Green Control
- bonzaientertainmen
- Sep 1
- 8 min read
I've been plugging along with these 4 color decks through the year. At some point, I realized I've neglected mono colored decks. I really wanted a pallet cleanser. A lot of the time, when you increase the number of colors in a deck, you increase the complexity of it and increase the amount of thought that goes into each play. I wanted to streamline. I can do that with my deck, no problem, but it gets even more rewarding for me if I simplify your deck too.
Simplifying my play patterns is easy: play powerful creatures, remove threats, and attack to knock out opponents. Simplifying your deck is another matter. The easiest way is to limit when opponents can play spells. White is notorious for these types of effects, whereas Green is not. If I can't limit when you play spells, I certainly can limit how many spells you cast. The number of resources used in a game is a great corollary for who's going to win. If you make it through those 2 lines of defense, I want to ensure there's some other downside for you having cast a spell. I want opponents to feel like they're in quicksand; every step they take only serves to pull them further under.
Limiting when opponents can play cards was surprisingly easy. My commander will actually fill this role for me. Dosan the Falling Leaf is a 2/2 Legendary Human Monk for 3 mana. More importantly, he limits players to only casting spells on their own turns. With him out, the days of counterspells and instant speed removal are a thing of the past. Dosan is devastating when I play him on turn 3. Once he's on board, my opponents' whole strategies warp around my commander.
There isn't much else out there in Green to control when opponents can play spells, so I need to protect Dosan. With his ability, I can't be reactive, I have to be proactive. Snakeskin Veil and Heroic Intervention aren't going to cut it here. I fell back on some classics. Darksteel Plate is very simple, it just makes the equipped creature indestructible. It's a small upfront investment, but well worth it. I also included Trollhide. It's a great mana sink later on. Dosan the Falling Leaf gets to be a formidable attacker or blocker with a steady stat boost of +2/+2. Tyrite Sanctum is a little slow, but is very rewarding. It even speeds up with effects like Quest for Renewal.
With the question of "When" settled, I needed to limit how many spells could be cast. The main way I go after this is via casting cost, but it could also be achieved with limiting card draw or Rule of Law effects that limit the number of spells that can be cast in a turn. The key to this type of deck is to break parity. I need to get ahead of the problem I create. If I look to increase costs, I can increase my available mana, and it just so happens I'm in green and can ramp out rather quickly.
Sphere of Resistance is a simple way to add 1 mana to all casting costs. Me too. That's not great, but it's a known quantity for me to navigate in the future. Thorn of Amethyst isn't as extreme as creature spells dodge the tax. Damping Sphere goes about this in a roundabout fashion. It taxes players for each spell they've already cast in a turn. Your first spell is unaffected, but the second takes an additional 1 to cast. It continues to scale after that. Damping Sphere usually only gets hate from the storm slinger type players, where they are trying to cast many spells all on the same turn. With Dosan though, everyone is playing like that since everyone is limited to casting on their own turn. So this little artifact gets me a little more heat than usual in this deck. I've been lucky where opponents don't catch on right away, but opponents are usually smart enough to put 2 and 2 together. There was this one guy though....he couldn't wrap his head around what was going on.
With all these STAX effects making my spells cost more I needed to break parity with my opponents. I'm in Green, so my first answer was simple: play more lands. It's so simple, it might just work (it does work). Caged Sun is pricey but it offers a lot. It makes all my lands produce double green mana, since I'm always choosing Green. It also provides a little stat boost to my Green creatures. It's not going to turn Dosan into a commander damage threat, but with enough creatures out the extra power adds up. I also added Rhonas's Monument. Creatures play a big part in my strategy, so the mana reduction extends to a solid portion of my key cards. I also have Extraplanar Lens in the deck. I'm thinking about adjusting the mama base to Snow Lands to reduce the likelihood that other players benefit from the effect. I just don't have a critical mass of Snow-Covered Forests floating around right now.
Breaking parity led me to another strategy: putting creatures directly into play. This turned out to be a great way around my own strategy. In a world where my opponents are paying extra mana and are limited to only casting spells on their own turns, I could just use activated abilities to put permanents directly into play. Yisan, the Wandering Bard is an old boogeyman of the format. For 3 mana and a tap he goes to find a little guy in my library and put him right onto the field. Every time I do this I have to grab a bigger beater out of my deck. I get capped out eventually but its a wild ride, especially with something like Quest for Renewal, Yisan helps put counters on the Quest and then the Enchantment pays him back by untapping Yisan on everyone's turn. My favorite line for Yisan goes Spore Frog->Collector Ouphe->Manglehorn. It's bad for people thinking they can attack me and have me use Dosan as a blocker and worse for people running artifact heavy strategies. They still cast their cards, but at a premium and without expecting to use them for another turn. Take that Sol Ring. Between Yisan and Eladamri, KorVecDal, I can change the feel of the deck, for opponents and for me. It's like being able to play at instant speed when everyone else is stuck at Sorcery.
