This article’s question comes from Reggie Sauls, who asked:
I’m running a Wort the Raidmother deck and keep running out of gas. Any great R/G card advantage choices, especially on instants and sorceries?So…how do we get access to more cards with red and green sorceries and instants, with a general who makes tokens and copies spells?
Category 1: Straight-Up Card Flow
The cards in this category are the most straightforward options, though they are definitely not the most powerful.
Harmonize. The only “true” draw spell in these colors, it’s a lot better than Concentrate is in Blue—especially if you can double it to draw six cards! Probably the best of the bunch.
Magmatic Insight, Wild Guess, and Tormenting Voice. These are all very similar, and they are included here because when you conspire a spell you don’t have to pay its costs again, but you DO get twice the benefit. Early on, these cards can help you pitch things you don’t need to get ramp spells (or whatever), and once Wort is on the battlefield, these cards all basically say “discard one card to draw four” at a very cheap cost.
Category 1.5: Straight-Up Card Flow (with Permanents)
Just including the instants and sorceries above doesn’t qualify as a “full” answer, since there are MANY more ways to get cards into your hand in these colors by using permanents. Plus, since this blog’s Dig Through Time articles are designed to serve as a deckbuilder’s resource for people making similar decks, let’s cover the whole spread!
Sandstone Oracle; Knollspine Dragon; Kozilek, Butcher of Truth; and Lifeblood Hydra. These creatures are the heavy hitters of refilling your hand. Sandstone Oracle and Knollspine Dragon can both be very powerful but are a bit situational: if your opponents draw a lot of cards, Sandstone Oracle is fantastic, and aggressive decks can really take advantage of Knollspine Dragon. Kozilek, Butcher of Truth is a more expensive option, but it is the most “guaranteed” of all the options, since you draw the cards even if someone counters the creature…and a 12/12 creature with annihilator 4 is nice to have attached to your draw spell. Lifeblood Hydra has the highest potential of all the options, as long as you generate a lot of mana and watch out for exiling effects (or have a sacrifice outlet available).
Mind’s Eye, Loreseeker’s Stone, Tower of Fortunes, and Recycle. These noncreature permanents can provide a steady stream of cards, rather than the one-time bursts of card advantage that the creatures offer. Mind’s Eye is a Commander staple for a reason, since it can translate any extra mana you have into cards—but people will prioritize destroying it, so you can’t assume that it’s a game-long solution. Loreseeker’s Stone and Tower of Fortunes are the “small” and “large” versions of the same effect, which is to refill your hand when you have literally nothing else to do with your mana. For decks that frequently run out of gas, the Stone is probably the better choice, since it is much more possible to use it multiple times. Recycle is a really powerful and really weird card: it can turn into a huge amount of value (like Future Sight, an amazing card), but it can be risky. If you hit a glut of lands on top of your deck, your card-draw can slow to a sad trickle of only one card per turn. The real danger, though, comes when you play against discard: a simple Unnerve can lock you out of the game entirely. Don’t be too scared off by the dangers, though: particularly if your deck ramps a lot (and therefore thins lands out of the library), a resolved Recycle can help you use every single mana every single turn and rapidly spiral into a game win.
Ohran Viper and Staff of Nin. These cards are much lower-impact than those already mentioned, but they aren’t going to alarm anyone in the way that a Mind’s Eye will. Ohran Viper is usually good for several cards since people don’t want to trade with its pseudo-deathtouch, and it can serve as a great blocker once people have good blockers. Staff of Nin is a surprisingly effective option unless there is a huge amount of artifact removal in your metagame, although it does clash a bit with casting Wort at six mana.
Category 2: Creature-Dependent Draw Spells
Having Wort, the Raidmother as your commander presents an interesting conundrum: she is clearly at her best when surrounded by instants and sorceries, but a lot of the best green cards in the format center on interactions with creatures. Finding the balance between creatures and instants/sorceries in a Wort deck can be really difficult, but you can bridge the gap a bit by using token-producing spells like Goblin Offensive, One Dozen Eyes, and Gelatinous Genesis. The cards in this category can draw you a lot of cards, but they don’t work without creatures to fuel them.
Shamanic Revelation and Collective Unconscious. These are the options that fit most comfortably with the fact that Wort produces tokens whenever you cast her. While the Revelation is the strictly-superior card, they are each probably worth a slot in the deck—as long as you haven’t built a creatureless, “all-instants-and-sorceries” Wort deck, doubling one of these is going to draw you a lot of cards (and just doubling one with Wort and her tokens will still draw six cards!).
