Welcome to week two of your daily deck dosage. I’m your host, the Deckmeista’ Abe. Do you like old cards? Today’s casual deck takes an old Fallen Empires theme and gives it a little twist. Let’s take a look at ye olde decke liste and see what is waiting for us.
“But, Abe,” you exclaim, “Adam Gryphondorf already wrote a Fallen Empires deck article!” So? Fallen Empires is an entire set. Now, I’ll grant you that there aren’t as many deck ideas from FE as there are from, say, Alliances, but there are still lots of them out there. See my note at the bottom of the article for details.
The Fungus Among Us
4 Thallid
3 Elvish Farmer
4 Thallid Devourer
4 Fungal Bloom
4 Spore Flower
3 Citanul Hierophants
2 Hurricane
1 Thorn Thallid
1 Night Soil
2 Nature’s Resurgence
2 Nemata, Grove Guardian
2 Verdeloth, the Ancient
2 Saproling Symbiosis
2 Epic Struggle
24 Forest
Everybody has seen an old school Fallen Empires saproling deck by now. What I’ve done is combine that backbone with the Invasion block cards that make a saproling deck really shine, like Nemata and the Symbiosis. I’ve also added several secret tech cards in Hurricane, Epic Struggle, and especially Citanul Hierophants.
“Citanul Hierophants?” you may ask. Yep, good old Citanul Hierophants. The beauty of this creature is that it turns all of your creatures into Llanowar Elves. Imagine all of your little Thallids tapping for Green. Saprolings, fungus, Hierophants, everybody uniting behind a common goal: tapping for mana.
That best way to use this ability is with Fungal Bloom to make mad saproling beats. You can Fungal Bloom Thallids or the Devourers for more saprolings. Saprolings like being sacked for life to cards like Elvish Farmer. Tap some creatures to fill up a Spore Flower in order to protect yourself from attacks until you are built and ready.
One way you can win is through Epic Struggle, which seems ready made for this kind of deck. Epic Struggle might be your best win condition in multiplayer. With Spore Flowers to survive some attacks and Elvish Farmer to give you life, you should be able to survive a full turn until Epic Struggle kicks in.
Another win condition is Hurricane. With Elvish Farmer life, you can produce more than enough mana to wipe out multiple players at the table. I also like the old school feel behind Hurricane as a win condition.
Verdeloth and Nemata can each allow you to overrun one or more opponents with saproling beats. Each of these legendary creatures can prove to be a win condition in itself.
Your only card drawing is Nature’s Resurgence, which allows you to reload after a Wrath of God gets tossed. Night Soil should be used liberally if you expect to play the Resurgence, because then you limit the number of cards your opponents can draw.
This deck could easily splash Blue for Aether Mutation or some countermagic. Red or White could also give you Mutations that will help against various permanents. You might also want to run Naturalize as an emergency escape measure. For that matter, maybe even Desert Twister fits the deck.
Fallen Empire cards and Hurricane give the deck an archaic old feel, so I wouldn’t ruin it with cards from the new format. In fact, I would make an effort to get the oldest version of cards like Hurricane that I could.
This deck is really cheap, with the few rares in it being relatively inexpensive. This is the sort of deck that you might want to play sleeveless, just for effect. Some playgroups do not have many older cards, and Fallen Empires cards will be light. Don’t worry though, because FE cards are cheap. Lots of players who played at that time have oodles of extra Fallen Empires cards, because we bought way too many packs. You can try and pick up some of these cards from us.
I hope that you have enjoyed today’s little decklist from the past. Tomorrow we’ll take a very different tactic in building a deck.
Until Later,
Abe Sargent
Abe’s Note: Silly Adam Grydehoj with his silly “I’m going to build Fallen Empires decks, teehee,” and his silly hard to spell last name. Well, my Fallen Empires Green induced deck has tricks his only dreamed of. “So, Ha!”