MTG Salvation

Excellent tournament write-up. Congrats on your result!

I'd say Devotion has too many variants to have a single "core" list beyond:
4 Arbor Elf
2-4 Birds of Paradise
4 Utopia Sprawl
3-4 Nykthos
1 Kessig Wolf Run

There are Planeswalker heavy lists that run low creature count, Collected Company lists that run high creature count and no Planeswalkers, Pact lists that focus on fast explosive games, and Command lists that try to grind out value in a longer game. You're not gonna get 50 cards that match among them.

And then separately from those are the Tooth and Nail lists which have a different gameplan.

Lastly, there's a lot of experimentation going on in this thread with people trying different colors and focuses, either for fun, or to see how competitive they can be (or both) so some recently posted lists are not well tested against a wide meta.

I would suggest proxying a couple different variations if you have some friends to test against and see which you like best. I built a Command-style version but am slowly piecing together the other parts to change it up if I want to.

Quote from CurdBros »

I love hearing the announcers say that Green Devotion is a “Ponza Variant”....not quite

I find it truly cringe-worthy

Quote from discomute »

What you have basically said to me is that it is "not optimal"

Fair enough. If you have a suboptimal list, one choice is to play a "best efforts" list that tries to fill in the missing gaps with the "next best thing" that's available, in order to try and preserve the focus of the deck. The other choice is to play a similar deck with a different strategy, filling in what's missing from one deck with another package of cards that leads it down a different path.

Gilt-Leaf is a different strategy for sure, so we have to look at what makes it different from the other elf decks. It's slower, and activating the Gilt-Leaf doesn't necessarily win you the game, whereas activating Ezuri almost always puts you close to the finish line, if not over it. Fast decks like burn or affiniti can probably handle a land reset if they have a decent board presence. However it's definitely a hard blow to control. If your meta is control-heavy, the Gilt-Leaf approach might be good. Additionally, having the critical mass of druids means you're playing a lot of cards that are not really strong by themselves, like Boreal Druid. I think for these reasons, your win rate would decline compared to option #1, though I can't put a % number on it.

If you wanted to change your list to run closer to a stock list, I would recommend moving away from Gilt-leaf and trying to the 'best available' budget options. The expensive parts you're missing are really just CoCo and Chord. You can probably keep the Harbinger as a "pseudo-chord" and fill your last slots with Lead the Stampede, instead of CoCo. I'd swap your Boreal Druids with Nettle Sentinels, and the Gilt-Leaf Archdruids for Dwynen's Elite or Elvish Visionary. The Channelers can probably stay if you like them. Their best replacement would be Shaman of the Pack, but then you're dipping into black and have to shore up the manabase - which costs money. If you want some flex slots to play with, the Arbor Elves are redundant with 4x Llanowar/Mystic already.

But before you go changing everything up, first play with what you have and see how it goes. It may end up doing well, despite my doubts. Playtesting will be a better judge than any amount of writing I can do on a forum.

While Gilt-Leaf Archdruid is a fun card (not for your opponent), it seems like you're investing a lot of time/card slots in setting up the Gilt-Leaf, only to clear the way for an Ezuri win later. If you instead focus on setting up the Ezuri win primarily (which is what most mono-G lists aim for), then it speeds up your gameplan and cuts out some of the other cards that do not contribute much, other than to count as a Druid.

In short, the Gilt-Leaf Archdruid is a fun win-more card which probably shines more in multi-player or kitchen table Magic but will be too slow and clunky for competitive modern.

Quote from Deruvid »

Quote from CurdBros »

They FINALLY printed it.



I can FINALLY make my Genesis Hydra deck!!!

Genesis Hydra for 10, get both creatures and Dome the opponent for 10 Double the damage of a Walking Ballista.

I tried Warstorm Surge back in the day (I thought I was so smart with the whole timing thing of Surge entering te battlefield BEFORE G. Hydra)...but this is WAY better.

Between this and Fierce Empath...I'll be playing my creature deck more than my Walker Deck...never thought I'd see the day!

I've often looked at including more red in the deck, for stuff like this or Inferno Titan. At what point do we just merge with Ponza and have Gruul Devotion without the land destruction? It seems fun, and Ponza's on the rise atm. I should probably look at joining a Ponza discord, though I'm not a fan of Land destruction.

Quote from Rendroc »

I still haven't seen a deck with Vivien, Monster's Advocate which I feel is a very strong Walker. With Courser and fetchlands you can get some insane value from her passive.

