Mono Green Resurgence in Pioneer: Deck Preparation Tips

The Resurgence of Mono Green in Pioneer, and How to Prepare Your Deck For it

Explore the resurgence of Mono Green decks in Pioneer and get essential tips to prepare your deck for competitive play. Discover expert insights now!

All was quiet and chill in the Pioneer Format so far this season. It felt like the meta was really balanced, and every deck had it's fair shot at playing a good, honest game of magic. Little did we know it was all a ticking time bomb just waiting for Mono Green to literally explode back into contention for the best deck. We were all pretty sure that Niv to Light was the deck with the highest power level, and the one that felt the most consistent. It still may be, but now we have a new/old player back into the mix with a Mono Green list that has recovered from losing Karn, The Great Creator, and uses one of Thunder Junction's new plot creatures to amass even more value, and draw almost all of it's cards in the deck. You may wonder how a creature deck can do that - just keep reading.

Total Cards:

Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is still an incredibly powerful land, and the decks are using this to almot go infinite on mana. Couple that with Kiora still being powerful, and allow it to run into a format that doesn't like to use many board wipes, and you have an incredibly well-positioned creature deck.

New, Relevant Cards

This card at face value looks pretty fair, you get a benefit from plotting, and it draws cards, but it's only a 4/2 as it hits the board. It appears that the toughness on it was a necessary drawback to make it so that the card isn't too crazy. Well, in this deck, it is bonkers regardless. With Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner, it effectively can turn into a two mana 4/2 that draws a card. It is just one of the many parts of the value engine that creates a relentless onslaught on the opponent's life total.

This is a newer card that is the only leyline enchantment currently printed to be legal in Standard. It allows for perfect mana fixing, and even allows the deck to play Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines without having any white mana sources if it doesn't want to. This also immediately gives four devotion for Nykthos as early as turn zero. It's evident that the deck has leaned even more into devotion to amass obscene discrepancies in value throughout the game.

Citadel allows for even more broken combos in the deck, because it allows only two lands to tap for a Nykthos activation. It also allows Lair of the Hydra to get in an extra point of damage. It may seem marginal, but the deck does an outstanding job of getting value in as many places as it can, and this is one of many things that start to add up over the course of the match and cause the opponent to simply be overrun.

New Additions in the Four Mana Slot

Magic the Gathering Card - Ulvenwald Oddity - MTG Circle

Oddity is a card that was popular in Standard when it first came out and allowed for some aggressive Mono Green Aggro decks to be in the upper echelon of competitive lists. As control became more and more popular, and with the advent of the board wipe meta in Standard, the card fell off a good bit. It is pretty well-positioned, however, in a format that doesn't have too many board wipes, and sees a lot of the control decks starting to fade. The real kicker here is when the deck has enough devotion on board to not only play the Oddity, but also to flip it in the same turn. It effectively creates a one turn kill where an inconceivable amount of power is on the board, and all creatures have trample and haste. Unless you are in the mirror and also have a crazy board, there aren't too many situations in the Pioneer Format where a player wouldn't simply be dead on board against that.

What Can We do About this?

OK, so we know that this is problematic for anyone who doesn't want to play Mono Green, so what cards can we add to our decks that will effectively deal with the oppression? I'll give you some insights into the cards that I will either add more of to my sideboard in my Waste Not deck, or cards that I will add to the sideboard that weren't there before. (Don't worry, the best option is a colorless artifact that any deck can play!}

This card has been somewhat of a staple for a lot of decks in Pioneer, and it is often used to shut down combo decks that may be centered around all having odd or even creatures. The good news here is that a lot of the powerful creatures in Mono Green are odd mana value, and the ones that have death triggers are also odd. This card will exile them, and minimize the value.

This is the spicy one that everyone can put in their deck. We actually saw the last Pro Tour Pioneer winning list run this in the original Rakdos Vampires Sideboard. This flat out shuts down Nykthos, and can stall the opponent before they even get a chance to get extra value from the devotion land. It also is pretty nifty against storm decks, and Izzet Phoenix due to making the extra spell casting increasingly taxed.

This is one where I'm not fully decided if I want to put it in the sideboard. It would immediately shut down the deck by us simply calling Nykthos when we cast it, but the problem is that it is three mana, and sometimes the opponent's deck can start popping off on turn three. We would basically need to also have a Field of Ruin and a Necromentia to deal with it if the opponent already has the Nykthos land out. If the opponent is late in playing Nykthos, it makes Necromentia a home run. It is also worth noting that we are taking off turn three of the game to do this, which sometimes is bad because that can be a pivotal point in the game where it is decided who will be able to get ahead on board, or at least who will be able to set themselves up in a way that gets them where they want to be.

