Tunneler Wurm
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Planechase Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Tunneler Wurm

Creature — Wurm

Discard a card: Regenerate Tunneler Wurm.

StopShot on What is the best commander …

3 years ago

1.) The Gitrog Monster

2.) Combo-kill.

3.) The Gitrog Monster has a lot of casual variations, but it gets busted in competitive EDH if you plan to go infinite with Dakmor Salvage and any of the various free repeatable discard outlets such as: Earsplitting Rats, Grotesque Hybrid, Noose Constrictor, Oblivion Crown, Olivia's Dragoon, Oona's Prowler, Patchwork Gnomes, Putrid Imp, Skirge Familiar, Trespasser il-Vec, Tunneler Wurm or Wild Mongrel.

Upon discarding the Dakmor Salvage, The Gitrog Monster allows you to draw a card which you can use to dredge the Dakmor Salvage back. As you can see you have an infinite mill loop, BUT for every land you mill, you also get a draw trigger from The Gitrog Monster. Not only that, but in your deck you have one or more of these grave-shuffle effects: Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre or Gaea's Blessing. Milling any of those cards puts all milled cards back into your library, so you can keep racking up draw triggers until you have your entire deck in your hand.

At this point you can free cast Lotus Petal and/or Dark Ritual and then shuffle them back into your library to draw again by discarding a grave shuffler followed by any number of lands in your hand to draw them back and repeat. You now have infinite mana of any color in your hand along with every card in your library in your hand and the ability to recast any card in your hand as many times as you want. Simplest method of winning is just to cast Walking Ballista for a million mana but really any card that causes a loss of life that can easily be put back in the grave upon use so you can cycle it back will work. Also if your opponents have something like Leyline of Sanctity or any other protection card you can freely cast and recast your Assassin's Trophy and/or Maelstrom Pulse as many times as you want to bypass the issue.

But what if they exile your Dakmor Salvage? Use Riftsweeper to get it back and if that fails use your back-up Mirror of Fate to recur it after you've milled your library thoroughly with some value engine like Mesmeric Orb. You basically have to also exile their recursion cards to remove the land for good or use Praetor's Grasp as a silver bullet.

Why not just use a removal spell or graveyard hate spell/ability while the first dredge trigger is on the stack to interrupt the combo? Well, that could work, but keep in mind if they discard a another land card while its on the stack they can dredge off of that and run through their combo all while removal is on the stack effectively bypassing any number of removal spells equal to the extra lands in their hand. By the time the removal spell as has resolved they will have infinite black mana from Dark Ritual and a Lotus Petal to cast afterward allowing them to just recast whatever was removed or just win by hard-casting the aforementioned Walking Ballista.

If Tormod's Crypt won't work you could use Rest in Peace or Planar Void to stop it, but these decks run so many Naturalize effects because they know that's the only real effective answer you have to stop it.

Oh, and get this. If you can't find a discard outlet you can use your discard step to discard down to hand size to go infinite and win the game that way as the discard step repeats if an ability is triggered due to discarding down to hand size. Which means all you really need is the land which you can find with all the black tutors and green provides its own land tutor effects as well. Given you're also in green playing a turn 2 or 3 The Gitrog Monster is fairly possible which can be the same turn you win on.

The deck is too consistent at winning. People don't play it though, because certain interactions get very complex in rules interactions which means you need a solid understanding of how to pilot it, and those who do know how to pilot it find it boring as winning can be so fast and consistent it doesn't even feel like you're playing Magic anymore. Also the deck can get pretty pricey to acquire all the cards you need. That combination of factors is why it doesn't see much play otherwise it would be banned straight out of existence if sanctioned competitive EDH tournaments were more common in my opinion.

TheRedMage on I Can't Believe It's Not Golgari!

8 years ago

I have mulled over this for a while and I really cannot see how Abundance + Undercity Informer mill your whole library the way Dakmor Salvage + The Gitrog Monster + a discard outlet do. Could you walk me through it?

The list I am am working on only has the Gitrog + Dakmor + Discard outlet way to mill yourself but

Even with only one combo, there is enough redundancy here that I don't think you need more.

Also worth mentioning: comboing off with Skirge Familiar does not truly give you infinite mana if you don't want to play an Ulamog, the Infinite Gyro (but I dislike that plan since then you can only play three discard outlets to go infinite in some measure - Wild Mongrel, Volrath's Dungeon and the familiar itself). You get realistically 40-50, sometimes less if you start dredging 6 over and over to find Dakmor Salvage. That's low enough where relying on Exsanguinate for the kill might be unwise - somebody at the table is playing Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim and suddenly you can't kill them? It's an issue.

Then again, my solution of Dread Defiler throwing a Lord of Extinction at them suffers from the same problem.

Maybe one could use a "Four Horsemen" approach i.e. we play the Ulamog, the Infinite Gyro and rely on the extra draws from Dakmor Salvage to eventually draw it and proceed to put the whole deck in the graveyard a few hundreds dredges in instead of a few dozens? That might be the way to go if we want to have the option to cast large Exsanguinates occasionally.

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