I like the new Vivien, but at 5 mana I think she comes out too late and does too little. I tend to play a faster aggro-oriented version of devotion, and at that stage of the game I want to be closing the game out instead of grinding advantage. Against a jund-heavy meta, she'd be great.

I agree that at some point we just become a "worse Ponza"...its the same issues we run into with being a "worse Amulet" or a "worse Tron" deck. We are in a VERY tough spot. What can we do better than those decks? We can definitely go bigger. We can utilize planeswalkers better. In some instances we can be faster. We can build our decks to be more resilient (than Tron that is)...but it is definitely a question we have to ask ourselves all the time.

Haven't posted on MTGS in a long time. Hell, I haven't really contributed to any online community lately. Since I'm stuck inside and can't get any kind of Magic fix though, I figured I'd chime in and present my thoughts on the new set for whatever that happens to be worth.

First and foremost, I'm fairly convinced that Tooth and Nail is a dead card now. Ikoria just released a smattering of new cards that all threaten to do the same thing as Tooth and Nail, only better, so there seems to be little reason to pursue ramping into Tooth and Nail at this point. I'm not sure which card has the most merit yet since I haven't gotten the chance to actually sit down and test any of them, but their applicability on paper is plain as day. One or more of these cards will just straight up be better.

Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast — This is a Polymorph that you can ramp into. Polymorph has always been a powerful card, but the setup required to get Polymorph to work has always made the card seemingly unviable. You have to be able to build a reasonable deck without any creatures, save one or two for Polymorph itself. Then, you have to be able to produce a creature somehow, be it either a creature token or a card that can somehow turn itself into a creature, like man-lands for example. Finally, you have to cast and resolve Polymorph. If the opponent kills the creature in response, the spell fizzles, and you get nothing.

While Lukka doesn't address that last issue, he does make enormous ground on the other two. Because Lukka always cascades upwards, if your deck only contains creatures with the same converted mana cost save for one of them, Lukka will always find that one target 100% of the time. This allows you to build a Polymorph deck with actual creature cards, and mana dorks are seemingly perfect for this; they increase the speed by which you can cast Lukka while simultaneously being the targets that Lukka needs. Not to mention, without Lukka, mana dorks are still independently going to be useful on their own. They'll ramp you into whatever other valuable cards make up the rest of your curve.

Now, that isn't to say that Lukka isn't without his faults. Generally speaking, Lukka's other two abilities suck. If you're only playing 1-drops, you don't particularly care if you exile any for you to cast later, but you would care a great deal if you happened to remove the only remaining card that's eligible for Lukka's -2 ability. As such, Lukka's first ability can be a significant liability. His ultimate, in turn, is also sucks. If all you intend to do is cheat a spaghetti monster into play, not only will you not activate his first ability to generate loyalty in the first place, but you also won't have much of any power on the battlefield with which to capitalize off of Lukka's third ability even if you could activate it. Lukka also costs more than his Polymorph counterparts at five instead of four.

On another note, I do think it's worth mentioning that Lukka can activate his minus ability back to back. Say the Emrakul you pull out with Lukka gets bounced by T3feri. Next turn, you can activate Lukka's minus ability again and pull out another Emrakul, provided you have another copy anyway.

Emergent Ultimatum — This is Tooth and Nail, but for seven mana instead of nine. Granted, the color requirements are certainly more difficult, but seven mana is also substantially easier to get to than nine. Not to mention, even if you didn't have the right combination of colors to cast this at seven mana, you almost assuredly would by the time you hit nine. Anywho, here are some piles I cooked up:

• Worldfire
• Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
• Restoration Angel

Any two card combo will work here in place of Kiki-Jiki and Resto Angel; they just need the capacity to deal damage on their own. If the opponent chooses Worldfire and either one of the other cards, you cast Worldfire first, exiling everything, then put your creature onto the battlefield. At that point, there's nothing the opponent can draw on their next turn that can possibly kill you, and you attack them for lethal next turn. The only vulnerability here is if the opponent controls something very unusual like Thragtusk since that ability triggers when the card leaves the battlefield rather than when it dies. Of course, if the opponent opts for the two-card combo, you can just proceed to go infinite and kill them with that. There will be times when the opponent has an out to that though and can stop your combo with whatever interaction they happen to have in their hand.

