I've built and unbuilt this deck many times over a couple years. This is my millionth iteration of Wort. I tried Riku for a while and didn't like it. I have played several different versions of this deck with different levels of competitiveness, but this is the one that I think functions the best.
Because it is different, I'm gonna explain the choices that I made. But first, the most important part, the list.
This deck plays a bit differently than the normal version of Wort, The Raidmother. So I will start out with some explanation of the normal wort in order to highlight the differences.
Overview
Wort is a generally a deck focused around spells. She has a couple main themes in multiplayer decks. Most decks are usually some mix of token spawning, land ramp and some big spells. Land Ramp
Most people like land ramp spells because they are extra value in wort and seriously, who doesn't want more land. Cards that put lands into play untapped are especially effective. Commonly seen spells include, Cultivate, Skyshroud Claim and Explosive Vegetation Tokens
The tokens work for wort because they better allow you to copy your spells. Having a mix of green and red token producers is also important, due to the nature of the conspire ability. Common spells include one shot effects like gelatinous genesis and Crush of Wurms as well as permanents that make tokens like Ant Queen and Siege-Gang Commander. Big Spells
There are quite a few options as far as big spells go, so I will just name a few. Banefire, Comet Storm, Praetor's Counsel, and Wurmcalling
The Inspiration
This deck was born out of a hatred for the Blue/Black control decks in my meta and my inability to interact with them along the same axes as they were. So I built this deck to be a Combo/Control deck, like the blue black decks in my meta, but not the same deck. Thus, this deck has some differences from the normal Wort decks.
Regarding Ramp
The number one difference is the lack of land ramp. I find ramp decks tend to overextend a lot and leave themselves vulnerable to land destruction. I find it very important to efficiently spend resources in a control deck, so Land ramp was not an option. Instead of land ramp, I have opted to play mana doublers, some of which provide an advantage to my opponents but they do not require me to extend as much land ramp does. They also significantly increase the explosiveness of the deck.
How to Control
The next step was finding controlling elements in Red and Green. There are two major ways to do this. Land destruction and Copying Spells.
Spells such as Reiterate and Fork are important because they can counter counterspells as well as take advantage of the mana your opponents spent on their spells for a low cost. Anyone who has ever cast Wild Ricochet on Identity Crisis or Cruel Ultimatum can attest to how wonderful this is.
The second control element is less popular, but still very necessary. Much like blue decks rely on counterspells to prevent their opponents from running away with the game and casting game breaking spells, this deck relies on land destruction to prevent your opponents from running away with the game. Land Destruction for the sake of land destruction doesn't make you any friends, but if you use it to keep a player off 5 lands you will be doing yourself a lot of good. Also, Land destruction conspired by Wort can be very helpful for sealing away a game.
How We Win
and Possibly the most important part of the deck (aside from having fun of course, but thats subjective and another topic entirely). Winning. No one will want to play against your deck ever again if you just destroy everyones' lands and just durdle for the next 30 turns, the Land destruction is not in the deck for greifing people. Anyway, this deck wins the way that most Wort decks do by casting and copying large spells. Some notable favorites include Comet Storm, Rude Awakening, and Casting Unwilling Recruit on someone else's general or even Wort.
Creatures Arbor Elf and Magus of the Candelabra - These cards both interact well with the mana doublers and Magus works well with the nonbasic lands. Both are also good for conspiring with Wort. Summoning sickness doesn't matter for conspire so thats an added benefit.
Keeper of Progenitus - I like this better than Mana Flare or Heartbeat because it is A.) a Creature and B.) is a bit more restrictive so is less likely to benefit my opponents. Especially those also probably playing control.
Steel Hellkite - First of all, this card is sweet and very versatile removal. More importantly it is a win-con because I can dump huge amounts of mana into it and hopefully kill someone. Kamahl, Fist of Krosa is also a really cool fun mana dump.
Instants Artifact Mutation - This is nearly my favorite artifact removal because it generates creatures to use for conspiring while still being cheap artifact removal. Its awesome. I would like it a bit more if it hit enchantments too.
Berserk - This is primarily used for cheap creature removal. In a 40 life format, the damage from a creature usually doesn't matter too much. It can also double as a win con because Berserk + some copy spell and a two creatures to conspire with makes Wort deadly with General Damage.
Early Harvest - This is predominantly for generating huge amounts of mana for game ending spells. It can also be used to ramp out multiple spells in a turn with Wort in play. Fun fact, it is also an infinite mana combo with Reiterate.
