Explosive Vegetation | Art by John Avon

"Eat Your Veggies" Deckbuilding

Hello, and 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's card is Explosive Vegetation, a four-mana ramp spell that takes me back to when I first started playing Commander. It was a simpler time, back when Scute Mob was overpowered and Acidic Slime was an auto-include.

At that time, more so than now, extensive ramp packages justified incredibly high curves, and no one played to the board before turn four at the very earliest. The philosophy was simple: you can play whatever you want, and it will work as long as you "eat your vegetables" by including ramp and removal. And no card better represents that mentality than Explosive Vegetation, which even has picked up the nickname "veggies" to match its role. It isn't a particularly interesting card, it doesn't necessarily fit thematically with many commanders, but it's an easy way to switch from midgame to haymaker mode in a single turn.

As early as 2018, Veggies was getting some flack for being too slow, and since then many content creators have advised to move ramp down the curve from four to three and then from three to two. But we still receive a new Veggies variant every couple years, and these new cards show off the new era of card design for Commander. Cards like Circuitous Route and Vastwood Surge are designed to fill specific niches in specific decks by serving both as a responsible "eating your veggies" slot and furthering the deck's overall goal. In this way, four-mana ramp spells are trying to keep up with the competition in an ever-faster format.

There are now eleven cards that I would count as functional reprints of Veggies. They all cost four mana and put two lands onto the battlefield. All of them happen to be green, unsurprisingly. Here they are:

The most played of these cards is also the oldest: Skyshroud Claim from Nemesis, with 158,909 decks to its name. The double upside of being able to fetch any Forests and putting them into play untapped makes this far and away the most efficient version of this effect without anything else tacked on. The next most-played is Blighted Woodland, in 130,924 decks, which can function just fine as a land in situations that don't require ramp, and doesn't raise the mana curve. Veggies itself is number four, seeing play in 60,914 decks. The least played version is Path of the Animist in 990 decks, despite being printed in a preconstructed deck. People really don't like having words on their cards that don't mean anything, so for the vast majority of players who don't play Planeshift, Path of the Animist is unappealing.

Too Many Vegetables?

Now that over 10% of our deck is devoted to four-mana ramp spells, we come up against a problem: Our ramp package is raising our curve so high that we might need to ramp into it. Or, at the very least, we need to put quite a few cheap cards into the deck so that we can play the game before our ramp spells. But in that case, what are we ramping into? Ramp strategies always have a difficult line to walk where they can draw all ramp and no payoffs or vice-versa, and having our mana acceleration farther up the curve exacerbates this problem.

So this deck needs to assume a slower game. This deck needs to assume we don't need a blocker until turn five, and assume that turning ten mana into twenty will matter. Isn't that a relief? Truth be told, I prefer aggressive strategies that prey on decks like this, but I can get down to spin some wheels for a few turns.

Now, if we're going to be aiming for some big mana, I know exactly the commander to lead this journey. Kruphix, God of Horizons loves mana and value, and once was a powerhouse strategy. Helming 2,819 decks today, he's still no slouch, but he used to be the pre-eminent Big Value commander in two of the game's best Big Value colors. Kruphix will make it so any excess of cards or mana will not be wasted, and rewards us for generating absurd numbers.

With this guy as our commander, our plan comes into focus. The best ramp payoffs to go with Kruphix are colorless Eldrazi, since our overflow mana turns colorless. Several of the titans definitely make it in, and new card Desecrate Reality seems perfect here, acting as an instant-speed removal spell that we can hold up sneakily with only colorless mana.

Some other cards work particularly well with Kruphix. Wilderness Reclamation, Awakening, and Seedborn Muse all untap our lands for re-use on our opponents' turns, allowing us to store mana. Helix Pinnacle offers an alternate win condition to turn a lot of mana into a win without the extra steps. And the brand-new The Millennium Calendar turns wheel-spinning into a win surprisingly quickly, especially if we can activate its doubling ability multiple times per turn cycle.

Shuffle It Up

One sneaky benefit of running so many cards that search for lands is that we have a lot of ways to shuffle our deck. This can combine very well with cards that manipulate the top of our deck, such as Sensei's Divining Top. We can time our shuffles and spin our top so that we only ever have to draw good cards. Playing blue lets us use Legacy all-stars Brainstorm and Ponder, and green adds standalone powerhouse Sylvan Library and sleeper Mirri's Guile. But my favorite card in this package is Mishra's Bauble. Any Modern player can tell you that it combines well with fetchlands, allowing you to choose when to shuffle your library based on whether you want to draw the top card or not. Similarly, if we crack the Mishra's Bauble, the card we see can tell us whether to cast an Explosive Vegetation or something else this turn. I know it's funny to say this about a card that sees play in over 45,000 deck, but Mishra's Bauble (and it's brother Urza's Bauble) is underplayed. The cost of inclusion is so incredibly low, and it has little synergies with everything from artifact strategies to graveyard strategies to this, a big mana Eldrazi deck.

The Decklist

This deck feels like home. My first few Commander decks were all Simic (blue and green) value piles trying to go over the top of everyone else, and this deck certainly does that. The nice thing about multiplayer Magic is that having a slower start often makes opponents forget about us, until we cast a Gelatinous Genesis with X=15. Fiddling with the top of our deck and searching up lands number twelve and thirteen are enjoyable enough that it doesn't feel like losing if we don't get there, and if we do manage to pull it off it feels wonderful. Commander can still be big and slow if you want it to be, and veggies are still tasty.

Until Next Time

We get a second chance at a creature? It's Not Dead After All? That sounds like a scam. Seeing the havoc this type of card has wreaked on Modern alongside the Evoke elementals, I'm excited to see what it can do in Commander! How can we turn this into a killer deal? 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.