• Omniscience
• Enter the Infinite
• Tooth and Nail

How ironic that Tooth and Nail itself is a combo piece here. The opponent can't give you both Omniscience and Enter the Infinite together since that would be suicide, so they have to give you one of those two plus Tooth and Nail instead. Tooth and Nail, of course, lets you win with either setup, no entwine required. If the opponent gives you Omniscience, you choose to find two creatures with Tooth and Nail and then cast them for free afterwards. If the opponent gives you Enter the Infinite, you draw your library and then have Tooth and Nail put two creatures from your hand onto the battlefield. What sucks about this three-card pile is that Tooth and Nail also requires you to play an additional two-card combo somewhere else in your deck, so there are a lot of slots occupied by otherwise dead cards; you won't realistically ever hardcast an Omniscience across the course of a game.

• Exquisite Blood
• Sanguine Bond
• Enduring Ideal

Baby's first combo actually works pretty well here. If the opponent chooses to put both Exquisite Blood and Sanguine Bond onto the battlefield, they die from the two-card combo. If they go for Enduring Ideal plus one of the other two cards instead, Emergent Ultimatum will shuffle the third card back into your library, and Enduring Ideal will pull it right back out, so there's no way for the opponent to stop you from getting your combo. The downside here is that you still need a way to either gain life or to make the opponent lose life, so if you don't have any way to do that already then the opponent will have ample opportunity to turn the game around.

Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy — On the surface, this might not look like a replacement for Tooth and Nail, but it most assuredly is.

The reason why Leyline of Abundance sucks (and the reason why I have never bothered giving it the time of day) is because it lacks redundancy, and it doesn't play well with other ramp cards. If you play Leyline, that means you're not playing the best ramp spells in Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl, and you are playing objectively worse mana dorks instead. That wouldn't be so bad if you had other cards that could support said dorks, but with Leyline as your only supporting card you instead run into the issue where every game you don't draw a Leyline is one where you're operating as a worse ramp deck than you could otherwise be. Worse yet, drawing Leyline outside of your opening hand is also terrible since there's no opportunity to play the card before turn 3 at which point you should be slamming haymakers. Hell, if all of that wasn't bad enough, Leyline is still problematic even when you do begin the game with it since, if the opponent is able to kill whatever dork you happen to play turn one, they effectively two-for-one you because now your Leyline isn't doing anything until you play and untap a second dork.

With the printing of Kinnan, Leyline of Abundance gets a lot better, as you now have additional redundancy which ensures you won't be that "same ramp deck but worse" in the instances where you don't draw a Leyline. And because Kinnan only costs two, he's easy to weave into turns, enabling lines like:

1. Land —> Cast Birds of Paradise
2. Land —> Cast Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, tap Birds to cast any other 2-drop

Or

1. Land —> Cast Noble Hierarch
2. Land —> Cast Llanowar Tribe
3. Land —> Cast Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, tap Hierarch, Llanowar Tribe, and your third land to activate Kinnan

What makes Kinnan so crazy is that he's a powerful ramp spell with an insane win condition stapled onto him. Paying seven mana to effectively cast Summoning Trap is absurd. It can be done at instant speed, and it skirts around countermagic because the creature is put straight into play. You don't even need to play with otherwise uncastable creatures like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to make this guy good. It may just be that finding six mana or seven mana threats that you would otherwise be able to cast is better than trying to high-roll some unplayable Eldrazi. And as long as Kinnan is in play, this can be done turn after turn. It's repeatable! That's way better than Leyline's weaksauce "spend my entire turn to put a +1/+1 counter on each of my three creatures." A repeatable, instant-speed, uncounterable, cost-efficient way to win the game that comes attached to an otherwise playable ramp spell is about the best thing a ramp deck could hope to ask for.

From my testing of Fiend Artisan in other decks, I find it's better overall than Fauna Shaman. Fiend Artisan is out of Bolt range shockingly often, you basically pay X instead of the actual mana cost of the creature you're tutoring for (more importantly, you don't need to pay the specific colours), you can tap your mana dork for mana and then feed it to Fiend Artisan (as opposed to Fauna Shaman forcing you to not play the mana dork), and we get into topdeck mode fairly quickly, thus making Fauna Shaman worse at the same rate.

Fiend Artisan can also burp out an infinite combo given only 13 mana and a spare creature, though I don't think Nykthos Green really wants to play that combo's Corridor Monitor, Renegade Rallier, and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. (Fauna Shaman needs exorbitant colour requirements and 2 spare creatures in hand but only 9 mana to pull off the same combo, as it doesn't need Renegade Rallier. But then, if you have 2 spare creatures, Fiend Artisan also needs only 9 mana.)

