The Mycotyrant Self-Mill Saprolings

Commander Overview

The Mycotyrant is a very interesting commander; they are an amazing card for both fungi and saprolings but also interact extremely well with self-mill. Our deck takes advantage of both of these attributes, and we get a self-mill package in a Saproling deck. This best-of-both-worlds approach allows us to make Mycotyrant huge and fill our board with huge attackers. The Mycotyrant is an extremely formidable attacker for us as well, but we typically don’t attack with them; we would much rather keep them on the field. The Mycotyrant is an amazing support card for the deck, but it is not strictly necessary; if we don’t have it, the core game plan can still succeed.

How to Play the Deck

Playing the deck is extremely straightforward. We pretty much play our saprolings, play out our commander, and start going crazy! Going crazy can mean a lot of things in this deck. Still, with cards like Mirkwood Bats or Nadier’s Nightblade, we can turn our token creation and tokens leaving the battlefield into damage, combining that with some of our sac outlets like Viscera Seer, which can allow us to do huge chunks of damage to our opponents. While that is an example of what happens when the deck goes perfect, playing the deck really is quite easy, play out our stuff, trigger our commander as much as we can and fill the board, whether we whittle them down with Mirkwood Bats or swing with a huge Craterhoof Behemoth buffed board playing the deck is straightforward. This deck is good for a player of pretty much any skill level, as long as this isn’t their first game and they have a good understanding of the rules. This is a great deck for them and anyone else!

Synergy’s in the deck

Our whole deck is synergized around tokens and milling, and we have many sources of both. In contrast, we don’t have a huge self-mill package; we have cards that synergize extremely well with The Mycotyrant, being able to utilize cards like Altar of Dementia where we sacrifice all of our fungi and then create a ton more! Getting some more stuff in our graveyard or triggering cards like Grave Pact or Dictate of Erebos is very good and can devastate our opponents’ boards. This is just one of many synergies. Mycotyrant specifically synergizes extremely well with Overwhelming Stampede since Mycotyrant is often considerably bigger than the rest of our board.

Phases of the Game

Early-Game: Our early-game is actually a lot more exciting than a lot of decks. We have quite a few very cheap saprolings, and Mycotyrant only costs three, so getting them out is extremely easy. There isn’t much we are specifically looking for in the early game, just cast Mycotyrant and continue to build up our board.

Mid-Game: Things typically start to get out of hand by the time we hit the mid-game, we have a buffed up board, have been creating a ton of tokens and we can begin to go wide, we produce so many saprolings throughout the deck that we dont care if they die, because of this if an opportunity presents itself to attack we typically do, lowering our opponents life total at any stage of the game is great for us. In the mid-game, we continue to fill up our board.

Late-Game: By this point we have a very big board and can start playing some of our payoffs, by far the two best are Craterhoof Behemoth and Overwhelming Stampede, these can easily kill all of our opponents at once depending on the size of our board and are just amazing ways to end the game, if we need to going to combat with The Mycotyrant is a great option as well, they have trample and can hit like a truck if we have a big board.

Card Breakdowns

Ramp

We aren’t super great at ramping, but we really don’t have to be. We have a lot of early-game creatures, and our commander is quite cheap as well. Because of this, we are easily able to play out our entire game plan by simply hitting our land drops every turn. We do have Sol Ring and Arcane Signet, which can be great sources of early-ramp, but they certainly aren’t required

Card Draw/Card Advantage

Being in Golgari allows us to have a lot of cheap and consistent sources of card draw like Read the Bones, Night’s Whisper, and Sign in Blood. These are cheap draw spells with minimal life drawbacks; we are easily able to keep our hands full with these. We also have Village Rites, which is a great option when we have a lot of tokens on the battlefield, which is pretty much always; it also interacts greatly with cards like Grave Pact. Pitiless Carnage is another insane source of card draw, and with cards like Mirkwood Bats and Nadier’s Nightblade, if we sacrifice tokens primarily, we can turn this huge draw spell into a ton of damage as well, truly a best of both worlds situation. We are very good at drawing cards in this deck, and we rarely have an empty hand.

