Much Abrew: Fecund Deserts (Pioneer)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're going for Mythic on Magic Arena in Pioneer with Fecund Greenshell! You might remember that a while ago, we played a Greenshell deck in Standard for Against this Odds. In many ways, this deck is the Pioneer version. Our deck is overflowing with high-toughness creatures to trigger Fecund Greenshell. And since we're playing Pioneer, we even get Yorion, Sky Nomad as a companion to blink everything and draw even more cards! Can Magic's flower-flinging turtle find its way through the desert and to Mythic in Pioneer? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Fecund Deserts
Discussion
- Record-wise, we went 6-1 with the deck and just managed to sneak our way into Mythic on Magic Arena! While the deck looks pretty janky and has a ton of Standard cards, it actually felt oddly competitive in Pioneer!
- The biggest reason for this is Fecund Greenshell, which lines up strangely well with the Pioneer meta. As a five-drop, it dodges Fatal Push. Having six toughness means it dodges red removal, so a lot of decks have few ways to actually get Fecund Greenshell off the battlefield. Oh yeah, and reach means it locks down Arclight Phoenix and other popular fliers in the format. When you add all this together, the end result is that, against all odds, Fecund Greenshell is actually really solid in Pioneer. It gets even better once we get multiples on the battlefield, which isn't too difficult thanks to Glasspool Mimic giving us a clone in our mana base.
- As far as the rest of the deck, it's basically high-toughness creatures that can also ramp us into Fecund Greenshell. Cards like Arboreal Grazer, Insidious Fungus, and Clifftop Lookout get us up to five mana to cast Fecund Greenshell as quickly as possible. And once we have our namesake Turtle, they draw us cards (and potentially ramp us even more) thanks to Greenshell's ability. While Outcaster Greenblade and Spinewoods Armadillo don't technically ramp us since the land they find goes to our hand, thanks to Arboreal Grazer and Insidious Fungus's ability to put extra lands from our hand on the battlefield, we often can turn them into real ramp spells with a bit of help.
- By far the strangest part of the deck is the removal. We don't have any hard removal (probably not a surprise considering we're a Simic deck); instead, we're leaning mostly on Blue Sun's Twilight. While the X spell is expensive, our deck is good at making extra mana, and being able to not only steal our opponent's best creature but also potentially make a token copy of it is super powerful. We won one game simply by stealing our opponent's Unstoppable Slashers twice and using them to beat our opponent down!
- The other interesting part of the deck is the mana base, which leans heavily into Deserts. Along with powering up cards like Outcaster Greenblade, the combination of Arid Archway and Conduit Pylons gives us a weird surveil engine to help ensure that we can find Fecund Greenshell and our other important cards even though we're playing an 80-card deck thanks to Yorion, Sky Nomad. While surveilling most turns might not sound like much, all those little bits of card advantage add up and eventually let us overwhelm our opponent with value by finding our best cards at the right time.
- So, should you play Fecund Deserts in Pioneer? I think the answer is yes, and doubly so if you have the Standard Fecund Greenshell deck we played a while back. While the deck stands on its own and is super fun to play, it's nice that it plays so many Standard cards. If you've already got a decent Standard collection, you should be able to put the deck together pretty easily! If you like drawing tons of cards and decks that ooze value, give Fecund Deserts a shot!
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.
