Necrotic Brews

So I took a Necrotic Ooze deck to #SCGRegionals last weekend.

Longtime readers will know that Necrotic Ooze is one of my all-time favorite Magic cards. While it was Standard-legal I wrote about various builds I tried out (you can see them here, here, here and here), and while they were a lot of fun, I wouldn’t say they were overly competitive outside of occasional good runs at FNM.

Once Necrotic Ooze rotated out of Standard and I started thinking about the card in Modern, I realized I had found the perfect companion card for it. Take a bow, you magnificent fool.

Thornling offers up a Swiss Army knife-ful of special abilities to copy while also being a really good card all on its own. If you’ve been playing Standard a while, you might remember that Thornling was a solid foil to the Bloodbraid Elf Jund deck that terrorized the format for a time. If you survived long enough to untap with a Thornling on the battlefield, your opponent couldn’t do anything about it and it would quickly kill them.

Thornling can do the same thing in Modern against other fair decks so long as they’re not packing Path to Exile. It’s fantastic to have a really good creature like this that you don’t mind running out onto the battlefield, because in order to guarantee a win with Necrotic Ooze outside of just beating down fairly, you’ve often got to use sub-par cards. In Modern the best options are these two creatures:

Devoted Druid is actually pretty sweet all by itself, since generating extra green mana is always helpful in any deck sporting Thornling, and when it’s dead, Necrotic Ooze can sometimes make good use of its ability to untap for just the cost of adding a -1/-1 counter to it. Quillspike is the epitome of a combo card, just terrible on its own but insane alongside Devoted Druid’s two abilities. With these two cards on the battlefield, your Quillspike can become arbitrarily large; one opponent Saturday said it was like building your own The Abyss. With Quillspike in the graveyard and Devoted Druid on the battlefield or in the graveyard, you can do the same thing with Necrotic Ooze, which is where borrowing Thornling’s ability to give itself trample is so helpful.

Outside of Necrotic Ooze, Thornling, Devoted Druid, and Quillspike, there are still a lot of slots to fill out a Modern deck and tons of great creatures with activated abilities to consider. Each time a new Magic set comes out, Necrotic Ooze has the potential to become even better. Whenever a creature gets printed that has a good activated ability, Necrotic Ooze has the potential to just go nuts. Before last fall, the two creatures with abilities that had gotten me the most excited were Griselbrand and Pack Rat.

Then Kozilek, the Great Distortion was spoiled.

Now how’s that for an activated ability, kids? I have to admit to sketching out four or five different decklists trying to figure out how to have a Necrotic Ooze on the battlefield with a Griselbrand and Kozilek, the Great Distortion in the graveyard, effectively locking my opponent out of being able to play any more spells the rest of the game.

So long as I could afford to keep paying life to draw cards. Oh, and figure out a way to keep what my opponent had already put on the battlefield from killing me.

It quickly became obvious that the dream scenario was a bit too Magical Christmas Land. For one thing, with big-mana decks like Tron and Eldrazi Black in the format, I could very well find myself not being able to use Kozilek, the Great Distortion’s ability to counter their most important spells. If the new Kozilek had a place at all, it was probably in the sideboard. My disappointment in New Kozi was tempered with my excitement over another card I had run across while sketching out various decklists.

Whenever a new set comes out, I usually do a search through all the creatures with activated abilities just so that I can check for combo potential with Necrotic Ooze, and yet somehow I had totally overlooked this powerhouse creature from Magic Origins until just a few weeks ago, when I was considering branching out from green and black into a third color. Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is a proven powerhouse card, and I knew looting was a powerful effect in a Necrotic Ooze deck.

If you’ve never played Necrotic Ooze or encountered it before, here are the rulings on it that are helpful to understand its shenanigans:

· Necrotic Ooze gains only activated abilities. It doesn’t gain keyword abilities (unless those keyword abilities are activated), triggered abilities, or static abilities.

· Activated abilities contain a colon. They’re generally written “[Cost]: [Effect].” Some keywords are activated abilities; they have colons in their reminder text.

· If an activated ability of a card in a graveyard references the card it’s printed on by name, treat Necrotic Ooze’s version of that ability as though it referenced Necrotic Ooze by name instead. For example, if Cudgel Troll (which says “{G}: Regenerate Cudgel Troll”) is in a graveyard, Necrotic Ooze has the ability “{G}: Regenerate Necrotic Ooze.”

Then I considered what happened when Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy was dead and I copied its ability with Necrotic Ooze when I had four or more cards in the graveyard. It would exile itself and then come back to the battlefield… and since it’s not a double-sided card, it wouldn’t return transformed, but as an untapped Necrotic Ooze! This was a groovy way for Necrotic Ooze to protect itself; if you had a Devoted Druid in the graveyard and your opponent tried to Path to Exile the Necrotic Ooze while you were attacking with it, you could untap it and then loot to dodge the removal spell. Since it exiled and came back, you’d even knock off the -1/-1 counter.

If you had a Thornling in the graveyard, you could sink each green mana you had lying around into giving Necrotic Ooze haste again and doing an extra loot, shredding through your library looking for combo pieces. That in itself was pretty sweet until I realized there was a way to have as much green mana as you wanted if this card found its way into the graveyard:

Necrotic Ooze can copy the Wall of Roots ability even if it doesn’t have haste, getting a green mana it can then use to copy Thornling’s ability to give itself haste and then loot, exile, and come back, knocking off the -0/-1 counter in the process. Since the Ooze left the battlefield and came back, it’s considered a new creature, which effectively breaks the one use per turn limitation of Wall of Roots’ ability (in a way, recreating the old “Wall of Boom” combo from aeons past for you old-timers out there). You can simply loot until you get Devoted Druid and Quillspike in the graveyard, make Necrotic Ooze arbitrarily large, and trample over for the game.

