“I was built for war. I’m the beginning and the end.”
Art:Ivy Seer
by Donato Giancola
Table of Contents
Today’s Featured Commander Is:
Ivy Seer is a wonderfully wacky commander; I haven’t been able to find anyone else playing this deck, and honestly, I’m a little surprised! This card is quite strong, and in a deck full of green cards, we can utilize our commander to up our damage and hit even harder than we normally do. This is a stompy deck with upside brought by our commander. This deck is not different from a typical stompy list, but the extra damage can be very tough for our opponents to deal with, especially when we add trample to the mix, which is very common within the deck and can be done quite often. This deck has been on my list for a long time and totally fits into the wacky, weird, and interesting category. Without further adieu, let’s get it!
The Deck:
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Ivy Seer Stompy!
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Why Ivy Seer?
Ivy Seer is a great asset for our deck; at our best, it’s a three mana +7/+7 and at its worst, it does nothing, due to the high amount of mana ramp within the deck, we are able to activate our commander’s ability without stopping what we want to do in a turn, and since we have so many trample effects and ways to give our creatures trample an extra buff helps us maximize our damage and hit hard. Ivy Seer is a great card but a card I don’t typically cast until we start to get a board going, I always would rather play out more mana ramp than cast our commander, they are an amazing support piece but don’t need to be out all the time.
Gameplan:
The gameplan for this deck is extremely simple; the whole goal of the deck is to ramp early and play out huge creatures, and use our commander as much as we can; for a starting hand all we really need is at least one big creature, and some mana ramp, in all of my testing games I only mulligan’d one time and that was a no-lander, this deck requires almost nothing to have a good game. The game plan for this deck is pretty similar to most green decks. As long as you keep on ramping and keep on casting, the game plan is on track for a win!
Deck Matchups:
Since this is Pauper EDH, there are an absolute ton of things that can tip a game in your favor or out of it. While an archetype may seem favorable, there are absolutely good and bad commanders for our deck to go up against; I have included both these, which were all played among my testing groups using various decks, and I have included the sample size for clarity purposes. This is just meant to be a guide after testing a bunch of games with this deck!
The information below is notes about specific decks that were featured in our testing pods and how we fared against them. Naturally, Pauper EDH is a multiplayer game, so these are just a summary of my notes against different commanders and strategies. When we test these decks we try to test to its strengths and weaknesses to give a full spectrum of what the deck has to offer. Various commanders and archetypes/strategies are used to get the most accurate information.
Commanders, we have a good matchup against:
Freelance Muscle
Record against Freelance Muscle 3-0
While our decks are pretty much doing the same thing, and it mostly comes down to the mana ramp race I still think this matchup is quite favorable. Being able to get all of their creatures out of the way with cards like Taunting Elf
gives us a pretty strong advantage against this deck.
Daru Warchief
Record against Daru Warchief 4-1
We can struggle early against this deck, and they can deal quite a bit of damage but once we get our big board established and start turning our big creatures sideways there isn’t much the soldiers can do against we are stronger in attacking and blocking, combine that with the general weaknesses mono-white and this matchup is great for us.
Plague Spitter
Record against Plague Spitter 3-0
Plague Spitter loves beating up on and bullying small creatures and token decks; luckily for us we are the exact opposite, while they are able to destroy some of our mana dorks they can almost never kill our big creatures so whether we ramp or it takes time we are pretty well-positioned once we get our big creatures out.
Commanders, we have a tough matchup against:
Glaring Fleshraker
Record against Glaring Fleshraker 0-4
This is a very tough matchup for our deck; while colorless doesn’t have a lot of utility or support cards they have a commander that we cant kill outside of combat that whittles us down and provides a ton of very fast mana ramp allowing them to drop huge Eldrazi on us before we are ready, this is a very tough matchup for our deck.
Tangle Angler
Record against Tangle Angler 0-3
Infections are rough for us, whether it is Fynn, Tangle Angler, or any of them; they can just kill us so quickly, and because of the large amount of proliferate effects at common, we usually die before we are able to get our feet under us.
Minthara, Merciless Soul
Record against Minthara, Merciless Soul 0-2
Minthara scales very quickly, and since there are quite a few proliferate effects within Orzhov this can be a very tough matchup when our opponents proliferate experience counters and swing at us hard with extremely buffed up tokens, combine that with a ton of removal and a commander that’s hard to kill and overall this is a rough one.
Deck Overview:
This section contains information about cards in the deck and how they function within the deck! I also highlighted some of my favorite cards in the deck!
