Hello, fellow Magic players! My name is Brian Braun-Duin, and I’ve been playing on and off since Time Spiral block. My previous successes are numerous PTQ Top 8s, some StarCityGames.com Open Series Top 8s, and a money finish at Grand Prix Pittsburgh. I played some version of U/W in every single one of those events, even winning the Limited PTQ with a U/W draft deck. Diversity is overrated—Feeling of Dread is underrated.
A few weeks back, someone informed me that Forests are actually Constructed-legal cards. I thought they were only for bad Limited decks and proxies, so you can imagine my surprise that they could be used in real decks. Armed with this newfound knowledge, I decided to get my feet wet and try out this whole green thing. And by getting my feet wet, I mean playing the actual worst manabase in the history of Magic: 24 Forests.
My only regret? It should have been 25 Forests.
But let me start from the beginning.
As Dark Ascension was being spoiled a man named Todd Anderson, whom many of you may know as a StarCityGames.com giant, talked to me about an idea for a mono-green beatdown deck featuring Strangleroot Geist and Dungrove Elder. I thought he was overrating Strangleroot Geist and that the deck seemed like it would be pretty awful. We ended up putting the deck on the backburner as we focused on testing some other lists.
However, when I drove to Roanoke to do some testing earlier last week, I found David McDarby testing the mono-green list against Todd. Despite some very subpar card choices, our prototype mono-green list was crushing Delver over and over again and putting up reasonable numbers against other decks we were throwing at it. David cut some of the bad cards and added in Phyrexian Metamorphs, which turned out to be a really good call for the Phyrexian Metagame. A commentator on one of Todd’s articles had suggested Bellowing Tanglewurm, and we added him into the list as well. We were surprised to find that he became our go-to target for Green Sun’s Zenith at five or more. Too often our random green fatties were getting tangled in combat with tokens and other chump blocks, which was definitely well “bellow” our expectations. Primeval Titan, Vorapede, and other random big fatties were not doing much for us, and we pretty much never wanted to Green Sun’s for them, so we cut them to sleek down the list a lot.
Playing some games with the mono-green beatdown menace myself, I found that it was a lot of fun to play and with some fine tuning had the potential to be a reasonable contender in post-DKA standard. But by the time we left for the Richmond Open Series on Friday, both Todd and David had decided that they were playing different decks. David was set on five-color “do nothing” control and Todd was on some sort of Delver list. I had done some more testing with the green list and I wanted to play it, but at the same time I lacked confidence in my ability to choose the right deck. I have had a recent string of very poor performances in tournaments in the last month playing a variety of choices, and my confidence level was suffering pretty hard as a result. I expected and half-wanted Todd and McDarba to convince me otherwise, but to my complete surprise they both abandoned their original deck choices to jump on board the Forest train.
Destination: Brown town. Population: Our opponents.
We did some final tuning for the list on the drive up and that night at the hotel as well as the morning of the event. Matt Eitel quickly decided to sleeve up the deck as well. While we didn’t all settle on the same 75, we were all within about 70 of the same 75. We also spent a good portion of the drive making a series of increasingly worse puns and jokes based on the names of the cards in our mono-green deck, a practice I thoroughly encourage everyone to do.
So without further fanfare, I present to you Bellowing Tanglewurm Control:
Creatures (23)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Bellowing Tanglewurm
- 2 Thrun, the Last Troll
- 3 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 4 Dungrove Elder
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (24)
- 24 Forest
Spells (9)
While the deck may look pretty linear on paper, there are actually a number of different plans the deck can execute, and which one you’re on is going to rely a lot on your opening hand and the game state as things progress. First, I will explain a few of the different plans the deck has, and then I will get into individual card choices.
Primary Game Plan: Sword you, Bro
This may be a surprise to some, but the main plan of the deck is not Dungrove Elder or Strangleroot Geist. It is actually just beating them with Sword of War and Peace as quickly as possible. This is where all your free wins come from as well. It goes something like, “Turn 1 Forest, mana dork, go. Turn 2 Forest, Sword of War and Peace, go. Turn 3 equip Sword to my mana dork, attack.” Shortly after, your opponent is angrily signing the match slip and swearing that he’ll never eat another salad again. He’s been ranched enough for a lifetime.
Secondary Game Plan: Killing Your Opponent with Limited Cards
This game plan comes into effect when you don’t have a Sword in your opener or you’re playing against someone who doesn’t just fold to a turn 2 Sword, turn 3 equip, as many decks do. The idea behind this is running out a never-ending stream of hexproof and undying creatures that are bigger than your opponent’s guys and just bashing them to death. This is the classic “turn ’em sideways” strategy. It looks something like Strangleroot Geist into Dungrove Elder into Green Sun’s for Dungrove. This game plan frequently ends in the following fashion:
You cast Green Sun’s Zenith for five. While searching your deck, you start making a loud bellowing sound and shaking like an animal. You slam what looks like a classic 4th-7th pick from the Dinosaur Scars block draft strategy onto the table in commanding fashion. Your opponent says, and I quote, “I don’t know what that does.” He then picks up the card, pauses to read it, glances at the board and states, “Oh. I guess I’m dead.”
