Thelon of Havenwood (Commander / EDH MTG Deck)

Thelon of Havenwood

Commander / EDH BG (Golgari) Budget Casual Counters Fungus Sacrifice Theme/Gimmick Vorthos

Lord_Edge

Land (38)

ManaRamp (14)

Denial (9)

BoardWipe (7)

LifeGain (6)

Tutors (2)

Tokens (20)

CardDraw (12)

Removal (10)

Recursion (8)

Proliferate (3)

Win-Condition (3)

Commander (1)

Fungus (14)

SacOutlet (12)

Thallid (9)

Anthem (6)

TapOutlet (3)

Maybeboard

Other (38)

Thelon of Havenwood, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love Black Mold

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This Budget EDH deck centers around Thelon of Havenwood and other cards, such as Slimefoot, the Stowaway, that produce and weaponize tokens, while also spreading spore counters. This is a Thallid deck, w/ a soft Fungus subtheme.

I believe it is also very flavorful, and is my pride-and-joy when it comes to building on a theme.

Be warned, you will need a metric ass-load of counters and tokens for this deck. Come prepared.

The goal of this deck is to play Thallids. Thallid is a creature originally printed in the set Fallen Empires. The gimmick with every Thallid is that they passively accrue spore counters. They can remove three of them to summon a 1/1 saproling token. We run just about every Thallid that I could squeeze into this deck who isn't outright garbage (with the exception of Thallid, he's not garbage, he's a goddamn cutie.)

We start by playing cheap Thallids, like Deathspore Thallid, Thallid Germinator, Utopia Mycon, and Vitaspore Thallid. We buy time for them to amass spore counters with fog cards like Fog, Darkness, and Moment's Peace *list*; or removal cards like Mold Shambler. Additionally, we aim to establish our board's safety with cards like Butcher of Malakir, and Dictate of Erebos, making our opponents think twice about murdering our innocent lil' Thallids.

As we do this, we should remain passive, keeping our Thallids out of harm's way, and buying for time to draw cards and mana ramp. If necessary, cards like Viscera Seer or Carrion Feeder + Dark Prophecy or Moldervine Reclamation, and Thallid Soothsayer can be used to sacrifice any spare saproling tokens we may have to get more resources.

Once we have a good boardstate, and a respectable number of Thallids on our side, we should play cards like Sporesower Thallid, and Sporoloth Ancient to accelerate our spore counters. Spread the Sickness, Plaguemaw Beast, and Thelon of Havenwood also help with this, but either cost us additional resources, or have an opportunity cost associated with them. Regardless, in an ideal situation, every single one of our Thallids should be able to start pooping out saproling tokens each turn. Additionally, non-Thallid token generators can help here as well, such as Druidic Satchel, Jade Mage, and Sporemound; as well as other more expensive options like Verdant Force and Sprout Swarm.

By now, our engine should be online, and we can shift gears. We can begin sacrificing our tokens to cards like the afformentioned Viscera Seer, Psychotrope Thallid, Grim Backwoods, and Thallid Soothsayer to get card advantage; Utopia Mycon for mana; and cards like Deathspore Thallid for removal, which Butcher of Malakir and Dictate of Erebos help with as well.

Once wrestling away board control from our opponents, we can maintain it by using our fog suite (Respite, Moment's Peace *list*, Fog, Darkness), or my preferred option: by setting up a really janky combo between two cards: Koskun Falls, and Season of the Witch.

Now allow me to explain:

WARNING: I AM A BIG DUMB IDIOT-HEAD, FALLS AND WITCH DON'T COMBO!!! I AM A SHAME TO MY FUNGUS-FAMILY, AND MY MIND WILL BE FOREVER FILLED WITH Dread AS A CONSEQUENCE. THIS IS BECAUSE KOSKUN FALLS SAYS THEY "CAN'T ATTACK", THEY ARE SAFE FROM SEASON OF THE WITCH. SEE "POSSIBLE CARD REPLACEMENTS" BELOW.

Koskun Falls functions similarly to cards like Ghostly Prison, where opponents must pay if they wish to attack. Koskun Falls does come with a cost, requiring a on one of our creatures to keep it around. Now, though slightly expensive, that's not bad on its own.
However, it gets better. Season of the Witch is a card that forces our opponents to attack with their creatures. If they don't, those creatures are destroyed.
You may notice, our opponents are now in a bit of a pickle. If they don't want their creatures dead, they have to attack. However, they need to pay to attack, thanks to Koskun Falls.
So they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either they have to spend a ton of mana just to keep their creatures alive, or they let their board get wiped by Season of the Witch.

