Feature / Deck Cycle Question :
I made this deck about a year ago with the help of some excellent folks here, and have very much enjoyed playing. I wanted to know, with the the passed year and War of the Spark and Return to Ravnica etc. are there any changes / improvements you suggest to keep this deck relevant? Or should it be fine as it is?
Additionally, are there a good number of creatures? how about lands? can the mana base be improved to improve the deck?
(Other improvement suggestions unrelated to newer cards are welcome too!)
Thanks All!
Intro :
Hi All,
Literally just started playing magic, and this is my first proper go at building a deck. The hydra cards looked kind of fun, so thought I'd give it a go.
So it's a midrange deck with lots of hydras, it uses mana acceleration to get big creatures out as fast as possible. With many mana costs, a lot of these creatures can be flexible. Once the big creatures like
Primordial Hydra
and
Hydra Broodmaster
are out, their power and toughness ramps up with each passing turn, spell cast, or increasing of your mana pool etc. (They can be protected whilst they are still ramping using
Asceticism
or
Lightning Greaves
). This ramping up of stats is accelerated using cards such as
Doubling Season
and
Solidarity of Heroes
to get more value out of these effects, then beat down on your opponent with some ridiculous +16/+16 hydra with trample. Or at least, that's the plan, read on for more information on win conditions and strengths and weaknesses etc.
Update: Deck is finished and I'm pretty happy with the results; thank you so much guys.
Win Conditions:
1)
Primordial Hydra
- Cast
Primordial Hydra
, (earliest is 3 mana) and the idea is protect it until you have trample. Anything 10/10 is scary, a 10/10 with trample that is doubling every turn is super scary. Protect it using
Lightning Greaves
or
Asceticism
.
Vines of Vastwood
in the sideboard is effective too.
2)
Garruk, Caller of Beasts
- Cast
Garruk, Caller of Beasts
, ideally with
Doubling Season
on the field, starting him at 8 loyalty counters, and instantly use his -7 if
Hydra Broodmaster
is in the deck and -3 if it is in your hand. Either way, use this as a cheap way to get
Hydra Broodmaster
on the field, and use your piles of mana to make it Monstrous and beat down with lots of big hydra tokens. This also works with
Worldspine Wurm
in the sideboard.
3)
Kalonian Hydra
- If you can hard cast
Kalonian Hydra
(or use
Garruk, Caller of Beasts
to put it on the battlefield), it comes on the field with +4/+4. After 1 attack, or if
Doubling Season
is on the field, or if you play
Solidarity of Heroes
, this becomes +8/+8, which is already getting pretty scary. It starts with trample, so just attack away using the trample damage. 2 or 3 should be plenty to finish the job. Much like the first condition, protect it using
Lightning Greaves
or
Asceticism
.
4)
Managorger Hydra
- If all else fails, play
Managorger Hydra
and play any spells to bring it up to 2/2 or 3/3. Playing
Solidarity of Heroes
once already makes this a viable threat, as the hydra gets +1/+1 for the spell, which is then doubled by
Solidarity of Heroes
. Now you have a 6/6 or 8/8 with trample for only . This serves as a really useful back up win condition.
Stats:
Win Rate: 9/9 (100%)
Average Win Turn: 5.78 (standard deviation of 0.34)
Playtests:
Game 1: Won on Turn 6 against a / Monk deck (mostly built around a lot of instants and prowess). Ended game with 20 life remaining, a 10/10
Primordial Hydra
, a 16/16
Kalonian Hydra
,
Garruk, Caller of Beasts
(7 counters), 2x
Arbor Elf
,
Asceticism
,
Doubling Season
on the field.
Game 2: Won on Turn 5 against a / Monk deck (mostly built around a lot of instants and prowess). Ended game with 12 life remaining, a 7/7
Managorger Hydra
, a 16/16
Primordial Hydra
and
Birds of Paradise
on the field.
Game 3: Won on Turn 6 against the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk. Ended game with 15 life remaining, 2x
Arbor Elf
,
Garruk Wildspeaker
(6 counters), 2x 16/16
Kalonian Hydra
, 14/14
Hydra Broodmaster
, 7x 7/7 Hydra Tokens on the field.
Game 4: Won on Turn 6 against the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk. Ended game with 13 life remaining, a 22/22
Managorger Hydra
, and
Doubling Season
on the field.
Game 5: Won on Turn 4 against the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk. Ended game with 15 life remaining, 2x
Doubling Season
,
Arbor Elf
, a 12/12
Primordial Hydra
and a 13/13
Managorger Hydra
on the field
Game 6: Won on Turn 5 against the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk. Ended game with 8 life remaining, 2x
Arbor Elf
,
Birds of Paradise
and a 17/17
Managorger Hydra
on the field.
Game 7: Won on Turn 6 against the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk. Ended game with 12 life remaining, 2x 16/16
Primordial Hydra
,
Garruk Wildspeaker
(5 counters),
Lightning Greaves
on the field.
