Confession time: I think Theros block is super cool, but I feel the majority of its coolness comes from its flavor implementation, rather than from its mechanics. Still, it does have a mechanic called MONSTROSITY so it would be criminal not to build a deck around it.
NEMESIS RISING
Specifically I’m interested in Nemesis of Mortals. Here’s a deck featuring that super-scary snake:
Lands:
20 Forest
20 Lands
Creatures:
4 Nemesis of Mortals
4 Splinterfright
4 Dawntreader Elk
4 Viridian Emissary
2 Uktabi Drake
4 Elvish Visionary
22 Creatures
Other Spells:
4 Culling Dais
4 Wildwood Rebirth
4 Beast Within
4 Bonehoard
2 Mighty Emergence
18 Other Spells
Ok, as you can imagine this deck centers around putting your own creatures into the graveyard to make Nemesis of Mortals easier to cast. This deck also features Splinterfright. This elemental will be your win condition in a lot of games, while your opponents worry about your 10/10 superviper they’ll likely ignore your 3/3 (or 5/5, or 9/9) trampler. Splinterfright also has the added bonus of making himself bigger by milling you for 2 every turn.
THE OTHER GUYS
The other creatures in this deck (and this is a creature-heavy deck) are largely there to be corpses. I chose them for their ability to sacrifice themselves or for the bonuses they give you when you feed them to a Culling Dais. Of special note are Dawntreader Elk and Viridian Emissary who pull double-duty of being tasty bones for splinterfright to wear AND building your mana up so you can BOOM-SHAKA-MONSTRIFY even faster.
NON-NOMNOMS
Although they’re in the minority, this deck features a few non-creature cards to help things along. The aforementioned Culling Dais draws you cards and gives you a sacrifice outlet, Wildwood Rebirth allows you to re-use your dead creatures, mighty emergence adds insult to injury making your bruisers even bigger. Note though that putting counters on Nemesis of Mortals doesn’t monstrify it, Monstrosity is its own ability. Bonehoard acts as a secondary Splinterfright, with the additional bonus of, say, turning an elvish visionary into a massive threat.
GRAVEYARD SHIFTS
If you wanted to add different cards to this deck you might consider swapping out Nemesis of Mortals for Ghoul Tree, thus getting all your power at once (there are pros and cons to both). Obviously throwing in some black would allow more graveyard synergy as well as more reliable ways to reanimate your creatures. Red could give you access to cards like Hissing Iguanar, adding bonus damage whenever you crunch a creature. Lastly, blue cards like Tome Scour would allow you to dump creatures into your graveyard even faster, but honestly I think the deck does a good job of that already.
There is a lot of room for customization with this deck, if you guys get a chance to put this together let me know how it plays and what changes you’d make.
2 Comments
I’ve found the Theros sorcery Commune With The Gods to be great at filling up my graveyard for a turn 3-4 Nemesis, turn 5-6 monstrosity. In addition, Karametra’s Acolyte has become my favorite mana dork in Monstrosity decks. While not useful in earlygame ramp, she’s amazing in the late game, when your devotion to green is five, six, eight… half the wins I get with my monstrosity decks, I get by using her to hard-cast a huge creature and Monstrous it at the same time.
Finally, I’ve found that monstrosity decks are more fun to play when you slowly stand, raising your fists above your head while yelling, “MONSTROSITY!!!!!” whenever you pop a big guy’s ability. Just a suggestion!
I played a similar deck in GP: Salt Lake City with Splinterfright and Ghoultree. Here are a few of my thoughts from playing the deck.
1) One of the toughest things I found with the deck was making sure that your deck had enough creatures to make Splinterfright awesome. I ran between 24 – 30 creatures depending on the build I had. All my other spells had Flashback so if I milled the spell, it still had some value.
2 )I was all into playing 4 – 8 Mana creatures. It helped to jump up to Splinterfright and other creatures.
3) I did actually run 2 versions that were both 2 color (but more difficult to make work): G/U and G/Black. G/U was nice cause I ran 2 more creatures that mill me and it gave me some side value (Dungeon Geists were kinda cool). G/B was good cause Grisly Salvage and Jarad are both awesome.
However, I do like the deck, and I hope it works out for you.