Insidious Roots is one of my favorite cards in the current standard that encourages all kinds of silly builds involving the graveyard and pulling creatures out of it in one way or another. One popular build prior to our recent rotation featured Osteomancer Adept and Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler to create a self-feeding engine that could play out an entire deck and fling an enormous plant for a win.
If you’re curious, check out the article I wrote on that deck here:
While the theory on that deck was sound and it performed very well, one of the key combo enablers has now rotated out of the format. Tyvar is gone from Insidious Roots, but rather than accept this as the death of the deck, I've decided to push forward and accept it as a challenge to overcome.
I've experimented with a number of styles including a more aristocrat variant with Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER, which had mixed success, an enchantment-focused variant with Yuna, Hope of Spira that was fun if inconsistent, and the one we're going to talk about today: Jund Exhaust.
The Core Combo
The roots themselves are our primary build-around. This two-drop enchantment is focused on paying us off for getting creatures out of our graveyard. This enchantment has captured my imagination for a while now because it doesn’t fundamentally support itself in any meaningful way by neither helping you fill your graveyard nor empty it, but the payoff is incredibly powerful when you can trigger it. And there are many, many ways to trigger it.
Afterburner Expert is a mediocre card if you have to pay its full price, but if you can get it into the graveyard, it will reanimate itself when you activate an exhaust ability. There are a handful of exhaust creatures we could use here, but the most efficient and consistent has to be Draconautics Engineer, who can exhaust for a single red mana and even give the expert and plants it generates haste once they arrive on the board. The expert now attacking for four is a threat our opponent now has to respect and if they kill it, we can continue to recur it for value.
Agatha's Soul Cauldron is seen as one of the strongest cards in Standard as of this writing or, at least, it's a key combo piece in the format's strongest deck. Vivi Cauldron is taking up a scary portion of metagame real estate at the moment, so it's no surprise that we can take advantage of it here. This two-drop artifact removes cards from our graveyard and allows us to give the Draconautic Engineer's exhaust ability to every plant token we pump out, making it far easier to loop our Afterburner Experts. This card is also just uniquely powerful as a graveyard hate piece if you're careful about how you time its tap ability.
Finding Our Pieces
Surveiling is key in a deck like this because we need to mill a lot of cards, but we want to avoid milling specific ones. Gorehound triggers off of many of our creatures, but it notably triggers off of the plant tokens created by Insidious Roots. Every trigger equals a surveil which will help tee up our combo turns while also being a menace body that can wear counters well from the cauldron.
Cache Grab is an excellent two-drop spell that can put material into our graveyard while also pulling out a permanent that we'll need for later. If our roots are already on the battlefield, this gives us a trigger and can (hopefully) find us an engineer or other piece. If not, it gets us closer to finding the roots themselves.
It wouldn't be an Insidious Roots deck without Overlord of the Balemurk. This mill machine is a creature that fills our graveyard and helps us dig for our combo pieces. Additionally, once it's fully loaded, every attack trigger is an absolute explosion of value in a deck like this. It's a massive threat that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible, and if it isn't countered off the stack, it always provides meaningful value.
If we end up milling the cauldron or Insidious Roots, Coati Scavenger can help us by pulling them out of our graveyard and into our hand. We also can use it to trigger roots one time by grabbing a creature if everything is sailing smoothly. Additionally, if it's in our graveyard, the Overlord of the Balemurk can pull this back which can help us pull back the Insidious Roots if we don't already have it online.
The Midrange Gameplan
While we're trying to build a big janky engine with Insidious Roots, having a strong backup plan that our opponent needs to respect is very valuable. Qarsi Revenant, everyone's favorite Vampire Nighthawk reimagining, is incredibly powerful at buying us time and slowing down aggro advances. The lifelink and flying make it incredibly balanced as both a blocker and attacker. Additionally, its renew ability can help upgrade one of our plant tokens and even trigger roots in the process.
Scrapshooter started out as a sideboard card in this deck, but after playing a number of games, I found myself bringing it in in almost every matchup. That's a good sign that it's time for main-deck consideration. Its heavy stats and reach make it a real threat on the ground and a defensive powerhouse, plus it can remove the most powerful permanent on your opponent's board depending on the setup. Removal spells like Seam Rip and Pinnacle Starcage are also very popular these days, so being able to pick them off while adding stats to the board can be an enormous tempo swing. Gifting your opponent is a drawback, certainly, but I find this is more than worth it.
Conclusion
Insidious Roots is definitely missing its top-end combo potential without Tyvar's haste enabling on turn three, but the more value-focused version in Jund looks like a solid contender. In the few hours I played this version so far in the diamond ladder, I found the matchups to favor slower decks with this one slotting into contention and performing well. I'll no doubt be covering other versions of Roots in the future, so stay tuned for those decks!
Happy brewing!