As an infinite mana sink, Fiend Artisan needs no creature cards in hand to tutor for your win con--just eat one of the creatures enabling infinite mana.

Quote from CurdBros »

I can’t tell you how happy I am. For those of you to the forum; I have been a relative nut about Genesis Hydra for years and have been a very big advocate for Karn in particular (and walkers in general) for some time.

I was high on LLanowar Tribe; but had moved away from Burning-Tree Emissary and Devited Druid in my play history...I would not have seen their power in the new builds without the community here.

It’s by our community coming together that such awesome lists get made! Christopher Gooch did such an amazing job. What an awesome Devotion player. Hopefully he hops on here so we can thank him!

I think it may finally be time for people to see how good we’ve know this deck could be for a long time!


P.S. Will update the Primer ASAP to add the newest cards/list.

So, I was also attending SCG Knoxville, and also playing the Leyline List. I went 5-1, before hitting a horrible string of matches against Mono-Red Prowess, the Snow-blade deck, and with poor morale, got trash-canned by a terribly lucky TRON deck got to their payoffs faster.

I didn't get 2nd place, but here are some observations on the deck, and what I think that it needs to do to continue in a new meta.

1) Mono-Green Devotion was stupidly well-positioned in the meta at the time. The field was flooded with Urza decks and Oko-Amulit Builds. Our deck literally murders non-interactive match-ups. With any decent hand, we are faster and more explosive than any other deck in the format, and by Turn 3, we can make a ton of mana and often can play Karn, fetch, and play a stumbling block that delays long enough to command the game. In my 5 wins, I 2-0'd Tron, Urza (the most played deck), Dredge, B/G Yawgmoth, and U/G Amulet Titan. My only early loss was to Mono-Red Prowess. Which brings me to #2

2) The deck is weak to interaction / removal. Bolting our birds, or a key Thoughtseize will mess you up playing a deck that is adamant about hitting a 4-cost PW on T3 (and some games T2 - with a couple of Leylines). That's where Prowess got me. Killed any dorks I played, and pinned down the benefit of the Leylines, and hampered Nykthos.

3) Genesis Hydra was the hidden gem. Many of my opponents flipped it over to read it, and my reply was often - "It's like Krasis. No matter what, I get to look, and play." This was the hidden tech against counter-spells. I originally was playing with Krasis and Voracious Hydra, but after some play testing, the Hydra was just bonkers. It can be cast for X=4 as early as T2, but reliably by T3, and at X=4, it literally will play everything in the deck other than Once Upon a Time. If they don't have a counter, it is a game-shattering 2 for 1 on T3. And it's not that hard to consistently do.

4) This deck is fun to play. Like, really fun. I had some of the most fun, even at a high-stakes REL event.

But the real news:

1) With the Oko and Mox bans, the Urza deck is effectively dead. With that, more "fair" decks will sneak in. We are already seeing this with an increase in Mono-Red Prowess, Burn, Death's Shadow, Humans, Tron and Jund. Each of these decks have just enough gas to interrupt us enough for a win. To continue, this deck - whether in the main or in the side has to deal with early creature removal. Options include veil of Summer, or Shaper's Sanctuary - but I had been so underwhelmed with these, they weren't in my SB, though I will say I may have paid for it in my Prowess matchups.

2) The loss of Lattice may not be as bad as people think. Sure, it was a nice lock, but it was hard to pull off through potential disruption, or I was at least delayed a turn between being able to Karn for it, and play it. In fact, in more than one game, I went for the Coating because it could be "on" the next turn, and I Ponza'd out the Titan player. Between Karn and Vivien there are a lot of things out there that can disrupt or end a game. So much so, that the loss of Lattice doesn't even impact Karn's place in the deck.

I am cautiously optimistic about the future of this deck. Will be interested in what comes next.

Quote from Deruvid »

Another point to make comparing Pioneer Devotion to Modern Devotion is the relevance of Nissa, Who Shakes the World. She's generally slow for modern, and we don't often have all that many forests down early. Pioneer gives her time to shine and the inclusion of Once Upon a Time as land/creature search means that we'll generally have more lands on the battlefield in Pioneer. I do agree that the prevalence of early burn for t1 mana dorks in Modern is what largely kept Leyline of Abundance from taking off. I tried several Leyline builds in modern and none of them were as resilient as the traditional manabase. If you haven't found a leyline by t3, all you've got is a big pile of dorks that can't win.