"But wait" I hear you say, "can't they just go down to a single creature?". Oh sure, they can. But remember:

We've got tokens, at least a dozen of them. we're not worried about one single creature. We can chump-block for days.
This all results in a situation where each opponent is forced into a position that is favorable to us, where they have few creatures, and we have many, allowing us to play our precious Thallids, create saprolings, and durdle to our heart's content.

"B-but wait!" I hear you say once more, insisting on speaking while the professor is talking, "Season of the Witch forces us to attack too!"

A wise observation, dear ignorant strawman student of the fungal ways. But that's just it... We came prepared:

Bam! Cryptolith Rite

If you read Season of the Witch's oracle text closely, you notice that it doesn't really care whether our creatures attacked or not. What matters to it is that they're tapped. Therefore, we're totally free to tap our creatures out for something else... like Cryptolith Rite.

With Cryptolith Rite in play, we can theoretically gain tons of mana of any color. Though, for our purposes, we're only concerned with Cryptolith Rite's ability to let us tap for .

Enter our win-condition, Pestilence. Once we have our Koskun Falls (or Dread), Season of the Witch, and Cryptolith Rite combo set up, we can durdle around until we've got enough creatures to win with Pestilence's activated ability.

Here's the step-by-step process. It's simple:

Get at least a number of creatures equal to half the life total of the opponent with the highest amount.
Play Pestilence or Pestilence Demon, and Slimefoot, the Stowaway.
Tap-out our entire board with Cryptolith Rite.
Dump between 1-3 -mana into Pestilence (just enough to kill our own saprolings, ideally while also keeping Slimefoot alive).
The first trigger(s) will kill all of our now tapped saprolings, triggering Slimefoot, the Stowaway's ability, dealing that much damage to each of our opponents, and causing us to gain that much life, simultaneously protecting us from Pestilence's damage.
In response, dump the remainder of the floating into Pestilence, and finally, watch as the opponents' life totals disappear, and schlorp up that lifegain, ushering in a new golden age for fungus-kind.

Winning this way is super satisfying, but I admit, it's pretty damn janky. Because of that fact, this deck runs some alternate win-conditions, and some support to help us get there.

Nemata, Grove Guardian, and Overwhelm provide really strong buff effects that can help us win the old-fashioned way of smacking the opponent. Evasion from Profane Command, and other anthems can help with this as well, like Thelon of Havenwood and Sporecrown Thallid

We also can opt to go tall, by sacrificing our creatures to Carrion Feeder, giving him haste with Vitaspore Thallid, and swinging.

Big recursion spells like Creeping Renaissance and Grimoire of the Dead can help us make big comebacks, while single-target recursion from Profane Command and Life / Death can help us get back important cards to our strategy.

Tutors help us get our combo-pieces more efficiently, like Mangara's Tome, Diabolic Tutor, or Increasing Ambition (if cast twice - once normally, and another time using its Flashback - it can theoretically grab all three pieces of our stupid janky combo).

Lastly, if we're behind, we can also make very explosive and risky plays with Life and Limb, and the first half of Life / Death, allowing us to get a bunch of creatures to combo-off on Pestilence with, or to sac to activate cards like Dictate of Erebos or Dark Prophecy.

Possible Card Replacements:

Replace Life / Death w/ Blessed Respite — Blessed Respite provides us both recursion, and a fog effect. Arguably, the fogs are more relevant to our overall strategy than the Life and Limb-esque effect from Life / Death.

Replace Overwhelm w/ Door of Destinies or Coat of Arms — Honestly, apart from its $14 USD pricepoint, the reason I chose not to run Door of Destinies was the fact that I'd have to keep track of all those counters in addition to the spore counters. If you feel confident in your ability to track all those counters, then by all means go ahead. Coat of Arms is another similar boost in power over Overwhelm, but it wasn't included due to its price, which is $16 USD as of writing this.

Replace Springjack Pasture w/ Reliquary Tower — Pasture is a nice card, since it gives us tokens. However, honestly, the increase to hand size is hard to give up, so I'd recommend slotting that in instead if you aren't a fan of goats.

