Why would anyone do that? Kazandu Nectarpot is obviously green! There is no reason why one could ever call it black. Unless…
Kazandu Nectarpot was one of the cards that interested me a lot when opening my Zendikar Rising Bundle. The card itself is not that special – gaining a life when a land comes into play, we’ve seen that before, Jaddi Offshoot. It was the frame that appealed to me. Of course, just an attractive and awesome new frame does not make a card good.
From gaining to draining
No, it was another card in the set that got my synergy alarms ringing. Marauding Blight-Priest makes your opponents lose a life when you gain a life. In case you missed it, the Nectarpot lets you gain a life when a land enters the battlefield under your control. So with both cards out, every land entering the battlefield under your control drains a life from all your opponents. Do this twenty times and you are twenty life up. More importantly, your opponents are twenty life down and in a regular game of Magic, they are dead.
Getting twenty land into play is not an easy job, but that is only one way to trigger the Blight-Priest with the Nectarpot. Earlier I mentioned the cousin of the Nectarpot Jaddi Offshoot. With both out every land that comes into play under your control triggers the Priest twice, thus cutting the number of lands you have to get into play by half, so ten lands. But that is still too much for my taste.
The land is the life
The Nectarpot and the Offshoot already reward me for playing Magic with their landfall ability, but I want more of this. Essence Warden lets me gain life when creatures come into play, providing another way to trigger the Blight-Priest. With the Warden out, the Blight-Priest can even trigger itself. When you have an Essence Warden out and you play the Marauding Blight-Priest, the life gain trigger from Essence Warden goes on the stack when the Marauding Blight-Priest enters the battlefield. The life gained by the Blight-Priest will trigger itself.
Now we have the Essence Warden to gain life when creatures come into play and Kazandu Nectarpot and Jaddi Offshoot to gain life when lands come into play. If only there was a card that would make creatures when lands come into play… Wait, there is and it is even reprinted in Zendikar Rising! Sporemound does exactly that and therefor deserves a spot in the deck.
With life and limb
A card I’ve always wanted to play but never found a home for is Life and Limb. It turns all your Forests into Saprolings and vice versa. When you play a Forest with Life and Limb out, you get a trigger of the Essence Warden, the Kazandu Nectarpot and/or the Jaddi Offshoot. Marauding Blight-Priest sees all these triggers as different instances, draining your opponents for every one. And when there’s also a Sporemound out, the Forest you play lets the Sporemound make a Saproling that is also a Forest and thus a land, triggering the fungus again. This results in an endless loop, probably draining your opponents to death.
We only need to have some cards that look for lands and put them into play for this festival of triggers. In an earlier article I discussed a landfall deck, so maybe we can find some useful tools there. My weapons of choice would be Khalni Heart Expedition, because of the tricks it can pull off and Cultivate for the card advantage.
The deck hinges quite heavily on Marauding Blight-Priest and your opponents will quickly recognise that. If it gets removed, destroyed or otherwise is put into your graveyard, you want to get it back. Zendikar Rising offers us a solution to this with Bala Ged Recovery, which can also come down as a land, which is always welcome in a deck playing landfall.
The land giveth and the land removeth
The deck runs a small but efficient removal suite with Doom Blade and Putrefy. With these you can easily remove pesky critters bothering you before your synergies will synergise (a.k.a. your combo’s can go off). But they can serve another purpose as well: if in the unlikely event there are both a Sporemound and a Life and Limb on the table, you play a land, but don’t have a Marauding Blight-Priest out, you can get an infinite – correction: arbitrarily large – number of saprolings, but in response to gazillionth trigger, you can destroy your own Sporemound and thereby end the loop.
Mana matters
The mana base is fairly simple. The deck consists of only a few cards that require black, so with twelve Forests and six Swamps you are likely to get the colours you need when you need them. Three Terramorphic Expanse can look for a Swamp if you don’t draw them and synergise with all the landfall cards in the deck. Two Golgari Rot Farm also helps to get both green and black mana and bounces a land to your hand, that can later be replayed to get landfall triggers.
| GB Marauding the Nectarpot | ||
| Creatures | Spells | Lands |
| 4 Essence Warden 4 Jaddi Offshoot 4 Kazandu Nectarpot 4 Marauding Blight-Priest 3 Sporemound | 4 Khalni Heart Expedition 4 Cultivate 3 Putrefy 2 Life and Limb | 3 Terramorphic Expanse 2 Golgari Rot Farm 12 Forest 6 Swamp |
Kazandu Nectarpot is not black, so there is no use in blaming him he is. The Marauding Blight-Priest is and when you drain your opponents to zero, they should blame him for being black. Or just start a new game with a new deck. In any case, let me know what you think of the deck. I’ll see you at the next sixty!
Simply Sixty MtG 