Livin' La Vida Locust

In Magic, powerful engines are often associated with transforming one resource into another. Way back in Ice Age, there was a weird black enchantment called Necropotence that took a while for people to catch onto that traded life for card draw. Turned out that trading life for cards was a heck of a deal! Over the years, there have been many of these sorts of cards, and one of the newest of the bunch happens to be attached to a legendary creature we can use as our commander. Behold, The Locust God!

The Locust God has a really sweet triggered ability, considering that blue especially – but red too – has a long history of card drawing, but often there is tension between reloading your hand and affecting the battlefield. With The Locust God you get it all—you draw your cards and you flood the battlefield with 1/1 flying Insects with haste. Let us start building our deck by selecting awesome card drawing spells!

Drawing Cards

Skullclamp is a Commander staple that goes into just about every Commander deck, but it is insane in a deck with The Locust God on the table. For one mana, equip Skullclamp to a 1/1 Insect, which then dies, giving you two card and two 1/1 Insects. Now that is an engine your opponents will be scrambling to put a stop to! Another fantastic card is Nin, the Pain Artist, which provides a decent conversion rate of mana into 1/1 Insects and cards in hand, but you can do it at instant speed and in a pinch use the ability to knock off opponent’s creatures. Teferi’s Puzzle Box, Mindmoil, and Arjun, the Shifting Flame can really churn out the Insect production without depleting your deck too much.

Enter the Infinite is extremely expensive to cast but provides exactly the sort of crazy haymaker play you want to cross off your The Locust God Bucket List—drawing your deck and making sixty or so 1/1 flying Insects with haste is bound to provide a story for the ages!

Drawing Matters

Since we are drawing all these cards to make Insects for The Locust God, I figured, why not include a couple other cards that do cool things with card-drawing spells? Sphinx’s Tutelage is quite the threatening card to any opponents outside of those who are actively looking to mill their own graveyards. Chasm Skulker does a nice job of converting all that card drawing into a large threat that also provides insulation from mass removal.

Creature Tokens Matter

We are converting card drawing into 1/1 creatures, but why stop there?

Goblin Bombardment, Impact Tremors, and Purphoros, God of the Forge convert those creatures into damage to your opponents. Phyrexian Altar can convert those creatures into mana. Bident of Thassa can convert those creatures into more cards. Opposition converts those creatures into a powerful battlefield control presence. Grenzo, Havoc Raiser can turn each member of your swarm into exiling your opponents’ libraries while casting some useful spells along the way too.

I thought Mindwrack Liege made a nice fit here by turning your 1/1 fliers with haste into 3/3 fliers with haste, which would be a significantly better threat, though that basically turns off your Skullclamp engine unless you have a way to sacrifice the equipped creatures.

Swarmyard might not be worth the land slot, but I figure there might be some corner case where being able to regenerate one of my 1/1 flying Insects would be helpful.

Mana

The Locust God isn’t cheap to cast, its activated ability isn’t cheap either, and many of the card-drawing spells cost a significant amount to cast, so we want plenty of mana! I am going to run 39 lands and include all of these mana-boosting cards too. Training Grounds shaves two generic mana off The Locust God’s activated ability, while also helping some of my other cards like Nin, the Pain Artist and Magus of the Wheel.

A couple of weeks back I wrote about Neheb, the Eternal as a commander, but it does great work as one of the 99 too and especially in this deck. The 1/1 flying Insects have haste, so if you draw a bunch of cards in your precombat main phase, you can send your swarm attacking into clear skies and then Neheb, the Eternal will reward you with a rush of red mana in your postcombat main phase. I am sure we can make use of that.

Then there is Mana Echoes. Oh, you ridiculous card, you. Cast Brainstorm with The Locust God and Mana Echoes out, make three 1/1 Insects and get six colorless mana (assuming no other Insects are around)… and that is just the tip of the shenanigans iceberg!

Utility

Okay, so we will still want out deck to do stuff while we wait for The Locust God to get online, so I have rounded things out with plenty of sweet, sweet red and blue stuff. This seems the perfect deck to break out my one and lonely Force of Will, namely to try to avert disaster once I cast Enter the Infinite. Steel Hellkite jumps right in to provide a way to deal with problematic enchantments that might otherwise stick around. With all the Insects floating around, casting Blasphemous Act for one red mana will feel good when you need to wipe the battlefield.

One thing that is fascinating about the Hour of Devastation Gods is how great they seem to be at grinding out longer games. Barring exile effects or counterspells, they are not going to cost more mana each time you have to cast them because you will be casting them from your hand when they die. That is why I think Leyline of Anticipation and Winding Canyons are even better in a deck with these Gods.

I am very curious to see how Commander players adapt to playing against these “dies to hand” legendary creatures. Will they play more cards like Darksteel Mutation? Or will they provoke more direct antagonism by aggressively taking out people playing those commanders?

Here is how the deck has shaped up:

The Locust God

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 07-14-2017

Commander

Creatures (15)

Lands (39)

Spells (45)

What do you think? Are there any great cards for The Locust God I may have overlooked? How would you build this deck differently?

New to Commander?

If you’re just curious about the format, building your first deck, or trying to take your Commander deck up a notch, here are some handy links:

Commander Primer Part 1
(Why play Commander? Rules Overview, Picking your Commander)
Commander Primer Part 2
(Mana Requirements, Randomness, Card Advantage)
Commander Primer Part 3
(Power vs. Synergy, Griefing, Staples, Building a Doran Deck)
Commander Starter Kits 1
(kick start your allied two-color decks for $25)
Commander Starter Kits 2
(kick start your enemy two-color decks for $25)
Commander Starter Kits 3
(kick start your shard three-color decks for $25)