Manamorphose - This is the poor man's (i.e. Red and Green) ponder. The great part is that it is free and can be used to hit some of the double mana costs in this deck. The cantrip is really great too. This card is basically my favorite card to conspire because it turns into a Divination for +2 mana.
Skred - This seems like an eclectic card choice, but this is some of the best removal in the deck. It usually does at least 5 damage and can take down larger creatures that green and red often have problems with.
Reiterate, Reverberate, Shunt, Wild Ricochet, Ricochet Trap and Fork - This is my counter suite. These spells allow you to interact with the stack in close to the same way that blue does and not allow other people to get what they want.
Vines of Vastwood - This is largely used to protect Wort, Vorinclex and Seedborn Muse from removal because they tend to attract a lot of hate. They can also be used to do some serious damage general damage with wort.
Sorceries
Removal - Largely I try to avoid removal that only has one purpose. That is why a lot of the removal spells can destroy lands as well as artifacts or creatures.
Regrowth, Restock, Recollect - Recursion is really important in this deck because being able to reuse your spells is very important and allows you to win attrition wars. With wort you can chain regrowth and recollect and keep getting cards from your graveyard.
Burning Wish - This card is just great if your meta allows wishboards because with Wort you can get two cards from the board. The actual contents of the wishboard isn't set in stone, but ideally there should be a card in there for most every situation making it one of the most versatile cards in the deck
Alpha Brawl - I really don't know about this card. It could be like a red plague wind, but its just doesn't seem to work that well. I was considering Scrambleverse because the deck doesn't play very many nonland permanents and so just by chance you should be able to come out better than you started. Especially if your opponents are playing a lot of nonland permanents.
Specific land destruction Raze - This can be really good early game if you know you have a lot of lands in your hand and can put you way ahead hitting an early karoo. This card is also strong conspired with wort because you only have to sacrifice one land.
Fallow Earth - This is really similar to Plow Under. The benefit of this card over plow under is that its way cheaper to cast for just the first land. Often times a double plow under is just overkill so being able to put someone behind earlier in the game makes a bigger impact.
Artifacts Gauntlet of Power and Caged Sun - you usually don't see these cards too frequently in not monocolored decks; however, you can name either red or green depending on what you have most of when you cast either of these. Green is usually a pretty safe bet though.
Torpor Orb - This is a bit of a meta call but there are a ton of Enters the Battlefield creatures and when you only play one, you can easily hose most the creatures other people play.
Scrambleverse is an option as I mentioned earlier - in place of Alpha Brawl. Thieves Auction is another possibility. Mages' Contest - This could be a sweet counterspell because you either get a cancel or you can put them easily in range of a blaze. Lace with Moonglove - this could potentially be a reasonable removal spell as well as drawing a card. Not to mention its sweet with Wort.
Have you tried Decimate? I'm surprised your not running the generic red/green cards such as K-Grip and Hull breach. For red I suggest Gamble, Shattering Pulse, Insurrection (doubles as a win condition). Green you could use Terastodon and Desert Twister. Artifacts you could use cards like Planar Portal, Mind's Eye, and maybe Killswitch.
While I understand your reasons for not running a lot of creatures. Is there any reason you're also relatively light on token generators. From the Wort decks I've seen most at least run a few different kinds. Granted they've all been more typical Wort decks.
How do you keep people from attacking you? You have few creatures, few token generators and most of your deck is cards that destroy land and other things that really piss people off. Do you actually play this or is this a hypothetical idea?
How do you keep people from attacking you? You have few creatures, few token generators and most of your deck is cards that destroy land and other things that really piss people off. Do you actually play this or is this a hypothetical idea?
..
It does adequately piss people off certainly.:D
It gets played, but its by no means a well-tuned list. I had a conventional build of Wort for a while but decided to try something different and liked it.
In general, you aren't really worried about people attacking you, first off because you have removal and hopefully can deal with their threats. Secondly, hopefully you can keep them off anything too threatening with the LD. Another steal spell might not be a terrible idea either, in case someone manages to play something threatening. Unfortunately, Red doesn't have any permanent steal cards. I would play spitting image if it were legal.
In the same way that a counter spell deck plays a lot of counters and not too many creatures, I am trying to do that with Land Destruction here.
All of that being said, more removal and maybe a token producer or two wouldn't hurt probably.
Quote from GlissaPox »
Have you tried Decimate? I'm surprised your not running the generic red/green cards such as K-Grip and Hull breach. For red I suggest Gamble, Shattering Pulse, Insurrection (doubles as a win condition). Green you could use Terastodon and Desert Twister. Artifacts you could use cards like Planar Portal, Mind's Eye, and maybe Killswitch.