Creatures:
Taunting Elf and Prized Unicorn
are two of the most important creatures in the deck since they clear the way for our huge creatures and allow us to deal a ton of damage, while these cards are both fairly cheap they are almost always used as finishers and are great ways to end the game, but lets not get ahead of ourselves, lets take a look at some of the cards that help us get there like all of the mana dorks we have which are all cheap and do nothing more than provide a ton of mana ramp which helps a lot and makes the overall gameplan much smoother. Some of our ramp pieces help us be a little stronger against aggressive strategies, with cards like Arboreal Grazer
being very strong blockers in the early game and helping us save a little life. Even if we do have take some early damage we can typically recover by utilizing Nylea's Disciple
which at its worst will gain us two life but, more often than not often gains us a ton more. We aren’t done with Nylea yet. We are also running Nylea's Forerunner
, which does exactly what the gameplan wants: it’s a decently aggressive creature that allows us to trample over our opponents. Now let’s talk about some of our awesome finishers like Annoyed Altisaur
, an expensive but absolutely worth-it attacker/blocker that gets even crazier when we play it early. I love utilizing our commander’s ability to get a huge trigger on one of my favorite finishers in Ambitious Dragonborn
, which is one of the primary ways I ended the game in testing.
Instants:
We can have slow starts, and against aggressive strategies who get the action going early, we have Moment's Peace
, which is quite strong against a variety of strategies and, in testing, saved my life a ton of different times. Since we have huge creatures that we love to buff, we have to protect them from removal with cards like Snakeskin Veil
and Ranger's Guile
, being able to protect our creatures even once or twice can be enough to give us the edge to get a win. We are quite offensive at instant speed and have some strong pieces of utility that allow us to draw some cards and get some buffs with cards like Charge Through
, Awaken the Bear
and Massive Might
, one of my favorite instants is Aspect of Hydra
, it’s extremely cheap provides a massive buff and when combined with one of our cards that gives trample allows us to one-shot or at least hit our opponent for a ton of damage.
Sorceries:
Soul's Might
is such a strong card in this deck; while it does cost a lot of mana being able to buff up a creature using our commanders ability the being able to cast Soul's Might to give them that buff permanently is insane and can help us end the game very quickly, especially with some of our bigger creatures like Generous Ent
and Annoyed Altisaur. Combining a creature buffed up with some of our trample enablers like Larger Than Life
and Confidence from Strength
allows us to beat pretty much any deck in combat and go over the top and hit our opponent’s life total. In a deck filled with ramp there is a very interesting piece in Broken Bond
, which is an amazing way to ramp and take out an opponent’s artifacts/enchantments for the most part; we don’t have a ton of removal for artifacts/enchantments so this card is quite strong at pretty much any stage of the game. For additional removal, we do have Atraxa's Fall
, which is another strong removal spell, and being able to kill a flying creature can help us an absolute ton against the right decks but is serviceable against decks with just a few flyers.
Artifacts:
Spare Supplies
is a perfect way to refill our hand and keep our commanders ability as strong as it can be, since we mana ramp a lot and can cast things early we can drop a lot of cards out of our hand so being able to keep a bigger hand for a bigger ability from our commander is key to maximizing our damage and for the overall gameplan. Wedding Invitation
is one of my favorite cards within the format. This card helps us keep our commander’s ability strong, and the unblockable can allow us to take out an opponent easily.
Enchantments:
Im sure it comes as no surprise that we have a ton of mana ramp within our enchantment package with strong and cheap enchantments like Wild Growth
and Utopia Sprawl
, which are perfect for the early-game and if dropped early in the game allows us to be very ahead of the curve. Being able to mana ramp early or at any time allows us to continuously activate our commander’s ability and keep the damage coming. Master Chef
is another huge highlight of our deck and is just pure value; more and more damage on every creature is good, and sometimes that one-mana definitely makes a huge difference and can be the difference between a win or a loss.
Strengths of the Deck:
- We have quite a bit of ramp and can speed out huge creatures quite early; this excess of mana also helps us activate our commander’s ability.
- We have a ton of different ways to give our creatures trample allowing us to hit hard and deal a ton of excess damage if our opponent decides to block.
- We have quite a couple of strong ways to guarantee damage, like Taunting Elf
and Prized Unicorn, which take all of the blockers from our opponents and let us do huge damage.
Weaknesses of the Deck:
- We don’t have a ton of card draw, we can still get some value out of our ability but we arent going to be giving a creature +10/+10 or anything like that.
- We are quite susceptible to damage within the early-game because we typically only commit mana dorks to the board in the early-game.
- We have very little removal within the deck.
Deck Stats:
Sample Hands:
Conclusion:
Thanks for reading to the end and for all of your support! This deck is a super interesting one, and I like it a lot. This deck feels, at least to me, like the quintessential example of a mono-green deck; a ton of ramps, huge creatures, and a ton of different sources of trample make up this deck, and it’s truly an example of what you see is what you get. And what you get is a very strong deck that hits like a truck and a commander that can help buff that damage a ton!