I hope this evaluation was helpful, and let me know in the comments if you have any other sideboard recommendations to deal with the pesky Mono Green!

Rate this article

I am a Magic The Gathering competitive player, and streamer. I specialize in homebrew decks. My favorite formats are: Standard, Pioneer (Explorer on Arena), and EDH. I first started playing MTG in 2001, and have played on and off since then.

numb_skull_

Check out more content by Numbskull

Explore the power of Rakdos Dragons in this midrange Magic: The Gathering deck. Unleash combos, removal, and ramp for competitive edge in Standard.

This Deck is Sneaky Good! Get Ready for RAKDOS Dragons!

You didn't think I could only give you one dragon deck, did you? I honestly saw too many fun options to do just Boros, so today I'm bringing you another. This one steers toward the more midrange, good ol' honest Magic side of things. I wanted to center a deck around something that is more consistent with the status quo of dragons: carnage and destruction. We have plenty of removal in this deck, and a creature that doubles as a board wipe when needed. Since we aren't doing a super fancy combo in this deck, I wanted to add element of ramp to get to the higher mana spells that we have in the deck. We will be able to use early creatures to help out with that, and also a new fancy artifact. We will torch the board and force our opponents to be more resilient than we are, while flying over the top of what they might manage to keep on the board. Let's take a look at the deck and then I'll tell you some of my favorite things about it. You can see some of the fun that we will have right off the bat with this deck. We are looking to smash aggro decks, and still punish other decks that don't play to the board. Although this one has fewer dragons on paper, we have a few permanents that can actually turn into them, and this leads to some cheeky interactions. Let's check out some of the new cards from Tarkir Dragonstorm that are in this deck, and then we will go over some fun combos! Key New Cards

It's Time to Mobilize the Aristocrats with Mardu Combo!

There is an ongoing argument in both Standard and Pioneer currently. What color combination is the best for aggressive decks? We have seen people try out Jeskai Aggro to try and incorporate the best of both worlds between Azorius Aggro, and Boros Aggro. Some like to stick with Gruul Aggro because of the high rolls that it allows for, and there is also an argument that sometimes all you need is mono red - and the results have proven as much in major events. There has been a bit of a surge of some Mardu Aristocrat/Sacrifice decks, and today's list will follow that to some degree. We went a little bit more aggro-based, but there is a combo element to it, along with a healthy sideboard that should provide for balanced gameplay. We will look to get a bunch of creatures onto the board, and then create a bunch more based on the amount that we have, while punishing the opponent when they die. If that isn't enough, the go-wide strategy should also allow us to swing for ample damage at an ample pace. A new ability called Mobilize that is being brought to us in Tarkir Dragonstorm is going to allow us to pull off some pretty powerful swings in combat. Mobilize allows us to create a bunch of tapped and attacking 1/1 tokens based on either the number behind it, or circumstances that pertain to "X." Something that is particularly fun is that we can benefit from our creatures dying, because the mobilize ability requires us to sacrifice the creatures that we get from mobilizing at the beginning of our end step. This is yet another deck that can allow us to win on the end step which is always fun. Another fundamental reason why I think the deck is good is because we are rewarded for something that would normally be considered a setback. If you find enough ways to turn negatives into positives, it usually can translate into the small margins that win you a match. Enough of me blabbing. Let's take a look at the cool new cards! Key New Cards

Demons Are Getting New Toys, and This Deck is ROTTEN

We have seen the vast majority of the cards that will be released in Tarkir Dragonstorm, and the excitement is definitely building. Magic players are expecting this to meet the hype that Duskmourn brought us, and hopefully more. We were left a bit underwhelmed with Aetherdrift, but this is proving to be all but a filler set. It's something that is so easy to be excited for. Who doesn't love dragons?! Anyone with an ounce of nerdiness is interested as soon as they hear the word. Although I don't have a dragon deck for you today, I am going to do my obligatory Mono Black Deck for the new set. If you have read my articles in the past, you know that I do one every set - and this one is no different. We finally have enough cards from Tarkir to give me what I needed to make a new-and-improved Demons list for you. We have a new one that will let us pull off some combos on earlier turns, and hopefully have a better body early on to put pressure on aggro decks. I think that should give us a better shot against the meta, since the threat of a 5 damage crackback can definitely give someone extra things to consider in combat phases. He also isn't a bad creature to discard, as he has an ability to activate from the graveyard. This will help us against the bounce/pixie decks. We have ample graveyard hate and removal for the graveyard combo decks, so I like most of our matchups against the current meta. The only thing we will have to see with time is if the meta shifts with this monster of a new set. We really have some fun cards to add here, and we are adding another type of threat to the deck. We have historically not used our graveyard for much, but now we are able to get additional value from it with a new addition. Our sideboard even has a dragon with an adventure that reads like The Meathook Massacre! I've said enough, let's check out these cards. Relevant New Cards

Free Dragons = Turn 4 Wins!