Decimate - generally I find the enchantment requirement for that card is sorta a pain and stops me from casting it. If someone plays an enchantment deck in your meta, go for it and it will probably work out well.
K-Grip and Hull Breach - I opted for other utility over these two. If I were to add another artifact/enchantment removal it would probably be Nature's Claim.
Gamble - Too variable for me generally. Its been in and out of the list over time and I've never really liked it too well, even copied it doesn't generate any physical card advantage
Shattering Pulse is fine, there are a lot of different options that can go in this deck for removal slots, but they are really meta dependent. If you don't find yourself needing to remove a lot of artifacts, I wouldn't bother with it. My meta is pretty creature focused, which explains the creature removal I have.
Terrastadon is fine, but its not a creature centric build, so he isn't included. I'd rather have cheap removal I can cast when I need it than potentially overkill.
Desert Twister is expensive, aftershock is much better in my opinion for creature kill.
Planar portal is also expensive and my cards usually have enough versatility that I dont need to tutor for anything, especially because I don't play any combos
Kill switch is just a clunky card in my opinion, very slow. I'd rather play shatterstorm.
@Paragon - Since I'm not planning on winning through a quick explosion of tokens, a lot of the smaller token spells didn't seem worth it. I would rather have another piece of removal. I end up recasting wort a lot, so her tokens usually get me there for conspire.
All of that in mind, I haven't updated this list since Innistrad, so there are probably some cuts to be made. If you have any recent suggestions I would appreciate them. Thanks for the comments!
Because it is different, I'm gonna explain the choices that I made. But first, the most important part, the list.
1 Arbor Elf
1 Charmbreaker Devils
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
1 Keeper of Progenitus
1 Magus of the Candelabra
1 Omnath, Locus of Mana
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
1 Seedborn Muse
1 Steel Hellkite
1 Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
Instants
1 Artifact Mutation
1 Beast Within
1 Berserk
1 Chaos Warp
1 Comet Storm
1 Early Harvest
1 Fork
1 Manamorphose
1 Reiterate
1 Reverberate
1 Ricochet Trap
1 Shunt
1 Skred
1 Slice in Twain
1 Sprout Swarm
1 Starstorm
1 Vines of Vastwood
1 Wild Ricochet
Sorceries
1 Aftershock
1 Alpha Brawl
1 Burning Wish
1 Explore
1 Fallow Earth
1 Gaea's Blessing
1 Green Sun's Zenith
1 Harmonize
1 Icefall
1 Mana Geyser
1 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
1 Pillage
1 Raze
1 Reap and Sow
1 Recollect
1 Regrowth
1 Restock
1 Rude Awakening
1 Stone Rain
1 Stunted Growth
1 Unwilling Recruit
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Mana Reflection
1 Sylvan Library
1 Vernal Bloom
Artifacts
1 Caged Sun
1 Gauntlet of Power
1 Grim Monolith
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
1 Torpor Orb
1 Vedalken Orrery
Planeswalkers
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
1 Koth of the Hammer
Lands
1 Winding Canyons
1 Kher Keep
1 Fungal Reaches
1 Rootbound Crag
1 Kessig Wolf Run
1 Raging Ravine
1 Deserted Temple
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Yavimaya Hollow
14 Snow-Covered Forest
14 Snow-Covered Mountain
1 Wort, the Raidmother
1 Natural Order
1 Banefire
1 Plow Under
1 All Is Dust
1 Deep Reconnaissance
1 Praetor's Counsel
1 Gleeful Sabotage
1 Gelatinous Genesis
1 Ruination
Overview
Wort is a generally a deck focused around spells. She has a couple main themes in multiplayer decks. Most decks are usually some mix of token spawning, land ramp and some big spells.
Land Ramp
Most people like land ramp spells because they are extra value in wort and seriously, who doesn't want more land. Cards that put lands into play untapped are especially effective. Commonly seen spells include, Cultivate, Skyshroud Claim and Explosive Vegetation
Tokens
The tokens work for wort because they better allow you to copy your spells. Having a mix of green and red token producers is also important, due to the nature of the conspire ability. Common spells include one shot effects like gelatinous genesis and Crush of Wurms as well as permanents that make tokens like Ant Queen and Siege-Gang Commander.
