Regrowth | 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 Regrowth. 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 Channel and Force of Nature, Regrowth 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.

Regrowth 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 Time Walk, or Wrath of God, or even Scalding Tarn, then that's a great deal.

I remember a green and black Standard control deck that played Seasons Past as a way to rebuy just the right answers and never mill out, and a deck at the birth of Modern that used Eternal Witness alongside Cryptic Command 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:

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 Eternal Witness.

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 Bala Ged Recovery. 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 Woodland Guidance. 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 Elven Cache's 602 decks.

A Key Distinction

Now, out of our list of Regrowth effects, there are two different formats to which I would like to draw attention. Many of the earlier versions of this effect, like Regrowth itself, as well as many of the creatures, can go to the graveyard.

Others like Restock, 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. Regenesis can't easily facilitate loops with another copy of Regenesis, 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 Regrowth, and the easiest way to do that is by copying our spells.

If we manage to consistently copy a Bala Ged Recovery, it can return a powerful card alongside a Dryad's Revival, and if we can copy the Dryad's Revival 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. Wort, the Raidmother 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 Regrowth 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 Regrowths later. Cards like Satyr Wayfinder, Circle of the Land Druid, and the new Malevolent Rumble put cards in our graveyard, dig us for lands, and give us creature bodies to tap with Wort, the Raidmother (though an Eldrazi Spawn is unlikely to share a color with any spell we cast for Conspire, but sacrificing for mana is still very helpful).

Mulch and Winding Way mill us as well, and also let us skimp a little on lands since they can dig for them. And Shigeki, Jukai Visionary pulls double duty, letting us mill and ramp early and then turning into a scalable Regrowth 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. Big Score, Unexpected Windfall, and Pirate's Pillage 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.

Seize the Spoils is their slightly lesser cousin, but it still rocks in this deck. And while Inspired Tinkering 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. Krenko's Command, Dragon Fodder, and Saproling Migration are efficient, and Mogg Alarm can even be free on a big turn.

Fungal Rebirth and Pest Infestation come attached to interaction, and Fungal Rebirth even plays into our Regrowth theme, though it is limited to permanent cards.

Audience with Trostani 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. Empty the Warrens and Chatterstorm, alongside the newer Elemental Eruption, 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 Regrowth loops. I'm excited to try out Stormsplitter 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. Jeska's Will is the gold standard, but in our deck, Battle Hymn and Mana Geyser provide more of the ludicrous piles of mana we need to loop our spells over and over.

Of course, red mana alone cannot cast Regrowth, and so we also need our Storm-Kiln Artists, Manamorphoses, and Big Scores. 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 Chatterstorm with at least two storm, and generate three Squirrels and three Treasure tokens with Storm-Kiln Artist. Cast Regrowth, tap two Squirrels to copy it, returning Bala Ged Recovery (or any of the other versions in this deck) and Chatterstorm to hand and generating two Treasures.

Cast Chatterstorm again, now creating four Squirrels and four Treasures. Cast Bala Ged Recovery and copy it with two Squirrels, returning Chatterstorm and Regrowth to hand. This will generate infinite storm, infinite Squirrels, infinite Treasures, and a very large Storm-Kiln Artist.

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 Battle Hymn or Mana Geyser, we can take some "time off" recasting the our storm spell and go for a copied Manamorphose or Unexpected Windfall.

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 Empty the Warrens that only creates red creatures and we need green creatures to copy our Regrowths, we can opt to return a Saproling Migration 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 Goblin tokens after recasting Empty the Warrens 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.

Bonus Round acts as an infinitely easier-to-abuse Wort, the Raidmother, 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 Regrowth and a Manamorphose after that.

The Decklist

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. Harrow is a great ramp spell, or it can work as a mana-producer when copied.

Dryad's Revival 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 Chatterstorm is much scarier in the graveyard than Stormsplitter, or that Elven Cache might be better for us than Seasons Past. Regrowth 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 Oblivion Ring. 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!

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Jesse Barker Plotkin

Jesse Barker Plotkin started playing Magic with Innistrad. He was disqualified from his first Commander game after he played his second copy of Goblins of the Flarg, and it's all been uphill from there. Outside of Magic, he enjoys writing and running.