along with me along the way to the final point, and you can play the forum game of “give it a better name than I did.”
First, the final five recorded games:
Game 1
My opponent gets a pretty solid curve of drops; a Llanowar Elf, Selesnya Guildmage, and a Loxodon Hierarch. I answer with a decent-ish curve of my own; a Search for Tomorrow, a Thallid Shell-Dweller, and then – when his Hierarch, Guildmage and Llanowar Elf go red-zone – I Scatter the Seeds all over his combat step.
That, uh, sounded wrong. Let’s just move on.
Anyway, he Temporally Isolates my 0/5, bashes with his 4/4, until I get another 0/5. And another 0/5. And another 0/5. Lurking behind this wall of beatdown-halting goodies, I waited for my opponent to run out of cards; he was casting Momentary Blink on his Coiled Oracle in an attempt to draw some more cards, and find something – but he hit a lot of land. Though the Oracle did reveal another Temporal Isolation – which I baited out by sticking Griffin Guide on my Deathspore Thallid. He did so, which freed up my mana to let me slap down a Teneb, and go to town on him. Thanks to the torrent of Saprolings coming out, my Deathspore Thallids were able to munch away a Loxodon Hierarch (even with a Plaxmanta involved), then another Hierarch, Teneb recruiting them to Work For Me. I ended this game on 39 life, thanks to Essence Warden and all my Saprolings.
Oh, I like this.
Game 2
A slow opening – four lands, a Deathspore Thallid, a Griffin Guide, and a Search. I’m really liking Search, actually. I miss on my turn 2, which is pretty remarkable given the number of two-drops I’m running. My opponent strongly represents Remand. I try and throw a Selesnya Guildmage into it… and he has the Remand, letting a Deathspore Thallid sneak out instead. I don’t know how valuable it’ll be in this matchup, though. He makes a morph.
Oh, this had better be worth it.
I Griffin Guide up my Thallid, and try to race. The Guide seems really odd and out of place in this deck – I rarely get anything impressive out of it when it resolves. My opponent suspends a Rift Bolt (which means my Thallid gets in for six, then gives me a 2/2 griffin)… but I get a Selesnya Guildmage out next turn, with the mana up to protect the Thallid. He Rifts my face instead of my Guildmage or Thallid – odd. He makes another morph. The Thallid, who has gotten in for nine at this point, makes Saprolings to kill the first morph. It turns out to be a Fathom Seer – limiting him to four mana on his next turn – and I’m left with a reasonable ground force, two in hand, and land… versus his four mana and eleven in the grip.
Scary stuff.
He suspends another Rift Bolt. Makes a Trade Routes. He flips up a second seer, in combat, after I shrink it down to a 1/2 (of sorts) and he’s left with a twelve-card hand… and very little life versus my solid threat base. He Rift Bolts my face.
Then he casts Lightning Storm.
Huh.
Fifteen to the face, just like that. That’s pretty impressive.
Ah well. Wish I’d cast that Spike Feeder I’d been sandbagging. Silly me.
Oh well! Game 3 time.
Game 3
I get a turn 2 Selesnya Guildmage and a turn 3 Sporesower Thallid. He casts Think Twice instead of Remand… and then has to go. Oh well.
He claims he’s flooded, so I win. I’m wondering whether to put this one up as a win or not. He reveals a hand of four lands, Momentary Blinks, and a Sunlance. I wonder.
I mean, I think I’d chalk that one up as a win. If my opponent’s hand sucks, then I will probably win. How many of my wins up to this point have been off bad draws? And is that all that important?
I dunno. I don’t need the game to give me an idea of what changes I’ll be making.
Game 4
Magus of the Scroll is better than Terramorphic Expanse. My opponent’s second turn play is a Boros Swiftblade, too. Curses. I figure I’ll be losing this one – fast aggression beats mana-heavy hands almost every time.
I keep from dropping a Deathspore Thallid in order to avoid it dying too quickly, and instead block with my face. He unloads a bit more burn at me, and I’m left hoping I can get out of this one intact at all.
I plop down a Guildmage plus Thallid combo, hoping to at least draw burn away from my face, and by now his Magus of the Scroll is online… and I’m basically dead. Oh well.
Hmm. I think I want more ways to find my one-ofs. Mycologist would be great if I could have… okay, no, I’d still be dead. Slow hands are just slow hands.
