Symbiosis Plus
The format at the last tournament was Starter Plus, a format which I think has a lot of interest as a passageway for beginners to go from playing starter decks to playing constructed. Since the game was about 1 month old, we could count on a lot of new players, and so I took on the task of building a bunch of different starter plus decks to offer players who had not built their own. I made lists for 10-12 decks, and today as promised I will be sharing my thought process around one of these deck constructions: Symbiosis, aka Naturalism 101.
You start with this deck list:
6 Discount Seed Shipment
3 Roottapper
3 Tundra Emissary
4 Loam Beast
3 Canopy Strider
4 Brookbringer
1 Heart of the Herd
1 Walking Parapet
2 Vigorvore
2 Martyr's Shrine
2 Glen Keeper
4 Nourishing Hyphae
4 Warden's Pact
4 Benevolent Experiment
Familiar:
1 Roottapper
An important basic point is that improving these starters is not just about what you add in, but what you take out. You may think that a second Supreme Wargear would be the best possible addition to your CM deck, but then you have to take out Shock and Awe, rather than, say, Excessive Weaponry. So with every deck, one of the things I did was make a list of cards I'd like to take out.
This deck only has two standout weak cards:
- Martyr's Shrine.
The deck also has a very consistent identity and game plan: get big servants, dominate the board, then hope for enough vandalism to finish.
In tweaking the deck, one of the big questions is: how much do you want to put in to the Vigorvore combo? Basically, Vigorvore combos with Roottapper and Benevolent Experiment to become an incredible force; but it's got high variance: sometimes your opponent will avoid doing incremental damage to your servants. Sometimes you will have healing cards and no Vigorvore, or Vigorvore and no healing cards. This set of cards (2 Vigorvore, 4 Roottapper, 4 Benevolent Experiment) can sometimes be your best cards and sometimes your worst! So it is a huge decision whether to support it, take it out, or leave it as an option.
We could use the two martyr's shrine slots to go up to 4 vigorvores, with 8 healing cards in the deck. Now the last 3 slots probably won't help much with this. You could switch the Heart of the Herd for an Everglobe, but more likely we'll upgrade three weaker commons.
The other option is to go with more Glen Keeper, which in the current iteration of the deck is probably the strongest card. This will get us more consistent ramp-- quite good chances of a t3 glen keeper even. Then we'd want to add some more expensive cards to go with the glen keeper. But there's the rub-- there's nothing big left to add at common. Eraya Snapdragon and Heart of the Herd are the two best targets, but then we'd be replacing Parapet or Flamingos instead of Warden's Pact or Nourishing Hyphae.
I really don't know which direction is correct-- each has its advantages and disadvantages. Going all-in on Vigorvore allows your deck to continue to make good use of Roottapper, Vigorvore, and Benevolent Experiment-- all of which will be among your weaker cards if you aren't using them in combo. On the other hand, these cards present very very little threat to the opponent, so if they see you are all-in on it, they can choose to *never* defend their lab, avoid all combat (which a lot of decks would rather do against N anyway), and your Vigorvores have almost no way to grow.
If you go for Glen Keepers, then you may have ramp without targets, or you may take out the Vigorvores to get Snapdragons, but then your Roottappers become garbage.
In all cases, there is a question of what cards you'd want to add if you replace a couple commons.
I'd say that Tundra Emissary is currently the 4th best card in the deck (Glen Keeper, Heart of the Herd, Parapet, Emissary), largely because of its 3 Vandalism. So logically, I'd be looking to add the 4th Emissary and/or Cavern Watchers.
Symbiosis - Flamingos
6 Discount Seed Shipment
3 Roottapper
4 Tundra Emissary
4 Loam Beast
3 Canopy Strider
4 Brookbringer
1 Walking Parapet
4 Vigorvore
2 Glen Keeper
2 Cavern Watcher
1 Heart of the Herd
3 Nourishing Hyphae
2 Warden's Pact
4 Benevolent Experiment
Familiar:
1 Roottapper
Symbiosis - Ramp
6 Discount Seed Shipment
3 Roottapper
3 Tundra Emissary
4 Loam Beast
3 Canopy Strider
4 Brookbringer
2 Heart of the Herd
2 Eraya Snapdragon
4 Glen Keeper
4 Nourishing Hyphae
4 Warden's Pact
4 Benevolent Experiment
Familiar:
1 Roottapper
All-in on the big guys! Given that we can consistently cast Heart of the Herd, I figured a second Heart of the Herd was a bigger upgrade than 1 roottapper becoming a flocksbane or cavern watcher (the difference is not as great as 4 +1 counters).
Symbiosis - General Quality
6 Discount Seed Shipment
3 Roottapper
3 Tundra Emissary
4 Loam Beast
3 Canopy Strider
4 Brookbringer
1 Heart of the Herd
1 Walking Parapet
2 Vigorvore
3 Cavern Watcher
4 Glen Keeper
4 Nourishing Hyphae
1 Warden's Pact
4 Benevolent Experiment
Familiar:
1 Roottapper
Here I neither go all-in on Vigorvores, nor do I take them out. I just try to increase the quality and quantity of strong servants. The Cavern Watchers increase our Vandalism threat considerably, the Glen Keepers improve our ability to churn out our cards, while being ready to soak damage, and a couple Vigorvores remain to punish an opponent who tries to fight us.
Which of these three versions do you think would be strongest? Two of them (Flamingos and Ramp) were played in the tournament; "General Quality" remains untested.
Also, let me know if you'd like to see my thought process on the other three starter plus decks-- I wrote all of them up as I was making them, but was not planning to flood the blog with all of them. If there's interest I'm happy to share them.