MTG Salvation

I don't play spider spawning or stinkweed imp but i'm definitely considering the first. I really think the deck wants to pair with blue, it wants to play a long control game and you don't need to be golgari to play worm harvest, just one of the two.

I would say the bare minimum at around 360 is 3 Looters, Worm Harvest, constant mists, Darkblast, Moldervine Cloak, Strip Mine, Wasteland but you could play more to support it too and most/all of those cards are cubeable already, plus more cards that support it.

2 out of 3 subthemes but probably all 3 in tokens/sacrifice/reanimator supported, these themes all work great with what worm harvest is trying to do. It's a card with a lot of natural variance, but with synergies you really take some or all of that variance away, you really have to construct your deck to utilize it but my c/ube construction has been leaning a lot lately towards archetype synergies and drafting those, not just good cards in your colors.

In my cube worm harvest has been drafted 3 times since I added it, none of those times was it drafted in a golgari deck, in fact none of the decks had both monogreen and monoblack cards. twice in a blue black control deck, and once in a green/white tokens deck.

Quote from Maëlig

Has anyone ever tried tortured existence? It's very decent with dredge creatures especially when combined with creatures with ETB effects. Maybe a little narrow though I can't see it being very useful outside of this archetype...

I noticed not a lot of people like TE. If you have dredgers to pair with it, it isn't bad. It's not really there for card advantage, rather for card quality. Discard your dredger to get a Boneyard Wurm? Then on your draw phase, dredge back your dredger, discard it through TE for an ETB creature and bash face with the Wurm. I think TE is only good if you pair it with Dredgers.

Just had a deck with Worm Harvest, one game it got discarded to a looter or something and made 9 1/1s. Other game it made 6 1/1s and ensured Ceta Sanctuary stayed turned on.

My friend also would have played Worm Harvest in his deck in the draft too.

Golgari thug seems like better for this than Stinkweed Imp. Every time I've drafted it the way I fill my graveyard usually involves blue or red's looting spells / fact or fiction/ compulsive research and not really dredgers or grisly salvage.

ok guise....shambling shell vs rot farm skeleton? I'm currently running Shambling Shell which seems slightly better to me.

Shambling Shell:
-You lose a draw to dredge, but you don't spend mana to get cards in graveyard
-Smaller body, but cheaper cost and has the ability to block.
-Built in sacrifice

Rot Farm Skeleton:
-Doesn't waste a draw, which gives you more flexibility/information, but you must commit mana to get cards in graveyard
-Can't block, but has a larger body
-Digs deeper.

I think I'm going to have to consider shambling shell a lot more now after seeing how good dredge is, how much i like using rot-farm skeleton (and thus want to give him friends) and the new nemesis of mortals guy.
I have so far been happy with rot farm skeleton (he's... like a genju of the spires in a way when you're on the offensive).

Worth noting that rot farm skeleton plays well with sacrifice abilities when you don't have graveyard shenaniganry going on. This guy doesn't.

Quote from taintedshampoo

In my cube worm harvest has been drafted 3 times since I added it, none of those times was it drafted in a golgari deck, in fact none of the decks had both monogreen and monoblack cards. twice in a blue black control deck, and once in a green/white tokens deck.

on this topic, how do people feel about considering worm harvest in a hybrid section as a opposed to the guild section?

cards like boggart ram-gang feel more multicolor to me, because playing it most optimally means being able to play it on curve. Worm harvest is a late game card exclusively that isn't as concerned with playing on curve, which makes the CCC seem much more reasonable.

I would absolutely count it as hybrid.
Actually... that fits in my new edit. Gonna test it soon.

I'm almost there on Worm Harvest too, probably will come out for Pharika's Mender to stay in theme. But I actually like Spider Spawning quite a bit. Maybe it's because I'm not as big on Grizzly Fate, but I think the two are pretty similar in power. Three 1/2 reach tokens are about two 2/2 bears for me, and I don't seem to hit threshhold a ton outside of dedicated decks, but getting 5-6 spiders instead of 4 bears is fine by me.

Are there any other token makers for these decks besides the aforementioned cards and Beast Attack?

I like both commune and grisly salvage...and would consider running them at a list your size. 5 out of 7 cards for threshold is pretty sweet....having both in would make me consider werebear more seriously.

A handful of people have tried out Worm Harvest but I think the general concensus was that it is too slow and just not impactful enough to be really worthwhile. I tried it myself and it got the axe pretty quickly.