Green is actually very good at messing with artifacts. I already talked about Collector Ouphe and Manglehorn. They shut off and slow down artifacts. Everyone if running mana rocks, I've never played a game where someone runs 0 mana generating artifacts. Those effects are a little fragile since they're tied to creatures, so I had to make these effects more resilient. Root Maze is a one drop enchantment that makes artifacts enter tapped. It also happens to hit lands. All lands, not just non basics. After a certain point, probably turn 6, the effect isn't very impactful as people have multiple resources available, but opponents don't necessarily believe or feel that. Hum of the Radix goes a bit further. It taxes each artifact relative to how many artifacts someone already owns. Essentially, mana rocks are just used to pay the cost they induce on the next mana rock you want to play. The deck starts to feel like quicksand, where everything an opponent does makes them sink further in. There's no getting ahead.
I wanted to build on that quicksand feeling. As bad as it sounds, opponents feel really accomplished if they can pull themselves out of the hole. It's like a minigame. Even if I win in the long run, opponents feel competent and accomplished for having beaten the cycle of abuse they are in. Arasta of the Endless Web rewards me with a Spider token any time someone else plays an instant or sorcery. Wandering Archaic forces my opponents to pay 2 or let me have a copy of each instant or sorcery they cast. My favorite has to be Managorger Hydra. This simple creature grows with each spell that is cast. He grows very large very quickly. OK, a little less so with the stax pieces out, but he still gets big. Lurking Predators on the other hand, makes my gameplay much smoother. If this is out when an opponent casts a spell I can look at the top card of my library and put it into play if it happens to be a creature. If it's not a creature, I can choose to keep it on top or drop it to the bottom of my library.
I have one more group of cards that really fit the quicksand motif. They punish opponents and just so happen to give me a little advantage. I'm talking about curses. Curse of Clinging Webs is great removal after the fact. It exiles the cursed player's creatures when they die. This really hampers a graveyard strategy. When the exiling happens I get rewarded with a spider token. Curse of Predation rewards most of my opponents for being aggressive. People love +1/+1 counters and this is an easy way to stack them on your creatures. Curse of Bounty also encourages aggression. With so many of my effects causing permanents to be or stay tapped, opponents are really incentivized to attack just to untap.
Green doesn't have a lot of curses, but I've found a couple more cards that feel like curses when they're played. March of the World Ooze is OK when Dosan is out, changing all my creatures in 6/6s. The card really shines when Dosan is off the field, which happens fairly often. When they start letting the instants fly, opponents buy me a 3/3 elephant that gets pumped to a 6/6 right away. There's a newer artifact out of Thunder Junction that fits this theme too; Bounty Board. I don't use it as a mana rock, but rather as a way to remove troublesome creatures. Those bounty counters encourage my opponents to do my dirty work for me and remove the creature I tagged with the counter. If so, we all get rewarded with a card and 2 life. It's great.
So where does the deck stand now? Here.
Mana Web | Katabatic Winds | |
Archetype of Endurance | ||
Scavenging Ooze | ||
Battle Mammoth | ||
Liquimetal Torque | Viridian Revel | |
God-Pharoh's Statue | Rampant Growth | Aethervial |
Hall of Gemstones | Up the Beanstalk | Tranquil Frillback |
Winter Moon | Extraplanar Lens | Broken Bond |
Primal Order | Caged Sun | Reclamation Sage |
City of Solitude | Cryptolith Fragment | Scour from Existance |
Rhonas's Monument | Desert Twister | |
Freyalise's Wind | Awakening Zone | Pest Infestation |
Kogla, the Titan Ape | ||
Tsabo's Web | Collective Resistance | |
Titania's Song | Ezuri's Predation | Temur Sabretooth |
All is Dust | Bow of Nylea | |
Timeless Witness | Bonds of Mortality | |
Eternal Witness | Elvish Piper | Harmonize |
Quest for Renewal | Return of the Wildspeaker | |
Scavenger Grounds | Desert of the Indomitable | Tranquil Thicket |
Bonder's Enclave | War Room | |
Slippery Karst | Gingerbread Cabin | Blast Zone |
Ghost Quarter | Tectonic Edge | Forest x25 |
I enjoyed playing the deck and seeing what Green can do. I've never seen a deck like this out at FNM before, and that's one of the reasons I put it together. The deck is not perfect in this form. It actually creates some tension within itself. I feel that a lot with my ramp options. A lot of those slots are taken up by artifacts. If you haven't noticed, this deck hates on artifacts pretty hard. These cards offer some explosive potential in a game but at the cost of being slow. It would move a lot smoother with some spells that put multiple lands on the battlefield at once. Either way, I'm keeping Liquimetal Torque. Green is good at removing artifacts, so it's a great way to threaten permanents of the field.
If I choose to make a change in direction, I'll let you know. For now, I'm happy to move on to new ideas and deal with more proactive decisions from my opponents.
Thanks for reading and all the support to date. I have affiliate links with Mana Pool and TCG Player to help fund these off the wall strategies. It's what makes all this possible.
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