You’ve always been more comfortable with your bare feet touching the fertile dirt, wet earthworms wriggling over your toes. You sense the detritivores moving under the earth like natures’ blood vessels. A swarm of beetles wrap around you like a cloak, and produce a crescendoing chorus of clicks. From beyond the blind eternities, you hear a response as countless maggots slither through space and coalesce into Grist, a thousand lives given identity.
You and Grist watch as your sacrifices burns in the Pyre of Heroes, their essence fueling countless births. A beetle feeds on their corpses, eventually towering over you. You shift your focus to your enemy in the distance. Swarms of bugs stymie the advance of their beasts, while caterpillars chew through the soldier’s weapons like leaves. Over the din of battle, you hear the wizard general begin babbling as maggots gnaw through his cerebral cortex. Your children crawl under his skin, fill his lungs, feast upon his eyeballs, and clean the meat off of his bones. You smile as his nutrients return to nature. Such is the power of the swarm.
The goal of this deck is to grind out a win using the insect tribal synergies of Grist, the Hunger Tide and Pyre of Heroes. This deck can win through going wide (Grist, Scute Swarm), by going tall (Mortician Beetle, Spring-Leaf Avenger), or even through Grist’s ultimate, allowing one to adjust one’s winning strategy on the fly. Despite having multiple sub-themes (discard, toolbox, sacrifice), the deck still feels cohesive through the tribal package of Grist and Pyre.
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You like unusual tribes/strategies
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You want a midrange deck that’s full of synergies and more than just a generic goodstuff pile
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You spent all of your money on Jund and want to build something powerful that won’t break the bank (if you already own the lands and thoughtseize)
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Grist, the Hunger Tide: Easily the most powerful card in this deck. The +1 is even better in this deck due to the high volume of insects, but, even if it misses, pumping out a token every turn is a lot of value. Moreover, the self-mill synergies work very well with the recursion package. The -2 allows you to pick off threats, as well as synergizing with mortician beetle. The -5 allows you to win the game out of nowhere if and is usually not hard to achieve in this deck.
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Pyre of Heroes: Grants a huge amount of flexibility to this deck; this is what allows the deck to balance all of its subthemes without feeling like a watered-down mess. If you don’t have Grist, it can tutor it. If you have Grist, it can turn Grist’s swarm of insects into a bunch of steadily growing Mortician Beetles. It can tutor Caustic Caterpillar and Masked Vandal to answer troublesome artifacts, like Unlicensed Hearse, or Kraul Harpooner against fliers, like Murktide Regent. If you need more threats on the board, it can tutor Scute Swarm or Spring-Leaf Avenger.
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Mortician Beetle: Synergizes very well with both pyre and grist. The longer the game goes, the bigger it gets.
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Caustic Caterpillar: Good tutorable artifact hate. Works very well with the deck’s recursion package.
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Virus Beetle/Brain Maggot: Solid two drops that help pick apart the opponent’s hand. Since the deck is so reliant on Grist and Pyre, getting rid of counterspells and removal is very useful. Beyond that, one-for-one trades are great in midrange decks that are able to eventually outgrind the opponent with value. The big downside of cards like these is that they’re not useful topdecks, but it’s less of an issue in this deck because you can still pitch them to the sacrifice outlets for value. Virus Beetle is better to sacrifice, but Brain Maggot is better for removing specific cards from the opponents hand.
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Masked Vandal: Tutorable two-drop artifact removal
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Kraul Harpooner: Tutorable two-drop flier removal
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Scute Swarm: Not good all the time, but in the right situation it can close out games very effectively or help gum up the board against creature decks. Being able to recur fetchlands with Spring-Leaf Avenger gives it more consistent value in the late-game.
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Graveshifter: Recursion that can bring back cards milled by Grist or sacrificed to Pyre. Can also be sacrificed to tutor for Spring-Leaf Avenger.
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Spring-Leaf Avenger: In addition to being great recursion (which is especially good in this deck), it provides a big body to close out games. Ninjitsu provides a useful surprise factor that can dodge counterspells and win the game out of nowhere.
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Thoughtseize/Inquisition of Kozilek: Like I mentioned in the Brain Maggot/Virus Beetle section, hand disruption is especially good in this deck. I went with 4 thoughtseize/2 Inquisition, as I figured that being able to discard a board wipe or big threat is worth being a bit worse against aggro
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Fatal Push: Efficient creature removal. Revolt is very easy to trigger in this deck.
If you’re building this deck and you have budget constraints, the only really expensive cards in the mainboard are
Verdant Catacombs,
Overgrown Tomb, and
Thoughtseize. Many players will already have those cards in their collection, and, if you don’t, they can be replaced by budget alternatives.
