Insects are the most AWESOME animals! I love them and I love decomposers and rot and decay! This deck is a wonderful celebration of all those things!

New to MTG, learning how cards work together in this game. I just wanted to build a deck with many bugs and Grist, the Hunger Tide, my favorite planeswalker (most of those guys are just BORING HUMANS, seriously how come there's no other insect planeswalkers????)!!

Okay here's the part where I learn how to make these descriptions look more fancy, wish me luck!

This deck's strategy revolves primarily around getting Grist, the Hunger Tide out as soon as possible. Optimally, we get her in our opening hand together with enough lands to play her, but if we don't, Pyre of Heroes can get her onto the battlefield (remember, she's considered a creature everywhere but the battlefield).

Once Grist is out and about, we'll be mostly focusing on pumping out a bunch of tokens, those'll come in handy later! Including Grist herself, there are a total of 27 insect creatures in this deck, so we have decent chances of using her +1 several times in a row.

The -2 is a good use of the tokens we made and a good way to pick off threats.

The -5 doesn't come up often, but keep track of the amount of creatures in your grave, it might just close out a game.

Another central card of this deck is the aforementioned Pyre of Heroes. This thing really DOES stuff in this deck, it essentially lets you get whatever creature you need the most at any time! Due to this, we can afford to have single copies of certain cards in our deck, since we can choose when we get them out of the deck! Just keep your lines in mind:

creatures (all tokens) -> Mortician Beetle or Caustic Caterpillar

creatures -> Brain Maggot or Virus Beetle or Masked Vandal

creatures -> Devouring Swarm or Hornet Nest or Scute Swarm or even Grist, the Hunger Tide herself!

So you definitely wanna keep these lines in mind. For instance, if an opponents artifact or enchantment gives you trouble, you can go for either Caustic Caterpillar or Masked Vandal.

One of the main mechanics this deck revolves around is sacrifice. It comes from three main sources: Grist, the Hunger Tide, Pyre of Heroes and Devouring Swarm. Usually used after we have at least one Mortician Beetle out and about, ready to receive some nice treats of rotting flesh.

Since our beetle will continue to grow and grow, we want to sacrifice stuff as often as possible, and this deck encourages this as its main mechanic. Every time Grist, the Hunger Tide picks off a threat with her -2, the beetle grows. Each time we use Pyre of Heroes to get to the creatures we desire, the beetle grows. And if you permit the Devouring Swarm a feast... the beetle REALLY grows. Additionally, keep in mind that Caustic Caterpillar, as well as sacrifices your opponent makes ALSO power up your beetle! One of the first things you should do once you get Pyre is to bring out Mortician Beetle (likely using one of Grists tokens, which we'll have in abundance), due to how much it benefits from simply being around as this deck works its festering magic.

Devouring Swarm is awesome here! It allows you to sacrifice without any mana costs as many times as you like per turn. On top of that, it enjoys the gift of flight, so if you gotta make one last push, you could just sacrifice every single creature you have except the swarm itself to make it really fat, then slam it into your opponent. A fun feast of flesh for everyone involved!!

A minor theme this deck has is hand destruction, the act of getting rid of your opponents cards before they can play 'em. Three cards in particular do this: Brain Maggot, Virus Beetle and Inquisition of Kozilek. Each of them are cheap cards you can throw out early while you work your way to Grist or the Pyre. Virus Beetle also makes excellent sacrifice material, since it's not particularly remarkable after it's ability is triggered. But we have ways to trigger it multiple times, thanks to Unearth and Spring-Leaf Avenger!

No cards means they can't play. This deck needs a bit to get going, so this tactic is very appreciated.

Fatal Push is simply a good card, and with how much we're sacrificing, it'll nearly always be at peak dangerousness.

Spring-Leaf Avenger is the much-needed muscle of the deck. We'll always be playing them using it's Ninjutsu, so we get a 6/5 creature off of a mere ! One of our extra 1/1 tokens is bound to slip through our opponents defenses, allowing the avenger to deal a meaty hit AND return a permanent to our hand. Need more lands? Just take one. Or how about recycling Virus Beetle again to once more remove the opponents hand?

Fun piece of trivia: The Spring-Leaf Avenger is based on a juvenile orchid mantis! The artists that drew it gave it a pink coloration and an up-turned abdomen, indicating it's went through 2-7 molts so far. It doesn't become an adult until the 9th molt, where it turns white, has a lowered abdomen and develops wings. A common mistake many people drawing orchid mantises make.

Swarmyard is mostly here 'cuz I really like the flavor... but it can do things like protect your Brain Maggot, which will allow it to do some minor damage or kill a weak creature on occasion. Either way it's just a card that FEELS right in this deck. We all love eating carrion here.

Grisly Salvage gets you stuff. It's nice. :)

Of course we all want to push our decks to their maximal potential, even if we arn't building the strongest stuff in the game. We wanna see our darling favorites succeed, after all! As such, there's a few things I'm considering to adjust and tweak in this deck.

Swarmyard greatly adds to the flavor of the deck... but only gives colorless mana. In order to function at maximum efficiency, we'll need more green and black mana. So I'm considering swapping these for mostly Swamps later on (I actually only own 4 copies of Swamp currently). It'd be great to replace 'em with some more fancy lands like Verdant Catacombs or Cavern of Souls or even Boseiju, Who Endures... but those cards are expensive. Maybe some day in the future.

Grisly Salvage is another kinda hit-or-miss card. It gets you something useful for certain. But since it needs both green and black mana, something you might not have turn two, it sometimes feels like dead weight. Maybe it'll be better after I replace the Swarmyards? Who knows. This is another card I'm thinking to replace with more lands, since I feel it's not entirely uncommon to just get bad opening hands with not enough lands to do stuff with.

Hornet Nest and Scute Swarm are good cards that give use useful tokens, but don't REALLY quite fit the whole theme of this deck. They're one-offs we get out via Pyre, so I'd definitely be eyeing to replace them once new insects more suitable to this deck get printed. I'm always hoping for cool new bugs every set!

I've decided to classify this deck as a "casual" deck, since I have no intentions of learning or following any sort of meta. I just wanna make what I like. The deck is technically also modern legal, but I feel that doesn't really represent what I want out of this game.

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Make quite an overhaul, based on a deck submitted by user "biggestmtgnerd". They had a lot of cool ideas involving the card Pyre of Heroes, which kinda ties all the themes of the deck together. Figured I'd try my own take on it.

Pyre's really interesting, 'cuz it makes it super easy to get individual cards out of your deck, making one-off cards like Caustic Caterpillar and Masked Vandal very worthwhile. Plus, you can sacrifice Grist's tokens for one mana creatures like Mortician Beetle, which also benefits from both Grist and Pyre's abilities.

Neat! I feel I'm getting a much better hang of MTG deckbuilding!

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Date added 5 months
Last updated 1 week
Legality

This deck is Casual legal.

Rarity (main - side)

4 - 0 Mythic Rares

27 - 0 Rares

7 - 0 Uncommons

15 - 0 Commons

Cards 60
Avg. CMC 2.23
Tokens Copy Clone, Insect 1/1 BG, Insect 1/1 G, Insect 1/1 G w/ Flying, Deathtouch
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