Big Spells
There are quite a few options as far as big spells go, so I will just name a few. Banefire, Comet Storm, Praetor's Counsel, and Wurmcalling
The Inspiration
This deck was born out of a hatred for the Blue/Black control decks in my meta and my inability to interact with them along the same axes as they were. So I built this deck to be a Combo/Control deck, like the blue black decks in my meta, but not the same deck. Thus, this deck has some differences from the normal Wort decks.
Regarding Ramp
The number one difference is the lack of land ramp. I find ramp decks tend to overextend a lot and leave themselves vulnerable to land destruction. I find it very important to efficiently spend resources in a control deck, so Land ramp was not an option. Instead of land ramp, I have opted to play mana doublers, some of which provide an advantage to my opponents but they do not require me to extend as much land ramp does. They also significantly increase the explosiveness of the deck.
How to Control
The next step was finding controlling elements in Red and Green. There are two major ways to do this. Land destruction and Copying Spells.
Spells such as Reiterate and Fork are important because they can counter counterspells as well as take advantage of the mana your opponents spent on their spells for a low cost. Anyone who has ever cast Wild Ricochet on Identity Crisis or Cruel Ultimatum can attest to how wonderful this is.
The second control element is less popular, but still very necessary. Much like blue decks rely on counterspells to prevent their opponents from running away with the game and casting game breaking spells, this deck relies on land destruction to prevent your opponents from running away with the game. Land Destruction for the sake of land destruction doesn't make you any friends, but if you use it to keep a player off 5 lands you will be doing yourself a lot of good. Also, Land destruction conspired by Wort can be very helpful for sealing away a game.
How We Win
and Possibly the most important part of the deck (aside from having fun of course, but thats subjective and another topic entirely). Winning. No one will want to play against your deck ever again if you just destroy everyones' lands and just durdle for the next 30 turns, the Land destruction is not in the deck for greifing people. Anyway, this deck wins the way that most Wort decks do by casting and copying large spells. Some notable favorites include Comet Storm, Rude Awakening, and Casting Unwilling Recruit on someone else's general or even Wort.
Creatures
Arbor Elf and Magus of the Candelabra - These cards both interact well with the mana doublers and Magus works well with the nonbasic lands. Both are also good for conspiring with Wort. Summoning sickness doesn't matter for conspire so thats an added benefit.
Keeper of Progenitus - I like this better than Mana Flare or Heartbeat because it is A.) a Creature and B.) is a bit more restrictive so is less likely to benefit my opponents. Especially those also probably playing control.
Steel Hellkite - First of all, this card is sweet and very versatile removal. More importantly it is a win-con because I can dump huge amounts of mana into it and hopefully kill someone. Kamahl, Fist of Krosa is also a really cool fun mana dump.
Instants
Artifact Mutation - This is nearly my favorite artifact removal because it generates creatures to use for conspiring while still being cheap artifact removal. Its awesome. I would like it a bit more if it hit enchantments too.
Berserk - This is primarily used for cheap creature removal. In a 40 life format, the damage from a creature usually doesn't matter too much. It can also double as a win con because Berserk + some copy spell and a two creatures to conspire with makes Wort deadly with General Damage.
Early Harvest - This is predominantly for generating huge amounts of mana for game ending spells. It can also be used to ramp out multiple spells in a turn with Wort in play. Fun fact, it is also an infinite mana combo with Reiterate.
Manamorphose - This is the poor man's (i.e. Red and Green) ponder. The great part is that it is free and can be used to hit some of the double mana costs in this deck. The cantrip is really great too. This card is basically my favorite card to conspire because it turns into a Divination for +2 mana.
Skred - This seems like an eclectic card choice, but this is some of the best removal in the deck. It usually does at least 5 damage and can take down larger creatures that green and red often have problems with.
Reiterate, Reverberate, Shunt, Wild Ricochet, Ricochet Trap and Fork - This is my counter suite. These spells allow you to interact with the stack in close to the same way that blue does and not allow other people to get what they want.
Vines of Vastwood - This is largely used to protect Wort, Vorinclex and Seedborn Muse from removal because they tend to attract a lot of hate. They can also be used to do some serious damage general damage with wort.
Sorceries
Removal - Largely I try to avoid removal that only has one purpose. That is why a lot of the removal spells can destroy lands as well as artifacts or creatures.
Regrowth, Restock, Recollect - Recursion is really important in this deck because being able to reuse your spells is very important and allows you to win attrition wars. With wort you can chain regrowth and recollect and keep getting cards from your graveyard.