Replace Increasing Ambition or Mangara's Tome w/ Seasons Past — Seasons past is capable of grabbing Cryptolith Rite, Season of the Witch, and Koskun Falls all at once, like Increasing Ambition, though it is far less mana-intensive. Additionally, it also can be reused, since it gets placed back in your deck after being cast.

Replace Respite w/ Heroic Intervention — Heroic Intervention provides a ton of protection all at once, which can be especially valuable if you're about to combo-off. However, it's like twenty bucks, that's unfortunately outside our budget. But if you can afford it, or already have a copy, it'd be an immense help to this deck.

Replace Koskun Falls or Putrefy w/ No Mercy or Dread — Due to the fact that Koskun Falls does not interact with Season of the Witch in the way I had initially expected, the combo doesn't work. However, cards like No Mercy and Dread work just fine. They still disincentivize hitting us, while Season of the Witch basically forces them to, creating the intended effect, and also synergizing with our fog suite. Also, Dread is just the most supreme of sauce, absolutely patrician-tier card.

Replace Viscera Seer w/ Skullclamp — Skullclamp may not fit the theme, but gets a lot more done. Sure, it's slightly more expensive, both in terms of mana cost and real life cost, but the benefits are far greater. It's a great replacement if you want to power-up the deck for stronger tables.

Replace Dark Prophecy or Slate of Ancestry w/ Crystal Ball — After playtesting Crystal Ball a lot, it's kind of dope. While Drawing is always better, Dark Prophecy kind of falls behind in some aspects. Mainly, this is due to it requiring us to already have a developed board, and so if we're behind or we need good cards, we're kinda' screwed. At least Crystal Ball lets us filter the quality of our deck, a feature that I've found Viscera Seer has been invaluable for. Additionally, the deck runs Moldervine Reclamation, which is more expensive, but that bit of redundancy does kind of make Dark Prophecy's impact a bit less important. Slate of Ancestry, while potentially a major card-draw machine, is kind of win-more, being dead if we're behind, and only useful when desperate.

Replace Dark Ritual w/ Utopia Sprawl or Springleaf Drum — Dark Ritual is such a kino card, but I can't in all good faith put it in this deck. Primarily, I don't feel like it is all that reliable in EDH, where single-turn ramp isn't very good, and also this deck lacks those -cost cards like Necropotence that would facilitate such immediate ramp with such a confined color-identity. Utopia Sprawl is nice for mana-fixing, and from my experience running it (alongside cards like Wild Growth) that type of ramp is actually really really good. Springleaf Drum is a little less capable of abuse, but serves as a nice way to tap our creatures for the few cards we have that care about that, and is also colorless, meaning unlike Utopia Sprawl, we can use it to acquire any of our desired colors, the problem being that it requires a creature. Although, with Thelon of Havenwood at the helm, we can theoretically, reliably ramp to three or four on turn three.

Replace Golgari Rot Farm w/ Hissing Quagmire — I consistently get disappointed by the bounce-lands :/ I don't know what it is about them, but they never feel good to play. Sure, they are pretty darn good in a landfall deck (or any land-central archetype really), and they do actually ramp you, but IDK, I've never liked them. Hissing Quagmire, though slow, is quite nice, allowing us to put on the pressure early or block dangerous creatures. The deathtouch is really good.

Replace Burgeoning w/ Carpet of Flowers — If your playgroup runs blue, this card is a pretty nice semi-budget alternative to Burgeoning, and kind of a spicy, obscure tech-card. It's about half the price of Burgeoning as of writing this, so if you're willing to spend $7, it's a nice alternative.

Replace Sol Ring w/ Utopia Sprawl, Wild Growth, Fyndhorn Elves, or Explosive Vegetation — As part of an ongoing, concerted effort to phase Sol Ring out of our games completely, I am considering swapping it out for Utopia Sprawl. Depending on Mana Curve, or the other above Replacements which may or may not be executed in this deck, I may instead opt for cards like Wild Growth, or perhaps Fyndhorn Elves, or even Explosive Vegetation.

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Date added	5 years
Last updated	2 months
Exclude colors	WUR
Splash colors	B
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	1 - 0 Mythic Rares 29 - 0 Rares 18 - 0 Uncommons 32 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.50
Tokens	Goat 0/1 W, Plant 0/1 G, Saproling 1/1 G
Folders	EDH3.0 Decks
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