Game 5
I suspend a first-turn Search. I get a second-turn Deathspore. I get a third-turn Sporesower. This might actually kick ass. On the Sporesower turn, my opponent taps out to Compulsive Research himself (I suspect he’s low on gas?). He puts out Mangara, I kill it with a Saproling. He Momentary Blinks a morph mid-combat, and my Sporesower Thallid is suddenly duking it out with Akroma Red. Baaah.
He Draining Whelks a Jedit, and I completely forget that I can ruin the 7/7 flier. Pox.
I think I’ve just had a long day. I’m playing rather mediocre Magic, and I want to rush to the next round of changes. Worse, I think there’s a chance I might actually just win anyway. I hate situations like that – I hate winning games where I win despite myself, rather than because of myself. My opponent tries to hold the ground with a Draining Whelk, a Red Akroma, and then adds a Stonecloaker so he can bounce my land (representing a Holy Day, I suppose), then serve for 16… when I kill the Stonecloaker with the Deathspore Thallid that’s been waiting for its day in the sun.
My opponent sees the table, notes that he missed that… and concedes. Shame – his deck looked pretty cool, and he deserved the win.
3-1-1
Now, this has crystallized what I’m doing with the deck.
Jay, when he did this, seemed to use it as a way to explore the new format that was unfolding before him. This approach is not one you can take up when you’ve basically bathed in the Standard format in the past year and already spent your time looking for decks. This means that I kept seeing holes in the deck that I wanted to fill up with cards I already knew. I kept seeing the holes in the deck, and how I wanted to plug them.
So, donning my cabin-boy pants, I decided it was time to plug those holes, even if I had to use my fingers for it.
Out: -2 Greenseeker
In: +2 Essence Warden
I’ve been activating Greenseeker less and less as my manabase has coagulated into a more solid state. Essence Warden’s really good for this deck, being the second best one-drop I can be playing for a deck that spits out a lot of Saprolings. In the games I’ve played since making this change, I’m routinely ending games on high life totals, even dipping down into sub-five stats only to spiral up and out of control once I clamp down. There was one game where I lead with a threesome of Essence Wardens, and my turn 3 play was a Scatter the Seeds. Not bad, that.
Out: -1 Spike Feeder, -1 Griffin Guide, -1 Sunlance
In: +3 Chord of Calling
Not one of these cards impressed me. Spike Feeder was in a position to make a difference once. Maybe I’ll slot one in my Green/Black Rock deck, sometime later, but for now, it’s just a 2/2 who dies to gain me four life. I’d rather spend two mana for a sliver who gains me three life, but anyway.
Chord of Calling is All That. I’m really going to miss it when it cycles out of Standard, since I don’t think I’ve enjoyed playing with a card nearly so much since I first got it. Since so far, in this deck, I’ve stepped down, or across for rarity, so I think I’m allowed this one cheap rare. The Chord lets me go for my one-ofs, and gives me another opportunity to draw the singleton game-closers like Jedit and Teneb.
Man, this is going to read like a love affair for cards like this. I’ve been playing with Chord so much lately – and after completing these changes, I started doing it with this deck – and loving whenever I can force one out to resolve. End-of-your-turn, do something rude. Counter me now. Give my creature pseudo-haste. Get my best dude. Reward mana flood. I love this card so much. I’m going to miss it in a few months.
A few short, sad months.
Out: -1 Hedge Troll
In: +1 Harmonize
Not an unreasonable ask; one Timeshifted card for another. Harmonize is just a general, all-around “good” card. I’m keeping it because it fits well on turn 3 – or 4 – after a simple curve, and can be a great bit of late-game gas when you’ve been land flooded. Harmonize is probably the only card in here that I don’t actively get excited about playing. It’s Just Good. Sometimes, though, you don’t want a synergistic corner piece that sits in the edge of a particular game state and supports an amazing play. Sometimes, you just want more cards and figure they’ll take care of the complicated stuff. That’s what Harmonize is here for.
It’s sad that Harmonize is about the best card drawing we’ll ever see in Green. I mean it. Playing with Harmonizes and Chords and Terramorphic Expanses and the like, I’m just barely able to squeak out the feeling that I’m in control of my library, and there’s just none of the ubiquity you have in Blue. Fewer cantrips means fewer ways to feel like you’re sifting through your deck. You can’t postpone your opponent’s turn, you can’t expect to draw another Harmonize-parallel with a Harmonize… it just feels like something you occasionally get. Bursting effects are rarely as appealing to me as a sustained effect.
