In this experiment, we feed our library to our Phyrexian Construct—or an Ooze mimicking its superpowers—and ironically allow it to maximize its power through the use of humbling magic.

The early days of Magic are full of oddballs. For example, take this guy:

It’s a 6-mana 1/1, which scores only slightly better on the vanilla test than our friend Scornful Egotist. But instead of morph, the Devourer has two abilities: a state trigger and an activated ability. A state trigger is a triggered ability that triggers not on an event in the game, but rather from a state of the game. If Phyrexian Devourer’s power is 7 or greater, you sacrifice it. If you Stifle that trigger, your Devourer will survive—until the Stifle resolves and the state trigger triggers again (assuming the Devourer’s power is still 7 or greater). That’s different than a normal triggered ability, which triggers off an event, such as “whenever a player draws a card.” If such a trigger is Stifled, it won’t trigger again until a player draws a card again.

Okay, well, there are two downsides. First, the Devourer only gains counters based on the mana cost of the exiled card. Exiling a land has no effect—the Phyrexian wants to eat big stuff. That means we want to have good knowledge of what’s in our deck to have a good understanding of the possibilities. And that brings us to the second downside: the triggered ability. If the Devourer has 4 +1/+1 counters on it and we exile a card that costs 2, that brings it up to a 7/7, forcing us to sacrifice our big monster. Every activation is a gamble.

One of the fun elements of Johnny deck-building is taking cards with massive upsides tempered by their downsides and removing or mitigating the downside—in order to take unfair advantage of the upside. The answer for Phyrexian Devourer is to isolate its activated ability, and there are two ways to do that.

Humble

With Phyrexian Devourer on the battlefield, activate its ability a bunch of times. We probably don’t want to activate it so much that we have no library remaining, but since we’ll be trying to close out the game this turn, going almost all-in is pretty reasonable. Activate the ability without allowing previous activations to resolve. Thus, the stack will consist of forty or fifty Phyrexian Devourer activations, and the Devourer will not have any +1/+1 counters yet. (A bunch of our library will already be exiled, though, so having our Devourer eat a Prodigal Pyromancer poke in response would be pretty rough.) Then, just cast Humble. The Phyrexian becomes a 0/1 and loses its state trigger. It loses its activated ability, too, but the activations are all on the stack already. From there, just allow those activations to resolve, and our humble little 0/1 will become huge (assuming our deck didn’t consist primarily of 0-cost cards, but what kind of deck would that be?). Trample would be nice, but the assumption is that we win from here.

We’ll be running a U/B/R deck today, so Humble is out, but blue has plenty of stand-ins for that Urza’s Saga uncommon. Turn // Burn, Snakeform, and Turn to Frog all offer different abilityless animal and Weird forms for our Phyrexian to take.

Necrotic Ooze

For the Necrotic Ooze plan to work, we need a way to put Phyrexian Devourer into the graveyard, which leads us into the rest of the deck. Buried Alive allows us to put three creatures into our graveyard, and it happens to cost 3 to Necrotic Ooze’s 4. A curve like that is pretty enticing, so naturally, I wanted to have a potential turn-four win. Hence the inclusion of Anger.

With a turn-three Buried Alive for Anger, Phyrexian Devourer, and potentially something else, a turn-four Ooze (with a Mountain somewhere in there) lets us activate the ability a bunch of times and attack for the win.

What’s a Buried Alive without a Zombify? In addition to its direct synergy with Buried Alive, Zombify also just offers some utility later in the game, allowing us to rebuy used-up Oozes and Devourers.

But what’s a Zombify without fatties? I’ve included one Hydra Omnivore and a couple copies of Bioshift to do work in multiplayer games. After enacting the combo—as described above, either with Necrotic Ooze or with a Turn to Frog or the like—simply Bioshift all of the +1/+1 counters onto Hydra Omnivore, and kill all of the opponents at once. That can even be a turn-five multiplayer win with a lucky draw.

Of course, as it’s a green card, we can’t actually cast the Hydra, but that’s part of the charm. (And we can always loot it away.) If you aren’t playing multiplayer, those are three deck slots to dedicate to something else.

With a bit more utility added in, and a sweet, one-of Mindless Automaton for synergistic value, here’s the full combo–control list:

"Phyrexian Frog"

• Creatures (15)
• 1 Anger
• 1 Hydra Omnivore
• 4 Civilized Scholar
• 4 Necrotic Ooze
• 1 Mindless Automaton
• 4 Phyrexian Devourer

• Spells (21)
• 1 Turn to Frog
• 2 Bioshift
• 2 Circular Logic
• 4 Snakeform
• 4 Turn // Burn
• 4 Buried Alive
• 4 Zombify

• Lands (24)
• 4 Island
• 4 Mountain
• 4 Swamp
• 4 Blood Crypt
• 4 Drowned Catacomb
• 4 Steam Vents

Buy This Deck

You could even just turn this into a Pocket Combo by just including Phyrexian Devourer, a Necrotic Ooze, and a Turn to Frog or the like in your Commander deck. Phyrexian Devourer is colorless, so it can go in any deck, and here are some cards it combos with along with the color combinations required:

• White – Humble (Darksteel Mutation or Humility work if you can somehow play them at instant speed.)
• Blue – Turn to Frog, Ovinize, Fowl Play
• Black – Sudden Spoiling, Necrotic Ooze
• G/U – Snakeform
• U/R – Turn // Burn, Dragonshift

If you’ve ever wanted to exile your library for +1/+1 counters or Humble your own creatures—or if you just love Necrotic Ooze—give these combos a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com