Vengevine is an interesting Magic card with a crazy history. It’s seen play as a fair card in Bant and Naya decks, with Sea Gate Oracle and Bloodbraid Elf to help generate two creature spells to keep the pressure up. It’s seen play as a combo engine in Survival of the Fittest decks alongside Basking Rootwalla. It’s seen play in dredge and Fauna Shaman strategies in Modern. Despite its pedigree, we haven’t seen a whole lot of Vengevine in the last couple of years. I sincerely hope that Julian Grace-Martin has changed all that:

Green-Red Vengevine - Modern | Julian Grace-Martin

• Creatures (25)
• 2 Hooting Mandrills
• 3 Goblin Guide
• 4 Hollow One
• 4 Insolent Neonate
• 4 Monastery Swiftspear
• 4 Street Wraith
• 4 Vengevine

• Instants (9)
• 2 Temur Battle Rage
• 3 Become Immense
• 4 Lightning Bolt

• Sorceries (26)
• 4 Cathartic Reunion
• 4 Faithless Looting
• 4 Snow-Covered Mountain
• 2 Copperline Gorge
• 3 Bloodstained Mire
• 3 Scalding Tarn
• 3 Stomping Ground
• 3 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Ancient Grudge
• 2 Blood Moon
• 2 Destructive Revelry
• 1 Domri Rade
• 2 Feed the Clan
• 1 Goblin Guide
• 1 Grim Lavamancer
• 2 Leyline of the Void
• 2 Roast

Buy This Deck

The thing is, that isn’t the only angle that this deck has. There’s a bunch of Faithless Lootings, Cathartic Reunions, and Street Wraiths as well. Those serve the three purposes. First, they stock your graveyard full of things you can delve away for Hooting Mandrills and Become Immense. Second, they let you discard cards to power up Hollow One. Last, they give you a discard outlet for Vengevines, which pairs pretty well with cheap delve Creatures, free Hollow Ones, and cheap hasty Red creatures. This combination of cards leads to some incredibly explosive starts where you can have multiple Hollow Ones and Vengevines in play as early as the second turn of the game.

One of the things to keep in mind is the amount of variance that this deck invites. The density of looting and cycling effects means that you get to see an awful lot of cards. That said, there are a lot of moving pieces that you’re trying to fit together and cards that want to end up in specific zones under specific circumstances. While you have the upside of ending games before they really start, you’re going to have to keep a lot of speculative hands that either win the game early or do nothing for four turns and lose depending on what your Faithless Looting and Street Wraith find you.

If you’re looking for an exciting aggressive deck that can end games quickly, this is an excellent shell with a lot of potential for exploration. You’ve got to be a little willing to gamble on finding the right combination of pieces with your looting effects, but your opponents will be hard-pressed to keep up with the recursive Vengevine beats.