Burning Wish - This card is just great if your meta allows wishboards because with Wort you can get two cards from the board. The actual contents of the wishboard isn't set in stone, but ideally there should be a card in there for most every situation making it one of the most versatile cards in the deck
Alpha Brawl - I really don't know about this card. It could be like a red plague wind, but its just doesn't seem to work that well. I was considering Scrambleverse because the deck doesn't play very many nonland permanents and so just by chance you should be able to come out better than you started. Especially if your opponents are playing a lot of nonland permanents.
Specific land destruction
Raze - This can be really good early game if you know you have a lot of lands in your hand and can put you way ahead hitting an early karoo. This card is also strong conspired with wort because you only have to sacrifice one land.
Fallow Earth - This is really similar to Plow Under. The benefit of this card over plow under is that its way cheaper to cast for just the first land. Often times a double plow under is just overkill so being able to put someone behind earlier in the game makes a bigger impact.
Artifacts
Gauntlet of Power and Caged Sun - you usually don't see these cards too frequently in not monocolored decks; however, you can name either red or green depending on what you have most of when you cast either of these. Green is usually a pretty safe bet though.
Torpor Orb - This is a bit of a meta call but there are a ton of Enters the Battlefield creatures and when you only play one, you can easily hose most the creatures other people play.
Scrambleverse is an option as I mentioned earlier - in place of Alpha Brawl. Thieves Auction is another possibility.
Mages' Contest - This could be a sweet counterspell because you either get a cancel or you can put them easily in range of a blaze.
Lace with Moonglove - this could potentially be a reasonable removal spell as well as drawing a card. Not to mention its sweet with Wort.
BBBMBC Shirei StyleBBB
URUNiv-Mizzet, Warp WorldURU
BGRKresh the BloodbraidedBGR
BBBMBC Shirei StyleBBB
URUNiv-Mizzet, Warp WorldURU
BGRKresh the BloodbraidedBGR
Multani, Maro-Sorcerer - Group Hug
Aurelia, the Warleader - Multi-Attack step aggro
Karona, False God - Your spells are my spells
Glissa, the Traitor - Artifact Toolbox
..
Azusa - Derevi - Glissa - Mizzix - Sharuum - Wanderer - Wort
It does adequately piss people off certainly.:D
It gets played, but its by no means a well-tuned list. I had a conventional build of Wort for a while but decided to try something different and liked it.
In general, you aren't really worried about people attacking you, first off because you have removal and hopefully can deal with their threats. Secondly, hopefully you can keep them off anything too threatening with the LD. Another steal spell might not be a terrible idea either, in case someone manages to play something threatening. Unfortunately, Red doesn't have any permanent steal cards. I would play spitting image if it were legal.
In the same way that a counter spell deck plays a lot of counters and not too many creatures, I am trying to do that with Land Destruction here.
All of that being said, more removal and maybe a token producer or two wouldn't hurt probably.
Decimate - generally I find the enchantment requirement for that card is sorta a pain and stops me from casting it. If someone plays an enchantment deck in your meta, go for it and it will probably work out well.
K-Grip and Hull Breach - I opted for other utility over these two. If I were to add another artifact/enchantment removal it would probably be Nature's Claim.
Gamble - Too variable for me generally. Its been in and out of the list over time and I've never really liked it too well, even copied it doesn't generate any physical card advantage
Shattering Pulse is fine, there are a lot of different options that can go in this deck for removal slots, but they are really meta dependent. If you don't find yourself needing to remove a lot of artifacts, I wouldn't bother with it. My meta is pretty creature focused, which explains the creature removal I have.
Terrastadon is fine, but its not a creature centric build, so he isn't included. I'd rather have cheap removal I can cast when I need it than potentially overkill.
Desert Twister is expensive, aftershock is much better in my opinion for creature kill.
Planar portal is also expensive and my cards usually have enough versatility that I dont need to tutor for anything, especially because I don't play any combos
Kill switch is just a clunky card in my opinion, very slow. I'd rather play shatterstorm.
@Paragon - Since I'm not planning on winning through a quick explosion of tokens, a lot of the smaller token spells didn't seem worth it. I would rather have another piece of removal. I end up recasting wort a lot, so her tokens usually get me there for conspire.
All of that in mind, I haven't updated this list since Innistrad, so there are probably some cuts to be made. If you have any recent suggestions I would appreciate them. Thanks for the comments!
BBBMBC Shirei StyleBBB
URUNiv-Mizzet, Warp WorldURU
BGRKresh the BloodbraidedBGR