Hornet Volley

Posted on August 5, 2014

In this experiment, we poke our own nest and make a swarm of hornets in an act of blasphemy.

Hornet Nest has appeared in Magic 2015 booster packs and appears to be quite powerful in the associated Limited formats. You just drop it onto the battlefield, and the Nest severely limits what the opposing player can do in terms of making profitable attacks. Sure, the Nest doesn’t have power with which to trade with an attacker, but if it dies and generates two, three, or more Insects, each of those little deathtouch bugs will be able to potentially trade with another, future creature, thus generating a two-, three-, four-, or more-for-one.

Today, however, we’re going to try to make things a little more interesting and not rely on our opponent’s necessity to attack. Not all opponents will have to attack with ground creatures to win, so we want to be able to trigger our own Nest for a ton of hornets and then capitalize on those hornets to sting our opponent to death.

Just Poking

One option when optimizing our Hornet Nest is the slow route: We just poke the Nest for 1 damage per turn, generating a single hornet each time. Here are a few cards we can use for that.

Fire Whip – There are several variants of this effect, such as Lavamancer's Skill, Arcane Teachings, and Psionic Gift, but Fire Whip has the added advantage that we can sacrifice it to deal 1 last point of damage in a pinch, such as when the enchanted creature is going to die anyway. If we put our Fire Whip on our own Hornet Nest, the Nest can tap to deal damage to itself and make an Insect. Alternatively, we can put the Whip on an Insect with deathtouch to turn it into Visara the Dreadful.

Chandra, the Firebrand – There are a lot of cards that can deal little bits of damage, but Chandra is very efficient. We can use her to poke our Nest for Hornets, and her second and third abilities can both play into our next hornet-making option below. If we have both Chandra and Fire Whip on our Nest, we can use Chandra to make a hornet on our turn and then the Fire Whip activation to make another on our opponent’s turn.

Going Big

In contrast to just dealing 1 over time in order to keep our Hornet Nest around for a while, we can just go all-in and deal a ton of damage to our Nest for a ton of Insects.

Chandra, the Firebrand – As I mentioned above, Chandra can go big as well as she can just poke. Her ultimate can deal 6 to up to six targets, taking out our opponent’s creatures, dealing a good chunk to him or her, and giving us six flying Insects. Her second ability works interestingly with the next card—assuming we have some backup from cards listed later on.

Blasphemous Act – Okay, so this just makes us thirteen 1/1 Insect creature tokens with flying and deathtouch. That seems worthwhile, especially considering we’ll probably be wiping out the rest of the board as we make our swarm. With Chandra’s -2, we can double that to twenty-six Insects as long as we have one of the cards listed below.

Save the Nest

Just when our opponent thought he or she could just deal with the Hornet Nest—or just when we hit it for a huge amount—we can cast one of these spells to benefit by generating a bunch of Insects while still keeping the Nest for future hornet production.

Withstand Death – For only 1 mana, we can give our Hornet Nest indestructible. That means that we can block, make a bunch of Insects, and still keep the Nest. Or we can cast Withstand Death, -2 Chandra, and then make twenty-six tokens.

Seedling Charm – Instead of giving indestructible, we can just regenerate our Nest for a similar effect. This particular regeneration effect has the added benefit of being a Charm and thus having two additional modes. One of those modes gives us the ability to return a used-up Fire Whip from our graveyard.

Wrap in Vigor – While this does cost an additional mana compared to the other two, it regenerates all of our creatures, and if we’ve made a lot of Insects, that is greatly to our benefit.

Going Wide

Assuming we’re able to make a lot of Insects, and given that we like dealing damage to our own creatures occasionally, here are a couple cards that will let us generate some blowouts.

Lightning Volley – This weird Born of the Gods card gives all of our creatures the Fire Whip power—but only for a turn. When our hornets all have deathtouch and our Nest can deal damage to itself for an additional hornet, this can gives us a pretty big advantage over our opponent. In addition, note that this is an instant, so it even functions as quite an interesting surprise.

Furystoke Giant – This card is essentially a Lightning Volley, but it’s at sorcery speed and is a 3/3. Persist gives a nice upside, letting us use the ability an additional time, and with deathtouch creatures potentially wearing Fire Whips, we can even trigger the ability when we most require it. Of course, the Giant gives a doubled damage-dealing ability, so poking our own Hornet Nest with this ability will kill it—though we do gain an extra hornet out of the deal.

Backup Bugs . . . and Snakes

Hornet Queen – Hornet Nest’s obvious compatriot is the mana-intensive Hornet Queen. She brings her own army with no setup—except a bunch of mana—required.

Saber Ants – The tokens generated by this Hornet Nest precursor don’t have flying or deathtouch, but Saber Ants does have a bit of a larger body, and it can do many of the same things as the Nest in this deck. And it’s nice to have a bit of redundancy when we want to go all-in with a Blasphemous Act.

Wasteland Viper – Our last nonland card, this 1-drop made the cut over Sedge Scorpion for its additional point of toughness and bloodrush ability—not that bloodrush has any particular synergy with the deck. Nonetheless, a turn-two Fire Whip on a first-turn Viper is a formidable start, and the Viper is nice to have around both as an early defense and as a perfect creature to have around when we start casting Lightning Volleys and Furystoke Giants.