Dredge is a good deck when it comes to giving me the feeling I have card filtration, card selection, even if I can’t manage card advantage. That’s a whole deck, of course, and a deck I really enjoy playing. If we could see more Green strategies like dredge, I think I’d be happier. Right now, however, I have the feeling that development think they’ve swung the pendulum heavily in the favor of Green, and that things are only going to get worse from here. More on this next week.
Out: -1 Mire Boa
In: +1 Pallid Mycoderm
Mire Boa, the final tidbit of my love affair with cheap regenerators, has to step aside here, for a horribly expensive 2/4. The horror, the agony, and so on. The Boa’s a fantastic creature – especially backed by stuff like Moldervine Cloak and the like. In here? He’s just a dude who can chump-block well. With this many Thallids, a veritable constant army of Saprolings, the Boa isn’t interesting enough to whet my whistle. If I’m going to have a singleton, I’ll make it something I can go get with Chord of Calling, and will want for a niche situation. Against Black, you don’t necessarily want to go get a ten-turn clock they can Darkblast. A more substantive singleton for that situation would be, say… um…
Note to self: Find a fattie in the 4-5 mana range and put its name here so forum people can suggest something better. W’ev.
Regardless, the Mycoderm’s in. Chord of Calling gives you a fantastic decision tree – it lets you have a few orphan slots that you want as particular niche cards. The more I think about it, the more I think I want this card to be Thelonite Hermit, but he’s a rare. Maybe I’ll play that sometime later.
Out: -1 Saltcrusted Steppe
In: +1 Terramorphic Expanse
If a storage land isn’t storing Blue mana, it’s just not a good land. Seriously. Green and White have so many ways to build up to huge late-game spells – Terramorphic Expanse is both less rare and less strenuous on your manabase.
Okay, lemme back up that statement.
You do not, as a deck, have the means to spend your turns doing “little” and letting your mana build up on a tapland. Blue has lots of tools for that. This isn’t saying that “Blue got the best stashland” – it’s saying “Blue has the best strategy for using the stashland.” There’s a distinction between the two perspectives; one is a petulant complaint, blaming Wizards of the Coast as if The Color Pie was somehow their fault, rather than the reason we get to write articles about Green and Blue in the first place. I’ll talk more about this next week – there is, after all, a new set to talk about, and this time around, I’m plenty-fine with speculating.
Anyway – the storage land isn’t very appropriate in this deck. Lacking for turn 1 plays that aren’t Search for Tomorrow (I love this card now, by the way), there’s less of a reason to want the stashland, and more reason to not mind a land card that fixes colors and comes into play tapped. The stashland isn’t really a Green source or a White source, and I’m not expecting to build up for an Xbox-sized spell like Demonfire for 10, or Gigadrowse for 6, or whatever is scary these days. Chord of Calling has a more effective way to be cast on the cheap.
So, with that final run of changes, here’s what we got:
15 Forest
2 Plains
2 Swamp
3 Terramorphic Expanse
3 Chord of Calling
4 Scatter the Seeds
4 Selesnya Guildmage
3 Deathspore Thallid
4 Essence Warden
3 Harmonize
1 Jedit Ojanen of Efrava
1 Mycologist
1 Pallid Mycoderm
4 Search for Tomorrow
4 Sporesower Thallid
2 Teneb, the Harvester
4 Thallid Shell-Dweller
No more game logs at this point. No real purpose – this is, for now, the final version of this deck. I really, really like the deck, though, as I’ve been able to avoid the main problems I’ve seen with Thallid Theme decks, which is that they, by and large, are really, intensely slow. Scatter the Seeds is amazing in this deck, turning into a kind of last-gasp-cum-chump-blocker-cum-board-wiping tool. The deck has enough Thallids that it can win long, plodding games with its eventual incremental card advantage, but it has enough beef to take control against other aggressive decks. It can stymie removal-heavy opponents and it can just keep making threats. My only qualm is that it feels mana heavy(!).
A deck which wants to cast two six-mana spells, one 3GGG, one 3WBG, when both of those are being cast off a manabase of entirely basic lands, does not feel like it should flirt with disaster and go down below its already-worrisome 22. I played assuming I had 24 – but looking at the list, it appears that’s just not the case. Still, I have the cards, I rarely get mana-screwed, and more often than not am mana-flooded.
So let’s talk about final revisions to the deck, for those who want to go further:
Where To From Here?