Nyx Weaver, on the other hand, is a favorite card of mine, it is phenomenal in the GB graveyard deck. I honestly would not ever consider cutting it from my golgari section unless for some reason I decide to move away from the GB graveyard archetype, which probably won't happen ever.

Continuing a discussion that came up in the This Or That thread, I'm trying to design my cube with dredge/graveyard value as a supported subtheme/archetype. I'm trying to figure out if I'm including enough to make it a) visible and b) deep enough that drafters can build around it if they want to. What I'm currently running:

Dredge: Darkblast, Stinkweed Imp, Golgari Thug, Moldervine Cloak
Unearth: Dregscape Zombie, Grixis Slavedriver, Vithian Stinger, Hellspark Elemental, Shambling Remains
Flashback: Dread Return, Moan of the Unhallowed, Faithless Looting, Spider Spawning
Looters: Looter il-Kor, Careful Consideration, Faithless Looting
Gets cards into the graveyard: Nyx Weaver
Has an effect from the graveyard: Reassembling Skeleton, Grim Harvest, Masked Admirers
Gets cards out of the graveyard: Grim Harvest, Entomber Exarch, Death Denied, Dread Return, Rescue from the Underworld, Eternal Witness, Torrent of Souls, Unburial Rites
Benefits from cards being in the graveyard: Spider Spawning, Worm Harvest, Nemesis of Mortals

Typing it all out, it sounds like a lot, but I'm not sure how often it'll come together and how effective it'll be when it does. In the scope of Modern, is there anything I might want to add? Rot Farm Skeleton looks like it has potential, as it both gets cards into the graveyard and has an effect from the graveyard, but it's pretty slow and doesn't help you survive to do all this durdling. I see some people run Golgari Brownscale but it seems so low-impact to me. Also, from the last few posts in this thread, it sounds like everyone was excited to try Worm Harvest but it didn't stand the test of time. Does anyone still run it and see it be successful with any regularity?

I think the biggest problem that we run into with this strategy is how to translate getting stuff into and out of the graveyard into actual game-changing value. You can go through a lot of effort making sure that your G/B decks are able to grind away all day long, but to what end? The creatures are generally undersized, and the spells aren't generally efficient enough to generate a game-winning position after all is said and done. Spider Spawning and Worm Harvest are generally the two big payoffs that you can get, but is that enough? I don't really know, but my suspicion is that it's not.

Basically, you need three things for these kind of decks:

• Cards that fill your graveyard
• Cards that profit from a full graveyard
• Cards that like being in the graveyard

And I'm increasingly sure the last one is vital. If you mill yourself, and all the cards you mill are essentially dead and just there to maybe be fetched back by an Eternal Witness or Unearth, you're essentially investing lots of resources into making your Witness a bit more flexible. That's very inefficient. If you're milling or looting a Reassembling Skeleton, Roar of the Wurm, Spider Spawning, then you're generating immediate value, and you're making your Witnesses huge. That's an efficient deck plan. Ideally you are also "paying" for something by filling your graveyard, i.e. getting additional value off of it. Looters and Wild Mongrel are fantastic graveyard enablers because you get to draw cards or grow a creature while you're at it. Thought Scour is mediocre at best because you're only filling your graveyard.

In that vein, I'd claim that Corpse Connoisseur is good. Straight-up, he's clunky, but not terribly so, and he fills your graveyard with the things you actually care for, and crucially, he's good when discarded or milled.

And I'm growing kind of fond of Scourge Devil, though he's out of color and out of archetype.

Thanks for the detailed responses! This is why it's great to have this forum, since I know I'm not the first to have these ideas, and this gives me the opportunity to learn from others who have tried the things that I'm interested in trying and seen how it actually pans out.

Quote from Squirrely »

I found Golgari graveyard decks to be worth it as long as it's built right and has enough cards that are good on their own. I realize this is somewhat of an open door, but there's a thin line between cards that help an archetype while being solid on their own and being underpowered/inefficient on their own while helping out an archetype.