Game 8: Won on Turn 6 against the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk. Ended game with 13 life remaining, a 16/16
Kalonian Hydra
, a 16/16
Primordial Hydra
, Asceticism on the field
Game 9: Won on Turn 8 against a Deck with a lot of burn and the Goblin duel deck from Goblins Vs. Merfolk (3-Way game). Ended with 6 life remaining and a 9/9
Managorger Hydra
, 40/40
Primordial Hydra
and
Garruk, Caller of Beasts
Strengths / Weaknesses:
Strengths:
-Strong against decks with only a few removals, as you just have more creatures that can do fatal damage than removals
-Strong against any direct beatdown, because the power and toughness of your creatures scales very fast, and even without your big creatures, solidarity of heroes can make
Managorger Hydra
pretty deadly.
-Strong against burn, you win before they can whittle down your life total.
-Strong against lifegain, you just outscale it. They'd have to be doubling their life total every turn.
-Deathtouch can be defeated just by holding back the attack until your hydras have trample, and enough spare attack that even though the hydra will die, it will kill the enemy.
-Mana Acceleration is enormous. By turn 6 it is not uncommon to have 30+ mana to use.
Weaknesses:
-Probably weak to decks with a lot of removal. Several times
Lightning Greaves
or
Asceticism
made all the difference
-Probably weak to very aggressive decks which reliably win by turn 3 or 4. So far this deck usually wins by turn 5 or 6.
-Once you deplete your hand, you have very few ways of drawing more cards, so your starting draw has to be good. In order to test this, I took no mulligans at all for the first 9 games, and managed to turn the bad draws around usually by buffing up something like
Managorger Hydra
or using Garruk abilities to fetch creatures I needed, but a more aggressive opponent might have punished the extra turn or two that took on the 'bad starting hands'. (Also in Game 9, I think I was saved by there being 2 opponents to kill for the guy that was ahead to begin with)
-Can be difficult to get in the first attack with
Kalonian Hydra
if you are bringing him to the field later in the game.
-Not much to block flying with. Best I can suggest is get creatures big enough they have to block you with their flying creatures.
-Not much in the way of control
Pricing:
This cost me 400 GBP ($540) somehow (predominantly not the foil versions and includes the sideboard), which feels pretty scary now I've actually added that up. I am based in the UK so bought my cards from a mixture of Magic Madhouse, LiliannaMarket, eBay and Arcane Cards.
To bring it down to 280 GBP ($377): Replace 2x
Cavern of Souls
with 2x
Forest
.
To bring it down to 160 GBP ($215): Replace 2x
Asceticism
with 2x
Vines of Vastwood
or similiar, and replace 3x
Doubling Season
with 3x
Hardened Scales
Alternative Cards:
Hardened Scales
instead of
Doubling Season
. Cheaper to buy, cheaper mana wise, but less powerful effect
Alpha Authority
instead of
Lightning Greaves
. In practice I prefer greaves, similiar mana cost, but the ability to give haste is so useful, and you can move them around for , to always give a creature haste. The ability to only be blocked by one creature is not terribly useful.
Vines of Vastwood
instead of
Asceticism
. Personally the regenerate effect is too useful to pass up I think, but vines is much cheaper mana. Again the 4/4 is not terribly useful since you just outscale it anyway. It mgiht help with
Kalonian Hydra
's first attack though
Increasing Savagery
. I'm not sure what I'd take out for this, but this deck has a lot of mana, and this card lets you use a lot of mana to play 5 or 10 +1/+1 counters, which done with any of the doubling techniques, could easily buff up a creature +20/+20, even if it is just something like
Arbor Elf
. This could be used to buff up
Birds of Paradise
to make huge hard to block damage that just sails over defenders. But typically I find the hydras just overwhelm defences anyway, and the mana cost of
Increasing Savagery
means it comes out quite late, and is more likely to just help you win when you are already ahead.
Questions:
A) How could this deck be modified to win on average turn 4 or 5?
B) Would replacing 1x
Doubling Season
and 1x
Beast Within
for 2x
Increasing Savagery
in order to give the possiblity of making non-hydra cards a threat if need be, be a good idea?
C) This was made in 2018, what can I do to keep this deck relevant in mid-2019? Or should it still be viable? (I mostly just play casually, but want to keep it competitive)
D) Are there enough creatures in the deck? How about enough lands? Can the mana base be improved to get more out of the deck with little sscrifice
E) Any ideas on how or if to include the cards on the maybeboard? These are the ones I most picked up on from some of the comments below, such as kamarupa
Acknowledgements:
My thanks to everyone who offered suggestions for this deck, especially the people who helped craft it from the initial idea into the deck I ultimately purchased from their suggestions: 12rreber, EnederKvothe, Deruvid, aswordforthefallen, Iron_eye2, itachi45, The7thBobba, SillyRabbits, KylerStar, Hexaflexagon, Jackfrost23, ScionsStillLive, kamarupa and Jimmy_Chinchila. Please go check out their profiles and decks and read their comments for insight if you're interested in developing your own similiar deck.