Removal

We have a sufficient removal package in this deck, while we aren’t going to be able to remove everything on our opponents boards (except if we have Grave Pact or Dictate of Erebos we have a strong removal package with access to cards like Assassin’s Trophy and Beast Within we can destroy our opponents stuff cheaply. We also have Lethal Scheme, which is a true home run for our deck. Not only can we use our tokens to convoke it out, but getting those tokens to connive can allow us to trigger The Mycotyrant, which can be extremely strong. I’ve mentioned them many times before, but Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos are basically board wipes for the deck and can be an amazing source of removal for even indestructible cards like Kozilek, Butcher of Truth. Our removal package is great and can allow us to remove the best stuff our opponents have and truly control the board.

Protection

We have a few sources of protection in the deck, but not a ton. We do have Heroic Intervention, which is a format staple for a reason and a cheap and good piece of protection. Whether we use it in a bad combat or to protect our creatures/commander, it is a strong option to have. If combat goes very badly for us, we also have Golgari Charm, whose regenerate option can allow our board to keep on keeping on. We have a pretty small protection package, but with a cheap commander and overall cheap cost, we can rebuild pretty easily.

Utility / Support

We have a ton of amazing cards that support our Saproling game plan and our Minor Mill package. I will highlight some of my favorites from both packages in the deck. We are quite good at milling cards and triggering our commander. We are greatly aided by Golgari Grave-Troll and Aftermath Analyst, which are both great ways to fill up our graveyard and, more importantly, trigger our commander. We don’t care if they are fungi or saprolings; we want them on the field. Saprolings are way more supported than mill in this deck, and we have some great cards like Mycoloth, which synergizes extremely well with our overall game plan and, more importantly, helps to fill up our board. Shroofus Sproutsire is another card that is extremely powerful and allows us to produce a ton of saprolings! Tendershoot Dryad is another great piece of utility for our deck. It is criminally easy to get the city’s blessing, and once we have it, we turn our board of simply 1/1’s into 3/3’s, which can make a tremendous difference since we can go so wide. I also want to highlight Springleaf Parade, which is not only a great source of token production, but the mana we can get from it allows us to dump our whole hand on the field.

Mana Base

We don’t have a lot of exciting nonbasics. Still, we are very good at getting both of our colors established we have a large collection of Golgari dual lands that allow us to cast our commander and all of our stuff, since we have a pretty low overall cost throughout the deck i found that thirty-four lands worked great for this deck and had no issues with the mana base in testing.

Win Conditions

Our primary win condition is combat; this is greatly assisted by Craterhoof Behemoth or Overwhelming Stampede, but since we go so wide, we can easily end games with just all of our creatures. We don’t have any other ways to end the game, but doing it through combat is sufficient.

Strengths of the Deck

We have great matchups against other token decks since we go very wide.

Our commander is an extremely strong source of token production; they can fill up our board extremely quickly.

Weaknesses of the Deck

We are quite susceptible to board effects like Toxic Deluge, while we are able to rebuild fairly quickly it can certainly stop our momentum.

We need at least a few creatures on the board for our commander to survive, as big as they can be, they can fall quite quickly, too.

Deck Testing/Matchups

I tested this deck against three different decks

Game 1: Vs Talion, the Kindly Lord. Matchup Record: 2-2

This was a split matchup for our deck, but it was overall ok. If we are aggressive towards Talion and can resolve and keep our commander, we should be ok, but Talion is a card draw machine and can absolutely lock down the game. Hard focusing them and killing Talion quickly is ideal.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Assassin’s Trophy, Beast Within and Scatter the Seeds.

Game 2: Vs Baylen, the Haymaker. Matchup Record: 3-1

This was a great matchup for our deck. While Baylen can go pretty wide, we can actually go quite a bit wider. There are a lot of 1/1’s just smashing into each other in this game, but since we have so many tokens and fill up our board quite quickly, we can typically come out on top.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Golgari Grave-Troll, Sporecrown Thallid and Tendershoot Dryad.

Game 3: Vs Greasefang, Okiba Boss. Matchup Record: 4-0

We are just a lot faster than Greasefang; they can get scary, but by that point, we can be very hard to stop. There’s no reason to deviate from the normal game plan here; swing hard and be aggressive, and things should go just fine here.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Scatter the Seeds, Springleaf Parade and Sprout Swarm.

Conclusion

Thanks so much for reading to the end! I hope you all enjoyed this one. The Mycotyrant is a very cool deck, and it’s refreshing to see not super supported creature types like Fungi and Saprolings get some love. While we all love elves and goblins, it is quite amazing to see more creature types. Mycotyrant is a blast of a deck, and if you like weird and wacky little dudes, then it is certainly the deck for you.