Wallet Warriors: Rith, the Awakener

Welcome back Wallet Warriors! We’re exploring tribal synergies once again today but this time we’re going a bit deeper. This is $60 Saproling Tribal with Rith, the Awakener as the general!

This build was inspired by the new card out of Rivals of Ixalan: Tendershoot Dryad

This limited powerhouse is also great in our format just on it’s own but I wanted to see how much value we can extract out of it’s +2/+2 ability. When I plugged in the word “Saproling” into ye olde Magic search engine I was astonished with how many results were populated.

I was ecstatic to find that one of the Primeval Dragons of Dominaria would make for a great leader of our little plants (Not to be confused with the actual creature type: Plant). Rith might not be the most powerful option objectively but he hits a nice balance since he has the potential to make huge swarms on his own and gives us three good colors while averting the gaze that a commander like Ghave, Guru of Spores might bring from the table.

Here’s the deck!

If you want to see the list organized into the categories I talk about click here.

Deck Overview

What’s great about this deck is that so many cards pull double duty. It was difficult to organize it into strict categories since a lot of the cards that pump our saprolings also produce them. We actually have saproling makers across the board, one in our card draw section, one that makes mana, a couple removal spells that spit out tokens and one of our lands even makes them!

Another reason this is a great budget deck is that it is relatively simple to play. We’re just trying to swarm the board with saprolings then find one of our eighteen ways to pump them and do some massive damage. There is also the added benefit of playing an “underpowered” tribe with an “underpowered” commander. A surprising amount of commander games are won by the player who is the least threatening out of the gates.

Building Our Army

We’re going to start with the pawns of the deck. These are the cards that don’t do much more than just grow our army but most of them can do that very efficiently.

I say “most” because we have to face the reality that when we’re trying to make a lot of saprolings, we’re going to need some fungi to help out. I’m of course referring to thallids here. Thallids are creatures that share the ability to slowly make saprolings, typically one every three turns. This is definitely not as efficient as we’d like but we’re not leaning on them too heavily for our token production.

Outside of our thallids we have some great mana sinks in Sprout Swarm and Jade Mage. We’ve also got some passive token makers in Verdant Force and Mycoloth.

After we’ve grown our army to be sufficiently huge we’ll need some payoffs for our hard work. That’s where our anthems and lords come in.

Powering Up The Army

To clarify some Magic lingo, “Anthems” are enchantments or non-creature sources that make our creatures stronger and “Lords” are creatures that give a certain type of creature a boost.

Tendershoot Dryad is one of the best cards in the deck since it’s one of the most efficient saproling makers and one of the most powerful lords. Including the dryad we have six lords that also make saprolings.

Radiant Destiny is another sweet card out of Rivals of Ixalan we get to use. In our colors we have access to a few cheap anthem effects like Intangible Virtue and Beastmaster Ascension as well as Impact Tremors which I put in this category since it similarly benefits you from going wide with tokens.

Now let’s look at our suite of reactive spells that let us make way for our army.

Answering Threats and Protecting Our Own

Let’s start with the MVPs, Artifact Mutation and Aura Mutation let us answer some pesky permanents while giving us a bunch of saprolings for our troubles! Aura Mutation will typically have fewer targets than it’s artifact mirror however keep in mind that since the “Destroy target enchantment” and the “Create X saprolings” effects are separate you can target an indestructible enchantment (such as a Theros God for example) and still get the saprolings!

Rootborn Defenses and Make a Stand give us some much needed board wipe protection. The nice part is that they both have a bit of added utility. The former will give us an extra token while the latter comes with a small anthem effect.

A card that can be tricky to use but very powerful in the right hands is Glare of Subdual. There are lots of uses to discover with this versatile card. Primarily we will be using it to lockdown a big attacker or deter people from attacking you if you can get on their good side. The glare can also be used to tap down blockers before your turn starts for a big swing. Apart from its uses in combat you can also tap down mana generators before they get a chance to be used. You will want to do this in your opponent's Upkeep step so they will be forced to use the mana on something with instant speed if they don’t want it to go to waste.

Alright, with the fun stuff out of the way let’s go over the bread and butter of Commander. Ramp and Card Draw.

Mana Ramp

For our mana acceleration we have a few of the usual suspects such as Llanowar Elves, Rampant Growth and Cultivate.

We want most of our ramp to come from creature sources even if they won’t be saprolings since a lot of our anthems hit all our creatures as well as our commander only caring about color.

Rishkar, Peema Renegade is one of my favorite cards from recent sets and he fits perfectly into our ramp package since his second ability lets any of our creatures with counters on them tap for mana, these don’t need to be +1/+1 counters. So that includes all our thallids since they naturally accumulate spore counters.

Utopia Mycon is a great card since it gives us a Phyrexian Altar effect on our saprolings while also having the thallid ability, and all for just one mana!

Card Draw

Psychotrope Thallid gives us a way to turn saprolings into cards which is incredibly useful. There are two common scenarios where you will want to sacrifice your saprolings for card draw. The first is when you are low on resources and don’t have much on board except for a few spare tokens. The second is in response to a board wipe.

Path of Discovery is not exactly card draw but it does provide a lot of value in a few different ways. It can straight up draw cards if we hit lands, it can make our creatures a bit bigger and it can filter our draws so we find what we’re looking for much faster. All in all, a very powerful card that fits our game plan well.

Then to fill out this section we have Lifecrafter’s Bestiary, Mentor of the Meek and Zendikar Resurgent that give us cards just for playing creatures and Shamanic Revelation, Collective Unconscious and Skullclamp reward us for having already played creatures.

Now let’s look at which cards you should consider when upgrading the deck.

Upgrades

Our colors give us plenty of options for go-wide payoffs. Purphoros is great since it is very resilient and deals tons of damage very quickly when we’re swarming the board. Aura Shards is a card you should invest in early if you have any decks that have green and white in them. For just three mana you get an enchantment that can threaten so many of your opponents permanents, it is a must answer card for a lot of decks.

Shared Animosity and Coat of Arms are both mega anthems since they get stronger the more creatures we have that share a type.

These are another couple of straightforward upgrades. One of the best things you can do in casual commander is double of whatever you were already planning on doing.

Wrap Up

There is definitely something to be said for the pleasure of winning with an underused tribe. Sure, you could be the eighth person at your LGS to build Edgar Markov or you could show them all up with your hipster saproling deck!

See you all next time! Cheers!