Budget Magic: $90 Necrotic Ooze Combo (Modern)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! This time, for the first time in a while, we're heading to Modern to check out our new post-ban format, with a Necrotic Ooze Combo deck that costs just $90 to put together! While comboing with Necrotic Ooze has been a thing for pretty much as long as Necrotic Ooze has been a thing, Modern Horizons 3 offers the deck some huge, huge upgrades that make the plan much more realistic, which is why we're playing it today! What does Modern look like post-bannings? How good is Necrotic Ooze with some Modern Horizons 3 additions? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Necrotic Ooze Combo
The Deck
Necrotic Ooze is an incredibly unique creature, gaining all of the activated abilities of all the creatures in our graveyard. Assuming we can get the right creatures in our graveyard, this ability make it pretty easy to go infinite with Necrotic Ooze...
So, what do we need to get in our graveyard to let Necrotic Ooze go infinite? Three specific creatures. First, we need Morselhoarder and Devoted Druid. Together, these cards give us infinite mana with Necrotic Ooze. We can use Devoted Druid's ability to put a –1/–1 counter on Necrotic Ooze and then use Morselhoarder's ability to remove that counter and make a mana of any color. We can do this as many times as we want, giving us infinite mana of any color. But infinite mana by itself doesn't win us the game. To actually kill our opponent, we also need Spikeshot Elder in the graveyard, giving its ability to Necrotic Ooze so we can spend our infinite mana three at a time to burn our opponent out of the game, four damage at a time!
Now, you might have noticed that all of these cards are super old. In fact, all of our Necrotic Ooze combo pieces have existed since Scars of Mirrodin, which was released 14 years ago in 2010. So, why are we playing Necrotic Ooze Combo now?
The answer here is that Modern Horizons 3 gave us some incredibly powerful support cards to make the deck way stronger. The most important by far is Buried Alive. As we just discussed, we technically need four pieces to go infinite with Necrotic Ooze, with a Morselhoarder, Devoted Druid, and Spikeshot Elder in the graveyard and Necrotic Ooze on the battlefield. Even taking into account that milling creatures into the graveyard is easier than getting them on the battlefield, getting three specific creatures in the graveyard still takes a lot of work—or, at least, it did until Buried Alive came to Modern. Buried Alive lets us tutor all three of our combo creatures directly into the graveyard, which essentially turns Necrotic Ooze into a two-card combo, rather than a four-card combo. We can cast Buried Alive on Turn 3; put Morselhoarder, Devoted Druid, and Spikeshot Elder into the graveyard; and then cast Necrotic Ooze on Turn 4 to immediately win the game!
While not as important as Buried Alive, Malevolent Rumble is also solid in the deck, giving us a card that digs for Necrotic Ooze while also ramping us into Ooze and filling our graveyard.
But the Modern Horizons 3 goodies don't end there. We also got two cards that let us return Necrotic Ooze from our graveyard to play should we mill it or tutor it into the graveyard with Buried Alive in Chthonian Nightmare and Victimize. Victimize lets us sacrifice one of our random self-mill creatures (which we'll discuss momentarily) to return Ooze to play and is also a fine value play if we need to do more milling by reanimating things like Stitcher's Supplier and Satyr Wayfinder. Meanwhile, Chthonian Nightmare is great with our sell-mill creatures, letting us loop them to fill our graveyard at lightning speed.
Rounding out our main deck are a bunch of early-game self-mill creatures, which not only let us get our combo pieces in our graveyard but also provide cheap sacrificial bodies for our reanimation spells. We also have Rotting Rats as a way to discard combo pieces that get stuck in our hand and Accursed Marauder as removal that we can loop with Chthonian Nightmare.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we ended up going 2-3 in a Modern league with our deck, which is fine for a budget deck, if not especially exciting. The good news is that even when we lost, it felt super close (outside of our match against Storm, which was a blowout). In our loss to Energy, we got wrecked by Blood Moon, which is something that will happen when playing three-color budget decks since we need to play a lot of dual lands to make the mana work but can't tutor up basics with fetch lands. Against the Breach deck, we were ready to win the game (and match) on Turn 4, but our opponent managed to Through the Breach and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn on Turn 3. Basically, we were competitive even when we lost, which is encouraging for a $90 budget brew.
As far as changes to make to the budget deck, I'm not sure I'd really change much. It might be worth playing a copy or two of Haywire Mite in the main deck as a hedge against graveyard hate (which is really good against our deck) that also answers The One Ring. And we never really managed to get much value from Accursed Marauder, so that can probably be cut. But in general, the deck felt pretty good considering the budget restriction.
In non-budget format, there are a lot of possibilities. First, we can definitely upgrade the mana. But even outside of the mana base, being able to splash into white for Priest of Fell Rites or Unburial Rites as reanimation spells we can mill over and use from our graveyard seems solid. Plus, since we're playing Devoted Druid, we could also backdoor in some other infinite combos as a backup plan. Even with the upgrades, the deck will still struggle with graveyard hate and is probably still hard mode compared to just reanimating an Atraxa, but it would add some different lines of attack and power up the archetype.
So, should you play Necrotic Ooze Combo in Modern? I think the answer is yes but mostly for fun. I think the deck is good enough to pick up some wins at an FNM or on Magic Online, but it's probably not good enough to 5-0 a league (without getting super lucky). Thankfully, at just $90 in paper and 13 tix on Magic Online, it's super cheap to put together, and it does have some upgrade potential. So if you're looking for something unique, fun, and semi-competitive to play, keep it in mind! I wouldn't make it my primary Modern deck, but it seems like a hilarious budget option as a backup deck to pull out once in a while for fun!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