The cards in this deck that are, at this point, the least cohesive with its theme are Teneb and Jedit. That’s pretty funny when you consider they were the core of the strategy that got me started on this path. I love the Thallid Shell-Dweller now, and these guys brought to light exactly how cool that little two-drop is, but they still don’t do much on their own. When I can Chord for six, either of them will “do the job,” but I’m never that proud to get them. Better options in their slots are as follows:
Verdoloth The Ancient: When this deck gets mana-flooded, it gets mana flooded. Verdoloth can be chorded up to save a bunch of Saprolings from a one-point ping, to fuel an alpha, or just to be a seven-toughness man. And if you draw him, well, he’s still good, giving you the ability to slam down and possibly bring a few friends with him. I really, really like Verdoloth the Ancient.
I just love him for what he is – a fair card.
Thelonite Hermit: I’ve found a lot of games come down to the Saprolings doing damage, not the Thallids, nor the fliers. Sometimes, a bunch of 2/2s is just going to be enough, on its own, to finish the job, and the Hermit lets them do that. I’d certainly cut one Teneb for a lone Hermit, as a potentially useful Chord target.
Juniper Order Ranger: To my surprise, I have precisely zero cards I can Chord up at a mana cost of five. I think this guy fills that role well.
Another thing is, the manabase doesn’t need the safety it has. You could afford to cut perhaps Mycologist or some other card for another land, specifically, a Vitu-Ghazi or two. While I don’t like the idea of adding colorless lands to this deck, sometimes I wished I could produce just one or two more Saprolings, and win the day on those. Plus, the only thing better than the Thallid Shell-Dweller for fighting control is a Ghazi – it’s so hard to stop, even compared to the Dweller.
Potential Sideboard Cards
Indrik Stomphowler, Harmonic Sliver, Ronom Unicorn, Cloudchaser Kestrel or Viridian Shaman: I need a way to deal with artifacts and enchantments. My inclination would be towards the sliver (it’s cheaper), but there have been very few games where I cannot win without the removal of some problem permanent like that. The main one that leaps to mind as a problem is Worship, which you do see a bit of in the casual room.
Sek’Kuar, Deathkeeper – Sek’Kuar wouldn’t quite necessitate a fourth color entering the deck, but he’d make a nice anti-Wrath trick in the mid to late game.
Nightmare Void, Persecute, Castigate – If you find you’re able to get your secondary colors online fast, be it through Basilica or ah, expensive lands, Castigate’s the way to go. If you have Persecutes, use those. And if you have neither of these “good” options, use Nightmare Void, because then you at least get to feel a bit better about playing what amounts to an overcosted Coercion in a deck that can’t capitalize on it.
Gaea’s Anthem – Another possible option. In some matchups, the Shell-Dwellers are a little too humble, and you just want something to give you punch. Control decks don’t seem to like the Shell-Dweller much (because he comes down before countermagic and can mandate a Wrath all on his own), and aggro decks can run into him all day along. In the matchups like Black/White midrange, however, he doesn’t block anything – they just have enough removal that he’ll live to block or make tokens, and in those situations, you want something that will speed up your Saproling Clocks, while not necessarily dying to your opponent’s mass removal that he was going to use on the ‘lings anyway.
Tromp The Domains – Less of a Sideboard option and more of a “hey, what if” option, the Tromp is capable of following up a post-Wrath Scatter and turning it into twelve points of trampling damage, something that I can’t see as “a bad thing.” The problem is, this card is better than the existent options in the deck only if you’re already losing.
Assorted Fatties – It’s a Chord deck. Let’s not kid ourselves; there are going to be lots and lots of different dudes who can fit into various niche roles. Mycoderm versus Hermit, for example. This deck is, I think, a fantastic deck for players to pick up if they like customizing it. It’ll adapt relatively well to almost any format depending on the cards you have available, and all you have to do is remember the thematic of using Chord of Calling to get something relatively unfair.
Okay.
How the hell JMS managed to do this and keep it interesting five times in a row, I have no idea. The guy’s a machine.
That said, it’s time for me to move on. Time to talk about headier subjects. We’re at seven pages – and that’s after adding and subtracting all over again – so I think it’s time to say farewell to this deck, and hope that the people out there have enjoyed it.
Oh, the name thing: Right now, it’s named Evolution 4.0 in my deck file, but my name in my head for the past week has been Tossing The Thallid. Unfortunately, I’ve found that to be both gross, and inappropriate; the only throwing that’s going on in this deck is Deathspore Thallid’s carefully-orchestrated toxic stench, and in his case, it’s less of a “toss” and more of a… carefully placed and masterfully timed fart…
That’s it.
Right now, I dub this deck: Green Bean Thallid.
And if you’ve ever been at a wedding with my family, you’ll realize why.
Hugs and kisses,
Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au.