Hunter’s Prowess, Momentous Fall, Life’s Legacy, Soul’s Majesty, and Nissa’s Revelation. These spells are all dependent, to one extent or another, on having meaningful creatures in your deck. Hunter’s Prowess is the least conditional in that way, since you can cast (and double) it targeting Wort herself… and then have a 9/9 trampling commander that draws two (!) cards for each point of damage she deals to a player. Momentous Fall and Life’s Legacy are both beneficiaries of the same rules interaction that makes Tormenting Voice good in a Wort deck: you only sacrifice one creature, but draw double the cards. As long as you have some decent-sized creatures, these are great options—and they are much more dependable than Soul’s Majesty, which can be very powerful but tends to be a magnet for instant-speed creature removal, which really spoils your fun. Nissa’s Revelation is an incredibly powerful card to conspire, since that’s a LOT of scrying and can turn into a lot of lifegain and cards. Again, though, you need a certain density of decent-sized creatures in your deck before it really works.
Category 2.5: Creature-Dependent Draw Permanents
Just as I did previously, it’s time to look through the permanent-based options for leveraging creatures into refilling your hand.
Skullclamp, Slate of Ancestry, and Regal Force. These cards allow you to turn a lot of small creatures into a lot of cards. You can, of course, just run them as a way to take advantage of Wort’s light token-production capabilities, but they don’t get really effective unless you are making some additional token creatures with cards like Dragon Broodmother or Dragonlair Spider. Remember that Regal Force only works with green creatures—don’t cast it after a Goblin Offensive and then get disappointed!
Jar of Eyeballs. This card is fantastic in any deck planning on making token creatures—and since you’re running Wort, it will do some work for you. Of course, just like all the cards in this category, it gets a lot better when you are running significant numbers of other creatures, but getting to activate this artifact every couple of turns, as your creatures die, will vastly increase the flow of good cards to your hand. As a flavor note: if you are playing Jar of Eyeballs, PLEASE run the card One Dozen Eyes. The flavor is just too perfect.
Evolutionary Leap, Carnage Altar, Phyrexian Vault, and Culling Dais. These cards all allow you to gain card advantage if you are making token creatures and stay at parity if you’re just running normal creatures. Evolutionary Leap is at its best when you are running a decent number of creatures in your Wort deck—and if your creatures make token creatures themselves, then this can turn into a parade of value. Carnage Altar, Phyrexian Vault, and Culling Dais all have advantages and disadvantages: the Altar is best if your deck makes huge amounts of mana, the Vault is more mana-efficient and therefore better in less ramp-heavy decks, and the Dais is by far the easiest on your mana but also requires you to occasionally make hard choices. I recommend running Culling Dais and either the Altar or the Vault, depending on your average mana production.
Category 3: Recursion
Vengeful Rebirth and Volcanic Vision. These cards are both fantastic for Wort, since conspiring them means that you not only get two spells back (ripe for conspiring on future turns) but also get double the damage-dealing ancillary effects. As long as you have some moderately high casting costs on instants and sorceries in your deck—and, with Wort, you probably should—these cards will give you a huge amount of value.
Creeping Renaissance, Verdant Confluence, Praetor’s Counsel, and Genesis. These spells all allow you to get multiple cards back from the graveyard, and they can be very powerful as a result, but they all have drawbacks to a greater or lesser extent in a dedicated Wort deck. Creeping Renaissance is VASTLY underplayed in Commander overall, and doubling it through Wort’s conspire ability lets you choose two different permanent types (and then do it again when you flash it back, later in the game)…but because it can only hit permanents, you may find that it leaves some of a Wort deck’s most important cards stranded in the graveyard. Verdant Confluence has the same problem, but its great flexibility means that you are always going to be happy to conspire it with Wort: extra ramp is always good in a deck like this. Praetor’s Counsel can get back your non-permanent spells, and everyone knows how powerful it is, but casting it can put a huge target on your head, and there is no reason ever to conspire it with Wort. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run it: it just means you should be cautious. Genesis, the last card here, is the odd one out: it’s not an instant or sorcery, and it only lets you return creatures to your hand—but it’s one of the most reliable and effective recursion engines for green decks in general, especially when combined with Eternal Witness.
