Modern Garlic (Competitive)

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The owner of this deck hasn't added a sideboard, they probably should...

Garlic: root vegetables that spice up any dish after they come out of the ground and can overpower almost any flavor

The name is pulled from the two root cards, Insidious Roots and Root Maze, both of which work in tandem extremely well.

This build runs as few lands as possible with an overwhelming ability to get around that fact through mana dorks, Green Sun's Zenith, a low curve, token mana, and (hopefully) great optimization. Meaning, you can run Root Maze and be next to unaffected, whereas opponent will hopefully lose a tempo every turn until you're far enough ahead that the rest doesn't matter.

Meanwhile, you use critter and grave synergy to build up momentum by sheer numbers, grave shenanigans that trigger Root tokens, or fun control critters that still have a bit of umph behind them.

Turn 1, you're going to have a play that puts you ahead in tempo, that's a virtual guarantee. You can drop a mana dork, Zenith into Dryad Arbor, slow down opponent with Thoughtseize, or (your best bet) drop Root Maze and smile. With Root Maze up, turn 2 you drop a dork/Zenith (of which there are a collective 12 copies) as well as a land, and suddenly on turn 3 you've got 3 mana ready to go, potentially dropping your 3rd land (for next turn), while opponent is sitting on 2 mana absolute max (this is unlikely).

Then you just shenanigan him to death with all the fun little positional interactions you can pull. Chthonian Nightmare is extra fun in here, as it triggers Root tokens, can use Root tokens both as fuel and mana, and can store up energy for Balemurk very easily. It will have plenty of fodder with the self-mill and carnage, and plenty of mana with all the dorks/etc.

Thoughts appreciated.

• Modern
• Golgari
• Competitive
• Graveyard