I've had this concept in mind before when working on the cube. The best cards are ones that are strong picks without support, while also having synergy with plenty of other cards in the cube. Cards that slot into multiple archetypes are especially nice. I feel like there is some room for cards that are narrow and very specific in the decks they enable, as long as they're powerful enough in that role - think Intangible Virtue and Kiln Fiend. Definitely not cards for every cube, but when the archetype is supported they can be the best cards in the deck, which is worth their inclusion in my opinion. Now, I thought Worm Harvest would be a similar fit for Dredge decks, but it sounds like from everyone's experience that it may not even be good enough when you draft the perfect deck for it. If that's the case, that it's super narrow and doesn't do enough in the one strategy it supports, it's an easy cut.

Looking over my earlier list with that lens in mind, here's how I think all the cards I mentioned fall:
Darkblast, Stinkweed Imp, Moldervine Cloak, Vithian Stinger, Hellspark Elemental, Shambling Remains, Dread Return, Nyx Weaver, all the looters, Masked Admirers, Death Denied, Entomber Exarch, Eternal Witness, Unburial Rites, Nemesis of Mortals - All of these do plenty of work on their own while also encouraging a graveyard focus, and I think are clear inclusions.

Golgari Thug - Questionable, but his function is interesting enough that I'm willing to give it a try.
Dregscape Zombie, Grixis Slavedriver, Moan of the Unhallowed - A little low-power, but I like that they support both Dredge and sacrifice themes. I'll keep them, but pay attention to how often they get drafted and maindecked.
Reassembling Skeleton - This is more for sacrifice interactions anyway, but it's nice that it does something interesting with Dredge as well.
Torrent of Souls, Rescue from the Underworld - Generally should be good enough, don't need any specific support to play.
Spider Spawning - My impression is that this card can be good enough even outside a dedicated graveyard deck, and would excel in one. I believe it's worth trying, at least for now.

Grim Harvest - Probably going to get cut. I've read some good praise for the card, but I just don't see it. Even as a "free" draw when you dredge it, it's 5 mana per cast to get each creature, plus the cost of the creature itself. And if you want to make sure you don't lose it, it requires keeping three mana open all the time. Seems so slow to get real value from it.

Worm Harvest - If this isn't a blowout finisher that rewards you for going deep on dredge, then it's probably too narrow to warrant the slot.

I'll probably do Grim Harvest > Raven's Crime and cut Worm Harvest for now, and keep an eye on swapping Spider Spawning for the more generally useful Pharika's Mender if it doesn't pan out. Everything else I think is pretty solid.

Squirrely, I was surprised to see you think Death Denied is too slow or not good enough. The average case I can see is 5 mana for 3 relevant cards at instant speed, which seems like an absolute beating. And the only support it needs is to be played in a deck with creatures.

Good discussion going on here, but I notice no mention of Fecundity or Golgari Germination. How've folks found them, if they've played them at all?

On that note, I've been looking for cards to go with Whiteout, which can dump a whole lot of lands into your graveyard - there doesn't seem to be much other Wild Mongrel, unfortunately.

Whiteout: Wow I thought Thopter foundry was narrow. There's just no reasonable way to expect this to work.

Golgari germination: Takes 5 creatures to die to be worth the mana and investment, I believe. 3 for the cost (like our new sorcery) and two more to make up for the lost time and variance.

Fecundity: It's too hard to break the symmetry, in my opinion.-

Quote from Leelue »

Fecundity: It's too hard to break the symmetry, in my opinion.

Don't want to live the dream with Fecundity, Life & Ashnod's Altar?

I've been running Golgari Germination for a long time and I agree with Leelue. If your deck can't easily generate 4+ tokens, then it isn't worth running.

I've also been running Deathreap Ritual. It's certainly fun to draft around, but drawing cards generally isn't as good as making tokens. It might not last much longer.

??
Drawing a card isn't better than a 1/1 token? This is crazy talk.

Perhaps I should have been more specific: I think that, in the sacrifice deck, making tokens to gum up the board is generally better than drawing an extra card (or two) a turn. Drawing cards is awesome, and Deathreap Ritual can draw a lot of cards. But it does so slowly. The sacrifice deck generally requires a few turns to get an engine going, and Golgari Germination can buy a lot of time (or generate an army to actually win the game).

I prefer Harmonize over Deathreap Ritual for green card draw.

Hermit Druid

buuuuuump

is this enough to make Spider Spawning or Worm Harvest a thing?

It doesn't seem like it would help Worm Harvest's case too much since you're guaranteed to stop when you hit a basic land with Hermit Druid. You would have to heavily draft nonbasic lands to have Druid make Worm Harvest better. It might make Spider Spawning a more reasonable inclusion though.