What is Dead May Never Die - a MonoGreen Primer

Hello Magic Players! My name is Joshua Holtzman (otherwise known as Thief_Of_Crowns on MTGO) and I’m going to be your guide today. Let’s take a journey from Timmy to Jenny to Spike and see how an old menace is returning in a big way to pioneer.

If you played any pioneer in 2023, you probably encountered or at least heard of MonoGreen Storm. While it didn’t win many of the biggest events of the year, the specter of the deck had a vice grip on the format, forcing almost every deck to be playing some form of hate, be it in the form of Grafdigger's Cage, Damping Sphere, or any of the other wonderful and creative ways to pretend to stop it. Unfortunately for those of us who loved the deck, The End was inevitable, and as public sentiment continued to Turn Against the deck, our hero, Karn, the Great Creator, succumbed to WOTC's whims.

Some of us remained, holding out hope for a future of the deck, as the true engine, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, was left untouched. I personally brewed mono green Collected Company, and worked on other versions with the more modern big green beaters. We saw exciting new tech like Tribute to the World Tree and Sunken Citadel. Soon, there arose big green stompy, a deck utilizing Nykthos and the green shell to ramp up to 7 mana and resolve a chonky threat. This made Timmy and Tammy very happy. Unfortunately, the deck lacked the consistency required to put up strong results.

Then suddenly, there was a change. We got a new piece with Leyline of the Guildpact, a card that made ripples but no true waves in pioneer, but enabled the deck to rack up to four devotion on turn 0 by starting on the battlefield if it was in your opener. Unfortunately, this lacks consistency, so it made the deck better, but failed to fix the underlying problem with mono green. What we really needed was just over the horizon.

Those of us who remembered the good old days of comboing off with Karn and any of the wild assortment of loops were disappointed by these lists and their lack of win condition beyond ye olde beatdown. Then, along comes a hidden gem. In a POWERHOUSE of a set, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, with absolute monster cards like Simulacrum Synthesizer and Pillage the Bog alongside gems like Freestrider Lookout, Astral Cornucopia, and (my personal favorite) Collector’s Cage, came a card that is still being overlooked: Outcaster Trailblazer. A seemingly innocuous 4/2 for 3 with upside, Outcaster Trailblazer is the new Karn of the mono green archetype. Or perhaps more accurately, more nonlegendary copies of the actual second-best card in the deck, Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner.

The Johnnys and Jennys of the audience know what happens when a card says draw a card whenever a condition is met if that condition isn’t too hard to pull off. So brings forth a new era of combo in mono green. This deck no longer produces infinite mana, it simply produces enough mana. What is it enough for? Well it’s enough to draw/mill your entire library and cast all your spells. Thassa's Oracle was seriously considered as the win condition for this absolute monster of a combo. Instead, a more traditional choice was selected in Ulvenwald Oddity / Ulvenwald Monstrosity. Giving your board of 4 (and 1) power creatures +1/+1, haste, and trample tends to close out the game. This list has seen variant after variant, some playing cards like Cactusfolk Sureshot, others Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines, but they’re all reliant on Nykthos producing silly quantities of mana and setting up cards like Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner to keep the engine whirring.

Then it starts to click. The deck starts to trophy leagues, and the brewers start to take notice. Around this time the list is starting to garner attention from professional players and brewers, but it hasn’t quite shown up in force. I personally wound up in 10th in two RCQs back to back; knowing I had something, I brought in some of the strongest mono green players of 2023, Kazi Baker and Dana Fischer. Between their help and the insights of brewers such as Jennifer Carson, the deck started to truly materialize. Then, on the weekend of May 18th 2024, Thief_Of_Crowns went 7-2 to finish in 12th of 254 in a MTGO super qualifier, and finished second in back to back challenges later in the week. Kazi Baker top 8'd and then won back-to-back SoCal RCQs playing a nearly identical list. The next week, teammate Dana Fischer put up back-to-back top 8s as well, also winning her second one. Adam Fischer also contributed his own top 8, and bubbled the next day in 9th on breakers as he watched his daughter win the entire event.  This is where we find ourselves today, reviewing the return of what was once a menace to the format. Azax won a Challenge playing a variant of the deck on May 20th, marking the first mid-level online event win for the deck.

Buckle your seatbelts Spikes, because you’re in for a wild ride.

On first pass this seems like a classic list. As you start reading through the specifics, however, you’ll notice a few unusual choices. The first thing many of you will pick up on is Deafening Silence, as it simply isn’t a green card. As it turns out, that doesn’t matter. Between Leyline of the Guildpact, Outcaster Trailblazer, Sunken Citadel, and Temple Garden, white mana is fairly easy to produce, and Deafening Silence causes a lot of problems for decks like Arclight Phoenix and Lotus Field without being too detrimental for our gameplan, *coughcough* Damping Sphere coughcough… There is a true shocker in this list, however. Hostile Hostel. We'll come back to the Hostel a bit later.