Regrowth, Recollect, Restock, Nostalgic Dreams, Surreal Memoir, and Shreds of Sanity. These cards are all quite effective in a Wort deck because conspiring them to get double the effect turns them into card advantage instead of merely parity. The first two, Regrowth and Recollect, are the most straightforward, but in a Wort deck they can become an engine: if you have a Regrowth already in the graveyard and draw a Recollect, you can conspire the Recollect to get any card PLUS the Regrowth, which can then be used to recover the Recollect, netting an extra card every time. Essentially, any two non-exiling Regrowth effects can provide you with a never-ending stream of recursion. Restock is just a powerful recursion effect: it isn’t capable of the same shenanigans because it exiles itself, but it already counts as card advantage, and conspiring it to get back four cards is big game. Nostalgic Dreams is a very powerful card, especially when conspired, since it can turn a few late-game bad topdecks into twice that amount of great cards from your graveyard: remember, with conspire, you don’t have to pay the costs twice in order to get twice the benefits. Surreal Memoir is a finicky card, but if your deck has enough instants so that it will never whiff, it is hard to imagine a better recursion card, since you can conspire both the original casting and the rebounded one. Shreds of Sanity should be very good in a deck based on casting and copying instants and sorceries: sadly, the “discard a card” part is not included in the cost, so you will still have to do it twice if you copy this card, but you could theoretically discard two lands while getting back two instants AND two sorceries, and that is just too much power to ignore.
As a final note for this category, there are a LOT of instants and sorceries that approximate Regrowth’s effects with various drawbacks. If you are interested in building a recursion-heavy Wort deck, consider some of the following: Woodland Guidance, Elven Cache, Revive, Make a Wish, Nature’s Spiral, Evolution Charm, and Wildwood Rebirth.
Category 4: Other Forms of Card Advantage
This category is the catch-all, where we can cover all the cards that don’t fit anywhere else. There are a lot of weird options available to ensure that you won’t run out of gas!
Sylvan Library, Abundance, Oracle of Mul Daya, Courser of Kruphix, and Scroll Rack. These cards are all about using the top of your deck as a resource, both for accumulating more mana and for getting free cards. Sylvan Library is obviously a fantastic card on its own, especially with 40 life to spend, and Abundance is great for not getting land-flooded, but it’s important to note that they are FANTASTIC when combined with each other. When you use Sylvan Library’s ability, you have to put back “cards in your hand drawn this turn.” If you replace all three draws (the two from Library plus your normal draw step) with Abundance triggers, you’re not actually drawing any cards that turn: you are using Abundance to “put [those] card[s] into your hand,” which is different, so you don’t have to put any back. Draw three cards a turn, and make sure you only draw lands when you want to! Oracle of Mul Daya and Courser of Kruphix are good on their own, too, but are even better when you can use Sylvan Library to put lands on top of your deck. The same is even more true for Scroll Rack, which can let you draw cards while using the Oracle and Courser to play lands that had found their way into your hand. And, of course, it’s worth noting that Mirri’s Guile and Sensei’s Divining Top are classic options for both controlling your topdecks and setting up free lands with Oracle and Courser. These cards cost a lot of money for a good reason!
Act on Impulse, Commune with Lava, and Genesis Wave. If the previous set of cards was focused on getting small advantages off the top of your deck, these are about digging much deeper. Act on Impulse and Commune with Lava are quite similar, although the greater expandability and better timing of Commune with Lava make it a much better choice for most Wort decks. Casting it at the end of somebody else’s turn, then untapping and playing a lot of the revealed spells, can turn a dismal board-state into a win pretty quickly. And speaking of going from nothing to winning—Genesis Wave is basically the ultimate card in that category, and conspiring it with Wort is even more impressive. Of course, it’s still not perfect, since Wort decks tend to feature a lot of important instants and sorceries that Genesis Wave will unceremoniously dump into the graveyard, but it’s still a huge effect that is generally good enough despite its awkward interaction with Wort-based deckbuilding.
Riddle of Lightning, Fated Conflagration, and Crystal Ball. Sometimes, it can be enough to increase your card quality rather than going all-out for card quantity, and scrying is a great way to do that. The first two spells here, Riddle of Lightning and Fated Conflagration, are especially perfect for a Wort deck because they can deal a really significant amount of damage while digging you toward important cards. Note, however, that Fated Conflagration can’t hit players and won’t scry unless cast on your turn. Crystal Ball is much less flashy that the other two options, but it can be a great addition to your Wort deck’s card-draw suite: nobody ever prioritizes destroying it, so it can dig you toward your card-advantage spells turn after turn.
