Lotleth Giant

Creature — Zombie Giant

Undergrowth — When Lotleth Giant enters the battlefield, it deals 1 damage to target opponent for each creature card in your graveyard.

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Arena	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Freeform	Legal
Gladiator	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Historic	Legal
Historic Brawl	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Pauper	Legal
Pauper Duel Commander	Legal
Pauper EDH	Legal
Pioneer	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (49)

shadowjules on Budget Cycle Storm

4 months ago

Hey QuantumGeckoGuy! Very cool deck man, I tinkered with something like this for a while as well.

I tinkered with a similar concept for ages. Instead of looking to scale with Drannith Stinger and Marauding Mako, mine had a combo win with Lotleth Giant, and a secondary beatdown plan with Hollow One and Chitin Gravestalker. The deck DESPERATELY needs to cut down as much as humanly possible on any card without cycling. I think running Dark Ritual is a mistake, as you can get similar results with 4 copies of Lotus Petal - when churning through your deck, you can combo off so much earlier with you effectively know you can consistently find free bursts of 1 mana to cast Songs of the Damned. The difference between your bursts of mana costing (1) and costing (0) is huge. Running Lotus Petal is extra good when accompanied by a suite of (1) cost cyclers. Drannith Stinger is a good start, but I would run every creature with a (1) mana cycling ability ever printed - it just adds a crazy amount of consistency. I've found that 38 to 40 creatures with cycling in the deck is ideal for a 1 turn combo kill.

Finding lands is extra easy with cards like Troll of Khazad-dum and Oliphaunt. With the amount of cards that cycling lets you see, you really don't want to mulligan. These landcycling cards are huge because they often allow you a turn 1 tutor of a land in the early game (Troll of Khazad-dum gets you Fetid Pools and Oliphaunt gets you Canyon Slough). You can tutor for a land turn one either with an untapped Ash Barrens or the strict upgrade in Capital City that also filters your mana, or again with a turn 1 Lotus Petal. Later in the game, the land cyclers are never dead draws, because they tutor for a dual land, that also ends up cycling away, letting you see more cards and remove more lands from your deck as you combo off.

Crucially for the combo win, Lotleth Giant only cares about creatures in your graveyard, so do keep that in mind when comboing off. I tend to split my graveyard into two piles - 1 with creatures and 1 with noncreature spells (cycled lands, lotus petals, and so on). The combo turn needs to resolve a Songs of the Damned to cast Lotleth Giant usually, but thats not always super hard. A sideboard tech of Miscalculation really helps protect this here. Also 2 Shadow of the Grave is usually enough to stop your deck from running out of steam, especially since you run out of steam after seeing like around 30-40 cards in your deck. Again, Lotus Petal is so useful here.

Finally, I've found that you CAN run 3 fluctuators and not 4 if you're able to have a split of cycling cards with a low enough curve. This deck really wants to minimize the turns it spends not spending mana, so again, Ash Barrens and Capital City not entering tapped is really important, same for your Lotus Petal. These untapped mana sources, along with 1 mana landcyclers and 1 mana cycling creatures gets this deck to be much more consistent and much faster.

Built like this, the Hollow Ones / Chitin Gravestalker Beatdown plan is more of a trick to trip up your opponent rather than a primary win condition. When your opponent plans to counter your big combo turn, dumping 2 4/4s and a 5/4 onto the battlefield really early can be backbreaking. THese are the matchups where something like Drannith Stinger is just a lot less useful as a pinger, and I would think of Marauding Mako and Drannith Stinger as plank cards with cycling rather than win conditions.

This deck has trouble against certain kinds of graveyard hate. It never targets anything in the graveyard, and never looks to play things directly out of your graveyard, so cards like Grafdigger's Cage and Soulless Jailer don't do anything. But cards that exile our whole graveyard or stop cards from getting to the graveyard (Rest in Piece / Leyline of the Void / Soul-Guide Lantern) make the Lolteth gameplan obsolete. Sideboarding in Ominous Seas still turns out cycling card draw into massive beaters, and this can still let us combo into two or three 8/8s to threaten a short clock.

The deck has some potential and honestly is a ton of fun to tinker with. I've been iterating on it for ages myself. Here's my list if you're at all curious (Ignore the silly name and out-of-date descriptions, its a little messy and I started it 5 years ago in high school). Deck: deck-large:cycling-coombo-deck

GodOfBullshit on Oops, All Spells!

1 year ago

Bookrook I don't think Lotleth Giant will ever really work in the deck. It costs too much to hard cast, it only goes off if you are already halfway through your combo, it has no self reanimation, and it only takes out one opponent.

jonjonhholt on Graveyard Smash - Paper

1 year ago

I like running this list with Lotleth Giant as it is an insane hit for dread return and you dump so many creatures into the gy so it can deal 10+ damage pretty quick. Also, the new mkm card Rubblebelt Maverick seems really strong imo. This is a sick list tho I love this type of deck.

