Singleton Shmingleton - Regrowth
Jesse Barker PlotkinSeptember 2, 2024
Can you weather the storm of this Wort, the Raidmother deck?
| Art by Dameon Willich
Return Target Card
Welcome back to Singleton Shmingleton, where I bend the singleton rules of Commander by building decks with as many functional reprints of a certain card as possible. This week we have a card that forms one of the foundations of green as a color in . Printed with the very first set of Magic, this card added a new depth to a color that was otherwise tied mostly to mana production and big creatures.
Now this color, tied to the sometimes mystical power of nature, could interact with the graveyard. Overshadowed at first by cards like and , has perfectly walked the line between those cards, ending up neither bannable nor unplayable as the game has grown and changed for thirty years, and the dozens of designs that have sprung from it still form a core identity of green.
No other color is given the ability to return any card type from the graveyard. Black can return creatures, blue can bring back spells, and artifacts and enchantments are spread across a few colors. But green, which is otherwise the color least interested in using the graveyard, gets to bring back anything.
and its progeny have seen play across every format, from Vintage Cube to Standard to Legacy decks of old. Alongside other colors, it offers a second chance at any card, and if that card happens to be , or , or even , then that's a great deal.
I remember a green and black Standard control deck that played as a way to rebuy just the right answers and never mill out, and a deck at the birth of Modern that used alongside to gain a soft lock on the late game, countering the opponent's first spell every turn. This card has a pedigree alongside powerful spells, and I aim to pay respect to that history in this week's deck.
There are thirty-one cards including green that let you immediately return a card of any type from your graveyard to your hand. Here they are:
List of Regrowths
There are a lot of incredible cards on this list, and also a few that have been rightly forgotten to time. The most played, in 447,990 decks, is .
Creature bodies are the easiest to move in and out of zones repeatedly, reaping their enters-the-battlefield abilities over and over, and when that ability lets you also recycle any other type of card, the possibilities are endless. The next most played of these cards, in 193,303 decks, is . Who would have thought that taking a classically powerful effect and adding on the ability to fix mana screw would be an instant hit?
This is one of the most powerful and flexible green cards printed in years, and it is no secret. The least played card, in only 448 decks, is . This card is sweet! I know it doesn't look like much, but it has serious upside, and in a deck that cares about topdeck manipulation and big mana values, this deserves at least more than 's 602 decks.
A Key Distinction
Now, out of our list of effects, there are two different formats to which I would like to draw attention. Many of the earlier versions of this effect, like itself, as well as many of the creatures, can go to the graveyard.
Others like , especially those that can return multiple cards to hand, exile themselves or otherwise stop themselves from going to the graveyard.
This design is meant to stop players from looping two of these effects and returning another spell repeatedly, which is an unfun play pattern and is very easy to abuse.
Some other designs that are not on this list restrict the type of cards returned to only permanent cards. can't easily facilitate loops with another copy of , because neither card can return the other.
Seeing the safety stops that Wizards puts onto any card that can return more than one card to hand, I decided it must be worth it to try to build our own double , and the easiest way to do that is by copying our spells.
If we manage to consistently copy a , it can return a powerful card alongside a , and if we can copy the in turn, we've got a loop. If the card we return with this loop generates enough mana, we might even have an infinite loop.
That sounds like a worthy goal. And I know of a worthy commander. can copy spells for absolutely free as long as we can keep generating untapped creatures, providing the backbone for our engine.
The Engine
Casting and copying spells leads our deck deep into Spellslinger territory, perhaps even into the realm of Storm. We want to cast a lot of instant and sorcery spells, and build resources until we can win in one big turn. But first, we need to set up our engine. Having access to a ton of effects can help with this as well.
There are a ton of cheap cards in green that let us mill cards into our graveyard, giving us a large selection of cards to return with s later. Cards like , , and the new put cards in our graveyard, dig us for lands, and give us creature bodies to tap with (though an is unlikely to share a color with any spell we cast for Conspire, but sacrificing for mana is still very helpful).
and mill us as well, and also let us skimp a little on lands since they can dig for them. And pulls double duty, letting us mill and ramp early and then turning into a scalable later in the game.