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s then time to chalk another notch on Bellowing Tanglewurm’s large belt. Bellowing Tanglewurm does not mess around.
Final Game Plan: Grindhouse
This is the kind of game that comes up when you’re playing against something like a tokens deck that’s going to do some or all of the following things: play a bunch of chump blockers, Wrath the board, play planeswalkers, and threaten to quickly kill you with cards like Hero of Bladehold and anthem effects. You can’t kill them quickly through their token swarms and they generally have answers to your Sword of War and Peace. However, they also have trouble swinging immediately through your much fatter creatures.
Ultimately, what happens is a back and forth of both sides trying to grind out some sort of advantage to break the stalemate. This is where cards like Garruk, Primal Hunter and Batterskull really shine. Batterskull won me a number of matches that I don’t think I could have won with any other card. Equipping it to a huge Dungrove or Thrun eventually Abysses your opponent each turn and keeps your life total high enough to stay out of range from their huge turns.
As for the cards themselves, I’ll talk a bit about some of the cards that are and aren’t in the deck and why those decisions were made. First up, the biggest baddie in the deck.
Dungrove Elder
This card may seem straightforward, as it looks like it’s just a big, dumb green creature, but let me dispel that myth. I actually like to think of Dunny as a modal spell, much like Cryptic Command, and I’m here to teach you how to Dunny. Simply paying three mana and announcing Dungrove Elder to your opponent is the wrong way to cast it. The correct way is to choose one of the four following modes based on the current game state.
- Lil’ Dunny. Lil’ Dunny is what you cast when your board is two Llanowar Elves, a Birds of Paradise and a single Forest. He’s small and weak, but with some time and good nurturing he can grow into a proper Dungrove.
- DunBro Elder. After Lil’ Dunny’s rebellious youth, he grew up into the classic bro. This is the Dunny you get when you’ve got about three or four Forests and can’t really attack with him into your opponent’s board. He’s fine sitting back on the couch, sipping some Natty Ice and listening to Dave Matthews Band.
- President-Elect DunGrover Cleveland. This is the Dunny you get when your first Dungrove had a weak and ineffective first term, and you want him back for a second run at glory.
- Ol’ Dunny. Ol’ Dunny is quite the cantankerous old man. He’s given up on enjoying life and simply continues to exist for the sole purpose of making your opponent’s life miserable, and he’s quite successful at it. This Dungrove Elder is huge and aggressive.
Phyrexian Metamorph
Metamorph basically does everything in the deck. He’s the 9th-11th copy of your best creatures—Green Sun’s Zenith is 5th-8th. He copies your opponent’s powerful cards, kills their legendary creatures, and copies a Strangleroot Geist and then can come back as something else with a +1/+1 counter on it if he dies. He’s an extra Batterskull and Acidic Slime in the matchups where you want them and an extra Sword of War and Peace in the matchups where you want those.
Strangleroot Geist
This card was actually a lot worse than our expectations. It’s a good aggressive card early and makes for a good blocker when you need it, but I will cut down on the number of them if I run the deck again. I still want some to have on turn 2 and to Zenith for, but getting flooded with them is a definite problem. The key to playing this card is to yell out as loud as you can, “Is Strangleroot Geist gonna have to choke a—” and then insert the name of a creature in play on your opponent’s side of the board as you cast it. Warning: This can easily lead to an increase in Geist-on-Geist crime.
Thrun, the Last Troll
The only commentary I want to say for Thrun is that if you’re playing against a deck packing countermagic, you want to generally play anything other than Thrun when they are tapped out and save him to play when they are spending their turn holding open mana for an obvious counter. Clearly this is not always the case, but it’s generally a solid rule of thumb.
The Brothers Garruk
Garruk Relentless is usually a bit better in creature matchups since all of his abilities are relevant, especially if you can fight a guy, have him live, and be able to untap with him flipped. It’s very hard to lose the game after that. Big Poppa Garruk is better against any of the control matchups and also good in grindy matches. Drawing four or more cards or making a constant stream of 3/3s is very tough for a control deck to deal with. I think the Garruk split we ran was incorrect, and if I run the deck again I will probably play 3 Relentless and 2 Primal Hunter, purely based on mana costs and the current metagame.
Primeval Titan and Kessig Wolf Run
These are definitely the cards that most people immediately ask about. Why aren’t they in the deck? Well, in testing we kept drawing the Wolf Runs and red sources and they were making our Dungroves terrible, and we rarely ever wanted to Green Sun’s for a Primeval Titan anyway. The times we did, Bellowing Tanglewurm was usually good enough.