I was extremely excited about this technological development because Wall of Roots and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy are high-quality cards on their own, which helps keep the deck from becoming too much of a glass cannon reliant on comboing off to win. I already knew I’d be playing Abrupt Decay in order to destroy pesky copies of Scavenging Ooze and Relic of Progenitus, and being able to flash it back with a transformed Jace to clear away a blocker could let me just win with a rampaging Thornling.

I was already going to play some number of Spellskites to redirect any copies of Path to Exile away from my Necrotic Oozes or Thornlings, and with Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy in the mix, that meant running a fair amount of blue mana, so I could use mana instead of life to activate Spellskite’s ability. That was pretty sweet, but were there any other blue cards that might fit well into the deck? That’s when I thought of this card:

Seems like an obvious inclusion, right? Necrotic Ooze usually goes nuts when there is some combination of three creatures to copy in the graveyard, so wait for one of those cards to naturally hit the graveyard and then you can Gifts for the other two cards and go nuts! Of course, once Gifts Ungiven is added to the mix, it’s tough to not try and squeeze in Unburial Rites plus some gigantic creature. Like maybe Griselbrand? Funny how we’ve sorta come full circle.

So my deck was pretty much finalized until I started watching the coverage Friday of Pro Tour Atlanta to better gauge what the new post-ban Modern metagame might look like and got scared away by the sheer volume of aggressive decks that appeared. So much Burn, Affinity, Infect, Zoo… and this was at a Pro Tour, which is nearly always biased at least a little bit towards a more controlling environment! If the pros were beating down and melting face, then what was it going to look like out in the wild amateur scene like #SCGRegionals?

At the last minute I panicked, pulled the Griselbrand and Unburial Rites entirely out of the 75, and bounced the anti-Tron Fulminator Mages out of the sideboard for more weapons against Affinity. Here’s what I ended up registering:

Necrotic Gifts

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 02-12-2016

Modern

Creatures (30)

Lands (23)

Spells (7)

3 Gifts Ungiven
4 Abrupt Decay

Sideboard

Vampiric Link was a super-cheap spell that I wanted to slap on my opponent’s early Eidolon of the Great Revel and force him to burn off two cards for my one. If I lived long enough, I could put it on a Necrotic Ooze or Thornling and make racing for my opponent practically impossible. Lotleth Troll was a resilient threat against Jund or Grixis decks and had a couple of abilities that are nice to copy with Necrotic Ooze. Thoughtseize and Cinderhaze Wretch were there for any decks that weren’t taking fast and furious chunks of damage out of my life totals.

By the way, the maindeck Magus of the Disk may look a little weird, especially given that I only have one source of white mana from my lands (there mostly to flash back Unburial Rites). Magus of the Disk is there purely to pitch into the graveyard to copy with Necrotic Ooze, allowing Necrotic Ooze to tap for one mana and destroy all creatures, artifacts and enchantments. If you happen to have a Thornling in the graveyard, you can copy one of its abilities to make your Necrotic Ooze indestructible before activating the ability. Now that is the very definition of a Good Time!

I started the tournament going 4-2, with one loss attributed to being needlessly careless against Infect, tapping a Birds of Paradise to take my opponent to one life instead of two with an attacking Thornling. He’d had to use some pump spells already to keep from dying, so I didn’t think he’d have enough to kill me through the air, but on his turn he attacked me for exactsies when I should have held the Birds back to block.

I did have some really fun games, killing quite a few people who understandably didn’t know what the deck was capable of.

One person let a Quillspike attack unblocked when I had a Devoted Druid on the battlefield.

A G/R Tron player cast Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger targeting the Thornling I’d been beating him down with and Spellskite. In response I made the Thornling an 8/0, putting him in the graveyard. I then cast Necrotic Ooze, gave it haste from the Thornling’s ability, and attacked with Ooze and a 2/1 Cinderhaze Wretch. He was at two life and had no other blockers. I beat him the third game of the match after he cast Ulamog by casting Gifts Ungiven to assemble the combo in my graveyard and cast Necrotic Ooze, who was able to loot until I got the rest of the cards needed to make him big enough to trample over Ulamog for lethal.

After playing the deck this week, my good friend Kevin has come up with an interesting idea. Remember in January when Ben Rubin made it to the finals of Grand Prix Oakland with a 64-card deck? The performance created ripples though the theorizers and thinkers of the Magic community.

I’ve gathered that there’s a “silver bullet theory” where if you’ve got ways to tutor up singular cards, you can make the tutors more powerful by adding extra “bullets” to your deck (over the deck size minimum), decreasing the odds of randomly drawing one of your singular cards that you don’t need while only minimally impacting the odds of drawing your key cards. In Rubin’s case, he ran a bunch of fetchlands (the tutors) and added extra Battle lands (the bullets) to improve his manabase to better serve his powerful spells across four colors.

Kevin has decided to try running a full four Gifts Ungiven and expanding the deck size a bit to accommodate more bullets to make Gifts even better than it already is. Currently the deck is 65 cards:

65-Card Necrotic Gifts

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 02-12-2016

Modern

Creatures (30)

Lands (24)

Spells (11)

I’m not sure what to sideboard yet, though the fact that I ended up playing G/R Tron twice and not a single Affinity deck makes me think I need to step back on the Affinity hate a bit and add some Fulminator Mages.

I think there’s something really powerful here if we can streamline it and adjust for the metagame. I’m very curious to hear your thoughts on the deck’s concept and execution. Is there anything I’m missing? If you have any questions regarding why certain cards are in the deck, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to explain.

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)