Very well put. Wanted to reiterate this for those coming here from Pioneer

@Rendroc
Here's the Simic devotion list I played at a recent Face to Face Open in Quebec City, if it interests you.



I went 4-3 at the tournament, thus finishing 33rd out of 97 players. A reasonable performance. Details are included in the following spoiler. I felt that no matchup was unwinnable. The deck's main strength is its explosiveness. I also felt that being on the play made a huge difference, since the deck is excellent at being proactive.


Here's what I will be modifying, after my tournament experience:

I think Goose is pretty meh unless your deck has Oko. Getting only 1 use out of the Goose, ain’t a deuce from a moose, or something like that. The decks that run Goose are completely different from Green Devotion.

So this list is probably better than the Finks + Henge list.

It is nearly identical to my most played and most successful Green Devotion list which I called Garruk Green that ran 2 copies of Garruk, Caller of Beasts . Now instead of Caller of Beasts and two other cards - Wolfbriar Elemental and I fI can’t remember what the other was - I have Karn. I will now have to see if this is better than the original. Caller of Beasts is insane, allowing for the deck to get any creature in the deck down for 6 mana (Craterhoof a turn earlier is a big game), and in addition, adding a ton of card advantage. Whereas Karn adds 15 extra cards to the maindeck, a large toolbox, plus and additional wincon.



Again, this sideboard is unrefined.

Potential Karn targets:

• Triskelion
  
• Thopter Assembly
  
• Steel Hellkite
  
• Duplicant
  
• Platinum Angel
  
• Myr Battlesphere
  
• Platninum Emperion
  
• Sundering Titan
  
• Memnarch
  
• Meteor Golem
  
• Batterskull
  

EDIT:
Testing Log

Match 1 vs. New monoblue Paradoxical Outcome deck 0-2 Loss (this deck looks really good)
Match 2 vs.R/U Thing/Aria of FLame deck Win 2-1
Match 3 vs. Green Tron Win 2-0 Game 2 he got turn 3 natural Tron and I still managed to win but he may have misplayed idk for sure

So this is the deck I started testing (only played one match).

/

Unsure of the sideboard still.

Basically this is just Karn Devotion but with Henge and Blasting Station thrown in the sideboard (can be substituted with Altar of Dementia, not sure which is better yet).

The question is whether it is worth it to the two cards. It seemed like a easy fit, because Finks was always a 4-of in my Walker decks anyways, though I worked on Walker decks a long time ago. I used it because it provided at leaset two blocks to protect my Walkers, while adding 2 devotion, gaining life, and synergizing with any Walkers that add +1 +1 counters, just like Ballista.

SO basically it's just two cardsI have to add to the deck to include an infinte combo, and just a a good card. Not to mention, The Great Henge and Blasting Station are not useless cards on their own.

So I thought of a very fun very janky combo for us:

1. Kitchen Finks
2. The Great Henge
3. Sac Outlet

It allows you to gain infinite life and draw out your deck Due to The Great Henge putting a counter on Kitchen Finks and blowing up its persist counter. It’s also all instant speed...so you can do it off a wave or just right when you hit your pieces.

I made a few lists for fun. Thought I would let you guys/gals know about it just in case you wanted to brew too :).

We are the best shell for the combo simply because we can make use of both cards outside of the combo (and can cast The Great Henge more consistently than other decks.). Having said that...It’s likely just worse than other Kitchen Finks.

Thought I’d throw it out there for the brewers among us. Will let you know when I’ve got more testing done with the main lists (and i will play some games with this for some fun write ups )

*P.S. I communicated with saffron olive about it and he said he hadn’t seen it anywhere either and wild brew with it as well. He’s a great brewer so it will be exciting to see what he comes up with! *

________

Quote from nonamealreadytaken »

By the way, i added 2 tribes in my deck and am looking forward to play a few leagues. Phoenix being "banned" and stoneforge mystic coming back may help the deck to be viable again.

On a more tournament/serious note. How has Llanowar Tribe been fairing lately for you? I’ve seen so many lightning bolts in my local meta I have been scared to play it...but it may be one of those “play it anyways because it is a must kill card” type card where it simply doesn’t matter if there is a lot of removal for it.

It’s such a powerful card I’ve been thinking of putting it back in a few builds.