Wheel of Fortune, Magus of the Wheel, and Memory Jar. This is an old effect, of course, and it doesn’t fit particularly well into a Wort deck since there is no reason to conspire Wheel of Fortune, but sometimes you just need a new hand. If your deck is very aggressive about playing out its hand, both of the pure “Wheel” effects can draw you seven new cards while making opponents discard their sandbagged late-game cards and get a new, unpredictable hand. It can be very dangerous to hand a four-player table this many new cards, but that effect is mitigated if everyone else had to discard four or five cards to get their new seven. Memory Jar is the much safer version of this effect, since you can use it during your turn, then play anything you want from your temporary hand while others can only play instants (and only if they have mana available). If you really like “Wheel” effects, keep in mind that Wheel of Fate and Reforge the Soul can serve as analogues to the cards pictured above.
Reiterate and Wild Ricochet. If you’re a Wort deck, then you’re in the business of copying spells. These cards are easy to underestimate, since people cast some very powerful spells in Commander. Also, some people don’t realize that you can use Reiterate to copy other people’s spells. Did somebody just cast a Tooth and Nail, Storm Herd, Time Stretch, Decree of Pain, or Comet Storm? Casting one of these cards, and then conspiring it, means that you are pursuing your opponents’ plans at least twice as well as they are. Reiterate, in particular, can be used with buyback to get incidental value from a lot of the spells that people cast. Getting two bonus ramp spells or removal spells can be a huge boon to your board position.
Balduvian Rage and Nahiri’s Wrath. These cards may seem pretty random, but they are often fantastic in a Wort deck. With Balduvian Rage, you often have a lot of mana, and you want to draw cards. Use this on an unblocked creature, and then conspire it, to deal a huge amount of damage and then draw two cards. You can even use it on other people’s creatures for a killing blow against a shared enemy, then get a Divination’s worth of extra cards! Nahiri’s Wrath is incredibly powerful with a Wort on the battlefield, particularly if you have already used cards from this article to fill up your hand: you don’t have to pay the cost twice, so you will be able to kill a LOT of creatures by discarding only a few cards.
Category 5: Cards That Only Work in Certain Playgroups
Compost, Reap, Fecundity, and Browbeat. These cards can be very powerful, but you have to know the people you play with: are there a lot of black decks around? If so, congratulations: you just gained access to Compost and Reap, two of the best card-advantage spells that green has. Do other people tend to play very few creatures? If so, that’s awesome: you can play Fecundity and draw cards whenever your creatures die, while not handing your creatureless opponents any free resources. (Fecundity is not usually worth it in “normal” playgroups because other people can draw more cards from it than you can.) Are the people you play with a bit selfish, or do they really worry about their life totals? If so, you have decent odds that a conspired Browbeat will let you draw three or six cards, since nobody will want to take the hit to stop you from doing so.
Now, in case you are not satisfied with all the cards mentioned above, or if you’re making a deck based on a different commander than Wort, the Raidmother, you can dig through the following pile of…
Cards That Probably Aren’t Good Enough (for Wort)
Hunter’s Insight
Control of the Court
Goblin Lore
Grim Flowering
Nature’s Resurgence
Sudden Reclamation
Gift of the Gargantuan
Enshrined Memories
Lead the Stampede
...and a lot of random cantrips—you can get two cards from a conspired cantrip, as mentioned in the description of Balduvian Rage above, but that doesn’t make them worthwhile.
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Well, thanks for going through this collection of cards with me! With the ability to conspire spells, and the powerful card-advantage options available to the color green specifically, there is no reason why your Wort deck should ever run out of gas!Now, please head to the comments and give me some requests for future Dig Through Time articles! We all know how hard and how satisfying deckbuilding in the Commander format can be, and there are often cards out there, lost in the mists of time, that are exactly what you’re looking for to make your deck run like clockwork.
A deck idea I have been thinking about for a while but never made it was a buffing Riku of Two Reflections, but I dont know where to go with practical, value buff instants and sorceries. I think it would be an interesting article *shrug*
ReplyDeleteIt would INDEED be interesting... I might have a go at this one!
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