Combo

Let’s look at the combo more abstractly. There are three primary resources in Magic:The Gathering: Cards, Mana, and Tempo. The great thing about a combo deck is that as long as you don’t fall too far behind on tempo and lose, you can use the other resources to win spontaneously. So, as we’re looking at this deck primarily as a combo deck, we can ignore tempo (although this will be discussed later). Now we have cards and mana. Most of the deck does something ridiculous with one of these two vectors. Elves and Leylines accelerate mana at the cost of a card, while the rest of the deck consists of cards that generate more cards if certain conditions apply. With eight copies of the Kiora static ability giving us draw power, all of our midrange creatures convert themselves into new cards, many of which are doing so while increasing our devotion significantly. Another notable effect is the ability to either untap Nykthos or have a fresh one enter from the library, with 12 instances of this effect, we can often convert a small net mana off of Nykthos into a cascading system of mana generation. When doing this, keep an eye out for ways to produce extra mana that’s conditional, as this deck plays both Sunken Citadel and Castle Garenbrig (sometimes).

Before getting into how to actually combo, let's talk Hostel. Many of you may not have even heard of this terrible joke card. It is a colorless land that allows you to sacrifice a creature for 1 mana in addition to tapping it in exchange for one of three counters required to flip it into a 3/7 creature with some marginally useful text. It’s a one of in the list, but I would struggle to find a more important combo piece outside of Ulvenwald Oddity.

So here’s an example of the spicy high-roll…

Turn 0 Leyline

Turn 1 forest - elf

Turn 2 Nykthos, make 5 mana, Kiora, untap Nykthos, make 6 mana, Storm the Festival

Turn 3 You’re going off, you’re going to draw your whole deck, but sometimes you mill all of your Ulvenwald Oddities during that process, instead of having to pass the turn and giving your opponent a chance to response, you cheat in Hostile Hostel off of a Cavalier of Thorns or a Storm the Festival and sacrifice a Cavalier to the Hostel, putting Oddity back on top to then get brought into play, lining up a win.

Lines to watch out for:

• Comboing off, then using Kiora to untap Lair of the Hydra to dump leftover mana after flipping Oddity
• Using Kiora to untap Nykthos before casting Storm but not activating the Nykthos until after the Storm resolves and adds more devotion (the reason being that if you hit another Kiora, another Nykthos, and a Troll or similar creature, it’s better to replace Kiora than to replace Nykthos as while they add the same mana, replacing Kiora draws you another card)
• Sacrificing Troll to Hostile Hostel to then put it on a land and sacrifice that land to make a 4/4 to draw cards off of Trailblazer/Kiora
• Attacking Invasion of Ixalan to exchange one devotion for having a 4/3 enter (and waiting to do so until it draws you cards)

Special Section: PLOTTING THE TRAILBLAZER

Plot your Outcaster Trailblazers. This is NOT a midrange deck. A 4/2 body is not a threat, it’s a target. Plot the Trailblazer and use that +1 mana to be efficient on a future turn. If you want a tempo plan, it’s simple, play Old-Growth Troll. A 4/4 for 3 with trample and upside is VERY good tempo and if you can play it on turn 2, which is common, you can apply *some* pressure. The problem is right now, most decks in the format simply don’t care about your pressure. The tempo is there to give you time to combo, not to win games. Against mono-black discard, you can periodically steal a game by playing two trolls and hitting your opponent with them. Otherwise tempo wins are scarce and require just the right hand to be viable.

Keeps/Mulls

So what hands are you keeping? Frankly, a LOT of 1-land hands are keepable. Any hand that has Leyline and can either activate Nykthos or cast Invasion of Ixalan is keepable. The goal is some form of mana acceleration and some form of draw power. Pitch 7’s that don’t do anything until turn 3 and mulligan for hands that go off. You’re going to lose some games to having to keep a bad 5 or going to 4, but the 6’s that win make up for it easily. Storm the Festival is 4 cards in one, so don’t be afraid to sacrifice card advantage in the early game to make sure you can do silly things quickly.