Dramoramagic on rakdos reanimate

1 year ago

testing it the creatures id reanimate usually die as soon as they are out there so i added insurance and if done with Lotleth Giant a trigger occurs.

legendofa on pauper spy dread return

2 years ago

Dread Return is going to be a common? Seriously? I've been trying to make Pauper Reanimator work for a long time, and this could be the breakthrough.

As far as the deck itself, in playtesting, I felt like the first few turns tended to be uninteractive, and I'm not sure what the intent of some of the tech pieces like Myr Retriever are. The mana is very smooth, but once or twice I got stuck with Lotleth Giant in hand, or Dread Return in the graveyard and only one or two available creatures, including unearth-able Dregscape Zombies. Maybe something like Putrid Imp could help?

rekkim on Ritual Mill

3 years ago

V2.0: Shifted aim toward answers from threats. Tokens aren't anything to worry about before turn seven, anyway.

Armored Skaab: Down by one.

Blex, Vexing Pest  ^Flip: Cut. Buffing the tokens to speed up lethal is counterintuitive to much of the rest of the deck's intention to stall. Rarely, if ever find reason to use the back side, and life is valuable to this deck only so far as delays are concerned. Once you're stable, you don't need to fish so desperately for pieces.

Boneyard Wurm: Down by one.

Combine Guildmage, Swarm Guildmage: See: Blex.

Lotleth Giant: I really like this because it dodges blockers, but it's never decisive like a seven-drop ought to be. Dropped.

Decisive Denial: Dropped. Couldn't justify its use when creature-based iterations can be used to keep the effect and fuel other spells.

Drown in Filth: Dropped. Part of the issue is the mana requirement. It's hard to reliably draw all three colors in the first two turns, so a lot of my starts were awkward with this. It could also fizzle early on by not having enough of the right thing in my graveyard.

Spider Spawning: Reduced by two. Slow, and the deck is pretty heavy on recursion. Despite issues with the tap requirement, Vilespawn Spider is a body, on or off the field, and anything in the way of attackers or pumping spells is important.

Spiketail Hatchling: Added four copies. Might look for one I like with a mana cost to make the tax a greater burden. Or maybe something with lower CMC and no flying.

Winds of Rebuke: Added three copies.

Spore Frog: Added four copies.

Svogthos, the Restless Tomb: Added another copy. Realized somewhere down the line that it plays really well with Crop Sigil to return two creatures to play.

Deadbridge Chant: Added one copy. Still not wholly sold on this, but it makes sprinting against other stall decks much more viable. Valid target for Winds of Rebuke, if you happen to need to reset with elixir.

Land: Reduced prominence of black and green for blue.

ClockworkSwordfish on Rare commander build?

3 years ago

EDH as a format never especially enchanted me, so more often than not the only reason I'd design a deck is around an especially odd or challenging commander.

Blind Seer is an absolute house that nobody sees coming. He turns Flash Flood, Hydroblast and Blue Elemental Blast into {2}{U} to blow up any permanent, or basically a monoblue Vindicate. Douse can likewise counter spells at will. Messing with colours completely opens up a lot of old school hosers, especially those that freely blow up permanents in mono blue. You can see the list here: Colorblind.

Another one I'm fond of is the never-seen Iname, Death Aspect, who can rather uniquely dump 30 or 40 Spirits into your graveyard all at once. From there, Living Death, Lotleth Giant or Mortal Combat can seal the deal. More of a combo deck, it doesn't have as much variety, but I guarantee it's a commander you'll never see across from you at the table. FINISH HIM

On the challenging side of things, I'm a big fan of Haakon, Stromgald Scourge. Since you literally cannot play him from the command zone, the only ways to make him accessible are Command Beacon and the more recent Netherborn Altar. You have to really jump through some hoops to get him in your graveyard where he can finally be played, but having the hurdle before his funky ability can be abused is sort of a fun game-within-a-game. Haakon Haxx

Westhane on Martin Sanson, Worm that Walks

4 years ago

Suggestions:

Plus: Kraul Harpooner , Moldgraf Monstrosity , Loam Larva , It of the Horrid Swarm , Hornet Nest , Brain Maggot , Brain Weevil , Nameless Inversion , Bone Harvest , Footbottom Feast , Haunted Crossroads , The Chain Veil , Deadbridge Goliath , Distended Mindbender , Graveshifter , Masked Vandal , Nullmage Advocate , Gigapede , Broodhatch Nantuko

Less: Boneyard Wurm , Golgari Grave-Troll , Lotleth Giant , Stitcher's Supplier , Glowspore Shaman , Mycoloth , Skirge Familiar , Birthing Pod , Forever Young , Vigor Mortis

And the reason Eternal is showing as illegal is cause' all of the MH2 stuff isn't out yet.

My reasoning is less efficient cards that happen to be insects make for more Grist, and if you've got a certain insect density, you don't really need other dredge sources.