Budget restriction: Cards need to be below 1.50€ on cardmarket.com. This might not reflect in the non-European markets.
This is my attempt to create a food deck on an extremely tight budget. I believe the food archetype has a lot of power, that seems a bit underappreciated in the current meta. Before buying into the full deck, which is still far cheaper than a lot of the big meta decks, why not give this version a try. If you want to make it more competitive, scroll down to upgrades and include the cards you already own. The entire main deck (not including shipping) cost me about 7€ on cardmarket, with another 10€ for the sideboard, which makes it the cheapest deck I have ever built, that can actually win games. Suggestions are always welcome!
What does this deck actually do?
This deck is designed to gain maximum value from The Underworld Cookbook through self reviving creatures and the madness ability. While being a midrange deck, it can go a rather aggressive route through cards like Feasting Troll King and Kitchen Imp and is also able to keep its head up in a longer game, using Food tokens for Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar's removal, Cauldron Familiar and their inherent healing ability. Watch out for Rest in Peace and other graveyard hate, as they shut down the deck's main plan. You could invest into a few Abrupt Decay or the cheaper, yet still powerful alternative, Witherbloom Command if you find yourself struggling. I should also note that this deck runs very few lands. I have played around with anything from 17 to 20 lands, and find that in order to obtain the three lands we need, in order to run our deck, this is the best number. If you test this deck and find that a different number works better, please let me know.
Notable synergies
This is a very nice synergy, as it creates a blocker every turn, that also drains 1 life, making for a slow but surprisingly significant clock. These two cards can both be played in turn 1, by casting
The Underworld Cookbook, discarding
Cauldron Familiar and sacrificing the food token to return
Cauldron Familiar to the battlefield.
I don't think I need to introduce this one to anyone, but just in case, this synergy allows you to drain your opponent for 1 every turn, while also making a blocker every turn. It helps a lot against aggressive strategies and lets us survive into the mid-game, where we start to shine.
This makes sure that every
The Underworld Cookbook creates a food token every single turn, so we can return our cretures regularly or eat our foods for health/damage.
Maybeboard and suggestions
Key to the City is a very interesting option to increase the number of discard outlets, while also providing some optional carddraw and evasion to the big hitters. I will test it, given the chance.
I am a quite sceptical of
Cryptic Caves, but experience will show whether it is worth the colourless mana. If you have a bit of money to spare,
Nurturing Peatland is much better.
Honestly, I don't think he is worth it, but he sort of fits into the theme of the deck. If you want, you can try him out; for me, he is too mediocre, having neither trample, nor any kind of evasion/recursion.
If you're looking to play a more control focussed deck, this, along with other discards is a wonderful addition to the deck.
One of my all time favourite MTG cards. Once again, this is better suited for a slower deck, but feel free to take it as an inspiration to create your own version of this type of deck.
If you want to focus more on the discard end of the spectrum, this is definitely a card to think about. I believe it has lost a lot of power ever since they removed
Faithless Looting from modern, but you can still make it work.
Upgrades
Prices, as they are on the 8th of May, 2022. The cards will be marked with , or , depending on how impactful the upgrade is, so you can prioritise accordingly.
As soon as you are playing Urza's Saga, make sure to play a one of Shadowspear, Pithing Needle and Nihil Spellbomb to get ideal value out of it. The upgrade path described above is simply a suggestion to make this into a Golgari () food deck. This is by far not the only possible upgrade path, as you could focus on instead, making this into a version of the Hollowvine deck, which uses Hollow One and Vengevine to play an incredibly aggressive game. Please feel free to let me know if you did something fun with this deck, and whether you enjoyed playing it. I have had an absolute blast with it. :)
The chopping block
These are the cards you should consider removing from the deck, once you eventually start updating it (nonlands only).
A note
This deck started out, focusing more on the discard aspect of The Underworld Cookbook, utilising Hollow One and even Zombie Infestation to swarm the board incredibly quickly, but sadly I found that my version of the deck had no consistency whatsoever, struggling a lot with keeping its pressure up for more than two turns. I still haven't quite given up on the idea, but for the time being, I believe this to be the best route to take, while keeping the legendary Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar & The Underworld Cookbook.