We are officially in the perpetual spoiler season of the MTG year, and Wizards has not been disappointing us. Most people can get behind a set centered largely around dragons, and it definitely helps that the plane itself is one that we have wanted to see them bring back for a long time. Over a decade later, we are going back to Tarkir. I played a good bit of Magic and did a lot of deck building the last time we had some fun dragons on Arena, and I knew that this set was going to call me back to those days. My favorite archetype a couple of years ago was Boros Dragons. I largely played that in the Alchemy format, but I am going to bring you a Boros Dragons Standard Deck today. We are going to take advantage of a combo that is used in Standard currently, but we are going to use a different payoff this time. We are going to cast dragons for FREE and then either they will have the opponent dead just from entering, or we will hopefully have a way to give them all haste! We will take a look at the new cards that are awesome. Then I'll let you know about the combo that will help us get there. We want to keep the board as clear as we can for our dragons and then slam them all on the board at once to clean things up. We also have some smaller creatures that we can use to chump block earlier in the game. When needed, we also have board wipes to deal with other creatures. New Cards from Tarkir Dragonstorm

I See a Monument and I want it Painted Black

It's been a few weeks since Aetherdrift came out, and we are starting to see the cards that are standing out in the meta. We didn't expect the set to change things too much with regard to what we have been seeing. What we did get from it is a nice supplement to many other decks. Although we did not get a ton of format-shaping cards, we have seen a couple that have lit up fringe archetypes. What I've brewed for today plays off of a familiar archetype, and it was one that we kind of already had, but it allows us to pivot in a certain way and get additional value from it that we may not have gotten in the past. One of the biggest things that our deck can do is have plenty of action on the end step/cleanup step. It's an interesting scenario because usually when we think of the cleanup step at the end of each turn, we remove damage, and we discard to hand size. Usually discarding to hand size is pretty much the final step, and there aren't any triggers... until now. We will be using Monument to Endurance to have triggers when we discard to hand size, and get additional value from it. Now we don't care if we end the turn with nine or ten cards in hand, because we are going to benefit from it. This will help us possibly get in some finishing damage against our opponent, or get extra value. It is worth noting that this will cause triggered abilities on the cleanup step, and this is something that our opponents can respond to. This has historically been a point in the turn where no player can respond to actions. We'll take a look at the relevant cards in the deck, and then I'll detail a few fun combos that we may see during gameplay. Relevant Cards

We've had a Couple of Weeks to Try Achievements on MTG Arena, and I have Opinions

The economy on MTG Arena has always been a pain point, and a grand debate over how far a digital version of a card game should go to ensure players feel as if they are getting proper value for their time. Wizards has two different versions of its beloved game on the internet, and they both seem to have their benefits and drawbacks. On February 11, Arena launched the Achievement System to reward players for hitting milestones in-game, and completing specific tasks. While it is always fun to do these kinds of things in each game, something that gamers always do is assess whether the reward for doing so in-game is worth putting forth the extra effort for the task. While there are some things in the achievement tab that I believe to be kind of fun, and certain things that I know people will want, I view the entire thing as largely a waste of time. Today we will look at why the new feature on Arena simply isn't enough for what the game should have, and what it could be. The Good and The Bad There are plenty of things that we love about Arena, with how it is the easiest way to play our favorite decks from Standard, and not spend thousands of dollars in doing so. It is probably the most efficient way to try out decks. We also love the wildcard system. Although it is not the easiest to obtain them, it is great that a rare/mythic wildcard could buy a rare/mythic card that is of any value and it still just costs one wildcard. This was especially helpful in getting a play set of Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. I still don't have a play set in paper simply because I don't want to spend that much money on it, but on Arena it was easy. I had the wildcards to do what I needed. The only part where this may be lacking is the economy itself. What if we could earn wildcards for hitting certain achievements (I.E. the achievement tab giving us wildcards instead of sleeves, etc.)? I believe that the rewards from this new feature being solely cosmetic underscores the ongoing issue of the economy on Arena simply not being enough for us.

This Deck is Sneaky Good! Get Ready for RAKDOS Dragons!