Tumble Magnet
This card is 100% for Mirran Crusader, which the deck otherwise cannot beat outside of racing it with Sword of War and Peace or copying it with Metamorph and hoping they don’t have an Oblivion Ring, Honor of the Pure, Fiend Hunter, Leonin Relic-Warder or Oblivion Ring, which is fairly unlikely.
Rather than bore you all with a match-by-match report, I’m just going to instead cover a few fun and sweet situations that came up over the day.
The first came in Round 2. My opponent is playing U/B Control and after missing his sixth land drop for a few turns, he finally draws it the turn before he’s dead to slam a Grave Titan and completely shut down my offense. Unfortunately for him, I had some grave news—he wasn’t going to be able to wurm his way out of this one. Green Sun’s Zenith, X = 5. Bellowing Tanglewurm is more intimidating than Grave Titan. Game, Bellowses.
Game 2 featured an embarrassing draw where I did pretty much nothing until turn 4, when I hardcast a Bellowing Tanglewurm. My opponent was forced to Black Sun’s Zenith for three. I followed up with a Thrun and on the next turn, with only a Metamorph and no other action in hand, I copied my 1/1 Bellowing Tanglewurm. My opponent, still missing his sixth land, had to Black Sun’s Zenith for three again, and a few turns later my 1/1 Metamorphed Tanglewurm, 1/1 Thrun and fresh Strangleroot Geist were able to kill him for exactsies past his Snapcaster Mage that couldn’t block. What’s better than one Bellowing Tanglewurm? Two of them.
In Round 3, I lost to U/W humans. I couldn’t beat his Mirran Crusader in game 1 and was too slow for his aggressive draw in game 3. But in game 2, after he hits me down to 3 life with a Mirran Crusader wearing an Angelic Destiny on turn 4, I rip a War and Peace off the top to do 16, his exact life total, with my Metamorphed Crusader!
In Round 6, I had to play against David McDarby in a virtual mirror match. We knew it was bound to happen eventually with David, Todd and I all X-1 for many rounds running. Whenever I playtest against David, he always has some spicy one-of in his list and draws it every single game. True to form, he drew the one-of Tanglewurm in our match. Unfortunately for him, a vanilla 4/4 for five isn’t exactly the nut in this matchup.
Round 7, I had a long grindy feature match covered here. I don’t think I could have possibly won game 2 without the power of Batterskull, and I ended the game over 100 life. Garruk was Relentless, to say the least.
I also managed to draw my one-of Creeping Corrosion in both of the matches I sided it in for: U/W Puresteel and U/B Tezzeret Infect. Sadly I used all my run goods on those matches, since I ended up being the only 7-1-1 to not make Top 8 and also later lost the credit card game for dinner that night. At least I got the two that mattered, right? No? Shucks.
On a different note, I want to stress that the most important part of any tournament is to have fun. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I did reasonably well at this tournament with a deck I enjoyed playing, whereas I have done poorly at prior tournaments playing decks I did not like at all. And win or lose, I don’t think any of us would continue playing this game without the fun and friendship and great times with friends we have on these weekend excursions.
For me, the most fun and memorable moment of the tournament came in the form of a long game of Mental Magic I played against Ali Aintrazi. Unfortunately for Ali and me, the game started to attract a crowd of people who got to witness how embarrassingly bad we were. One highlight of the game involved me casting a 2-drop artifact as a Cellar Door. Ali, at risk of getting beat down by a steady stream of 2/2 Zombies, was forced to Pithing Needle my Cellar Door. In order to keep the dream alive, I destroyed the Pithing Needle, and he was forced to Faith’s Fetters the Cellar Door afterward. I used the Cellar Door in response, flipping a Walking Corpse off the bottom of our shared library, which we had to shuffle graveyards back into twice because of how long the game went. I then showed off my true skills, failing to think of another creature at the mana cost of 1B in 10 seconds other than Walking Corpse and the Dark Confidant that had already been cast. I have the distinct shame of failing a Cellar Door activation in mental magic.
Griselbrand later declined my application to be his Disciple for reasons unknown.
Ali, at some point in the game, actually cast a 3R spell as a Hill Giant. Ladies and gentlemen, I present your National Champion. In classic Ali form, he skipped over killing me with actual red spells and instead opted to Psionic Blast me for game.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the report and give the deck a try. It was a lot of fun, even for a dedicated U/W player like myself. Hopefully I can come back from Honolulu with a more successful finish.
Follow me @BraunDuinIt in the tweeterverse.
P.S. Congrats to Todd for Top 8’ing with the deck and Ben Isgur for making the finals with Delver, even though he is (according to some of the very incorrect viewers on SCGLive) one of the worst players to ever play on camera.