Starting as an early attempt in my MTG career to build Giant Murder Noodles (Wurm Tribal), I discovered two things. Wurm tribal has little to no support (thus is not great), and Grothama, All-Devouring has the potential to draw a stupid number of cards, both off its own effect and something like a Rishkar’s Expertise. Grothama is a funny card, so I decided I would do my best to weaponize this stupid amount of card draw.
The Main Premise, Maro:
The main cards that make this deck tick are Maro’s. To summarize what a Maro is, it’s a creature whose Power and Toughness are equal to the number of cards in our hand. We have 5 of them. The single most important one to our deck is Psychosis Crawler, a 5 mana colorless artifact Maro that causes each opponent to lose 1 life every time we draw a card. This is our “Nekusar”. We also run 8 tutors that can find it for us.
Card Draw:
Card draw is the effect that makes any proper Nekusar deck tick. In Grixis, that tends to be wheel effects. But that gives our opponents cards, which can be used against us. In mono green, we don’t have to worry about that. Our first jumping off point is our commander, who can serve both as an excellent starting off point for a Rishkar’s Expertise effect (having 10 power) and can serve as a massive card draw spell itself. With one only one other card in hand, it takes two draw spells with X equal to its power plus Grothama and Psychosis Crawler out to draw the necessary number of cards to deal enough damage to each opponent that the while also giving the Crawler enough power to solo Grothama and draw enough cards to finish it off all your opponents. If your lucky, you could even hit the second card draw spell off of the Rishkar’s Expertise. Counting our commander, we have 8 of these style of card draw effects available to us. Some like Greater Good are reusable, allowing us to throw away unwanted Maro’s for exponentially increasing card draw. Some like Return of the Wildspeaker can act as overruns. To round it out, there’s also a smattering of land based card draw like Bonders' Enclave and staples like Sylvan Library.
Mana Ramp:
This is pretty standard fair for a green deck, with a couple notable exceptions. We have our normal mana dorks, cultivates, and rampant growths, but we also have some critical ramp to support our card draw. Thought Vessel and Reliquary Tower give us no max hand size, and thus are critical to our deck. Hour of Promise will ramp out any two lands in our deck, Moonsilver Key can find any mana rock in out deck, and Traverse the Ulvenwald can find any land OR creature for one green mana as long as we have Delirium (four or more card types in our graveyard).
Cashing Out and Alternative Wincons:
When the pieces don’t completely come together though, what do we do? We have the big Maro, but no Psychosis Crawler. Or we didn’t draw enough to finish our opponents off and still have a max hand size of 7. Then we smash face or cash out. We’re trying to pump up these ever escalating creatures with massive power and toughness. With a little bit of trample, these creatures can also deal massive damage in combat. We have cards like Nylea, Shadowspear, and Garruk’s Triumph to help us with this. Before we have to discard to hand size and lose our massive Maro, we cash out into something more permanent. Traverse the Outlands will put into play basic lands equal to the greatest power among creatures we control. Sacrificing a creature to Ooze Garden will create a permanent Ooze token with the same power and toughness that won’t get weaker when we discard down to hand size. Similarly, Feed the Pack will create X 2/2 Wolves, where X is the sacrificed creatures toughness, and Scourge of Skola Vale will get that many +1/+1 counters. And a sacrificed creature can be continuously recurred with a Mimic Vat or Cauldron of Souls.