Lists:

Note: both lists missing 4x invasion of Ixalan,  for some reason our decklist feature won't recognize those cards

To address a notably absent card from the above lists: Wolfwillow Haven. It’s a good card. It’s not in my deck. The top two decks, representing nearly ¼ of my matches, play Thoughtseize. Monogreen NEEDS a certain threat density to be able to play through hand disruption, and in my experience, 12 nonland dead cards is about the limit (being the 8 elves and 4 leylines). If I wanted to bring in Wolfwillow Haven, I would be cutting some other element of ramp, and I think that Wolfwillow Haven is simply the 4th best option in a situation where you only have space for three.

Now for my personal data from MTGO:

As should be apparent, The deck excels at winning against decks that are heavy on interaction and struggles against deck that play their own Game Plan to early and decisive wins. This is different from the way green used to function, as the combo is far more resilient than it previously was. Removing Karn used to cause a stumble, but Trailblazer being such a ridiculous source of card advantage let’s you keep playing long past when another deck would’ve folded to having combo pieces Thoughtseize’d away.

Let’s look at each matchup individually:

Rakdos Vampires

This is a matchup where what matters isn’t how you win but how you lose. Vampires has Thoughtseize and Fatal Push, so they’re adept at slowing your combo, but they take their time killing you with most of their threats being Bloodtithe Harvester and Fable, that said, Sorin does give some direct damage and they can get around your wall of blockers occasionally. This is true in most of your games where Vein Ripper is not involved. Vein Ripper is a clock and you have about two turns to either answer it or combo off before you’re too far gone. Sorin giving out +1/+1 counters means that you need two reach creatures to trade with it, but most of the time you’re chump blocking and buying time to find Pick Your Poison or a win. Don’t be afraid to chump block with Cavalier to get the death trigger. Statistically, we have found this to actually be our best matchup. Most of the time they cannot kill you quickly enough to prevent you from having a combo turn, and often even if you do not "finish" combo, you put up enough power and toughness to make the game all but unwinnable. Additionally, your sideboard is excellent against the deck, as you can always go with more Pick Your Poison should you want to.

MonoBlack Discard

Eventually, you’ll topdeck Storm the Festival. Don’t worry about comboing too fast, just line up some Outcasters, get some bodies on board, and set up to draw a bunch of cards all at once. Having a Pick Your Poison or two to answer Waste Not is generally a good idea. The biggest thing you’re afraid of in this matchup is Sheoldred. It’s normal in these matchups to leave Outcaster Trailblazer plotted for 2-4 turns while you wait for the right moment to strike. This has been our second best matchup, as even though they have more and better disruption than the Rakdos deck, they are worse at closing us out.

Phoenix

Play creatures with reach so they can’t win, play Deafening Silence so they can’t win, play some kind of answer to Ledger Shredder so they can’t win. Take your time and combo when convenient. Watch out for Temporal Tresspass and Lightning Axe. Note that you can and often should name white with Sunken Citadel, and that outside of that you have Leylines and Trailblazers to make white mana, or you can use Storm to cheat in the Silence. This matchup is legitimately tough, as they do have draws which beat you, and going forward, have the easiest adjustments to make in sideboards with cards like Aether Gust and Thing in the Ice being potential roadblocks to our gameplan.

Bring to Light

Go hard when you know you’re winning, otherwise hold back and be ready for Sunfall. Treat this matchup like control, except their deck is somehow worse? Not sure how they managed to do that.

Amalia

You’re going to struggle to combo faster than them so look for hands that have some fast mana that can respond to their combo. This is your only losing matchup amongst the top decks in the format - as of yet, at least. Their deck is fragile and you have the pieces to hit it hard. You are really just looking for fastest combo pre-board (mull for leyline or any turn 3/4 setup) and post board, any sideboard piece is pretty solid interaction. Remember, you are one of the few decks that can kill post-combo, as often you can do 100+ dmg in a single turn, although it can be difficult starting from no board.

Burn / Prowess

Red deck gonna do red deck things. Sticking an early midrange beater is usually enough to give you the time you need to set up your combo. Slickshot Showoff is a serious issue, although if you can block it once, you're usually doing well enough to win the game. Often, this matchup is basically if they get to a bird before you stall them with a troll. This is still an overall winner, though.

To summarize, Green gud. It's obviously been a bit easier over these past few weeks, what with sideboard hate being scarce, and people being unprepared, but I will say from our side of things, the deck is more explosive than ever. There have been multiple matches in witch TLK members and myself have won from virtually nothing. The deck is capable of turn two wins. Pioneer right now is a very broken format, and right now, I think Green fits right into that mold. This deck is a house, and the linearity of it means I highly recommend taking it to your local RCQs if you feel like you can get the combo lines down and figure out your keeps  and mulls. It's so damn strong, it may need to get banned again by the time RC Washington D.C. comes around.

-Josh Holtzman (ft. Kazi Baker)