In addition to those green goodies, there are a handful of red cards that both stock the graveyard and love to be copied. , , and all dig us deeper, and if they are copied they become mana-neutral and card positive, generating as many Treasures as they require to cast.
is their slightly lesser cousin, but it still rocks in this deck. And while doesn't interact with the graveyard at all, it deserves a mention for being absolutely nuts if copied.
As for how we can generate our first creatures in order to copy these spells, we have a ton of options. , , and are efficient, and can even be free on a big turn.
and come attached to interaction, and even plays into our theme, though it is limited to permanent cards.
is exceptional in this deck, as we play cards that create a variety of creature token names. It also loves to be copied itself, as it can generate enough tokens to copy the next spell while drawing us a few cards along the way.
Finally, it wouldn't be a Storm deck without Storm cards, and the ones we're playing work wonderfully within our engine. and , alongside the newer , create tokens proportional to the number of spells we've cast.
Even if these cards are only getting copied four or five times, that is some serious Conspire fuel, and these are the spells we are going to use to generate the creatures needed to copy our spells in our loops. I'm excited to try out as well in this deck, as a way to create creatures that can attack the turn we go off.
The last piece of the puzzle, the glue that holds any Storm deck together, is a package of cards that create a lot of mana. is the gold standard, but in our deck, and provide more of the ludicrous piles of mana we need to loop our spells over and over.
Of course, red mana alone cannot cast , and so we also need our s, s, and s. It's a tall order, but after milling a ton of cards, we can often pick up enough of our specific pieces to cobble together something pretty close to a win.
The Big Loop
With all of these pieces in place, here is the Rube-Goldberg-machine-esque infinite loop that this deck can achieve:
The steps to executing this loop are as follows: cast with at least two storm, and generate three Squirrels and three Treasure tokens with . Cast , tap two Squirrels to copy it, returning (or any of the other versions in this deck) and to hand and generating two Treasures.
Cast again, now creating four Squirrels and four Treasures. Cast and copy it with two Squirrels, returning and to hand. This will generate infinite storm, infinite Squirrels, infinite Treasures, and a very large .
Now, if you'd believe it, this is, in fact, only the simplest loop in this deck. Because of the number of redundant pieces in the deck, there are many others which involve more convoluted sequences of returning specific spells.
The limiting factors when it comes to switching out parts of this combo are as follows: we need to create green creatures to copy green spells and red creatures to copy red spells; and we need to make both red and green mana. Our biggest mana-producers all produce red mana, but given a big enough or , we can take some "time off" recasting the our storm spell and go for a copied or .
Not only do these cards filter our mana, they also dig through our deck, and even if we're losing one mana every time we execute this loop, we may be able to find a piece that makes the loop self-sustaining. Similarly, if we're stuck with an that only creates red creatures and we need green creatures to copy our s, we can opt to return a once we've made a bunch of red mana and creatures, letting us keep the loop going.
Even if it isn't infinite at first, it's remarkably easy to end a turn with fifty tokens after recasting four times, and sometimes we'll dig to exactly what we need. And we even have one card we could draw that turns everything else into easy mode.
acts as an infinitely easier-to-abuse , guaranteeing that every spell will be copied and setting us free of needing to create both red and green tokens to copy our spells. We can go infinite with two and a after that.
The Decklist
Regrowth Storm
This deck scratches my combo player itch in the most enjoyable way. Every card has two modes: its use in the developing stage of the game, and its use on the Big Turn. is a great ramp spell, or it can work as a mana-producer when copied.
can bring back the right piece to sculpt the perfect hand, or it can form the basis of a game-winning loop. Convoluted combo's like the ones in this deck keep me locked in on other players' turns, wondering what draws could give me a win or which cards I need to keep around. And the way that this deck sets up its storm turn is unlike any deck I've played before.
Most storm decks spend several turns drawing cards with and finding the right pieces from the top of the library, but this deck tries to dump a ton of cards into the graveyard and then return the pieces it needs to win. While this does let other players know what is about to happen, the synergies this deck exploits are so niche that that won't be an issue unless you've beat the same people multiple times.
No one will know that is much scarier in the graveyard than , or that might be better for us than . is the star of the show, and this deck's biggest turns show off why this card has never been power-crept out of the format.
Until Next Time
Get ready to put some cards under your enchantments, because next time we're going to build a deck around . One of white's best genres of removal, this card and its friends come with some risk, but also some serious reward. How can we get turn efficient interaction into a true engine? Find out next time on Singleton Shmingleton!