Necrotic Ooze is quite a Magic card. It’s a card that immediately asks you what kind of Rube Goldberg machine of activated abilities you can get into your graveyard to win the game with. People have done crazy things with Hermit Druid in Commander, with Morselhoarder and Shivan Hellkite in casual formats, or even Borborygmos Enraged in Modern. This week, Necrotic Ooze makes the jump to Legacy.
Necrotic Ooze Combo - Legacy | Yenko88, 5-0 Legacy League
- Creatures (7)
- 1 Phyrexian Devourer
- 1 Triskelion
- 2 Griselbrand
- 3 Necrotic Ooze
- Instants (16)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 4 Entomb
- 4 Shallow Grave
- Sorceries (18)
- 2 Collective Brutality
- 2 Exhume
- 2 Reanimate
- 4 Cabal Therapy
- 4 Gitaxian Probe
- 4 Ponder
- Artifacts (4)
- 4 Lotus Petal
- Lands (15)
- 1 Island
- 1 Swamp
- 1 Marsh Flats
- 1 Scrubland
- 1 Tundra
- 3 Flooded Strand
- 3 Underground Sea
- 4 Polluted Delta
- Sideboard (15)
- 2 Echoing Truth
- 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
- 2 Flusterstorm
- 4 Monastery Mentor
- 2 Surgical Extraction
- 4 Swords to Plowshares
The core of this deck should look relatively familiar to Legacy aficionados. You’re playing the same suite of cantrips, discard spells, and enablers as the Griselbrand plus Children of Korlis combo deck. The difference is that this deck doesn’t try to Storm off, and has a little more redundancy of combo pieces.
Your goal here is to use your discard spells and Entombs to get a Griselbrand and/or Necrotic Ooze into the graveyard. Once you do, you can use Shallow Grave, Exhume, or Reanimate to put your Ooze or Griselbrand into play. If it’s Necrotic Ooze, then you can just start drawing cards and try to combo off. If it’s Griselbrand, you’re going to be looking for more rituals and discard outlets to get your Necrotic Ooze into the graveyard and reanimated.
From there, your combo is to give Necrotic Ooze the activated abilities of Phyrexian Devourer and Triskelion. Even if you have these cards in your hand with no discard outlet in sight, you can just discard to hand size and combo off on your opponent’s upkeep. The idea here is that you can use Phyrexian Devourer’s ability to exile the top card of your library to get +1/+1 counters. Then you can immediately remove those counters to deal damage to your opponent thanks to Triskelion. You’re even resilient to removal spells, since you can just start exiling more cards in response to removal spells.
If you’re looking for a new graveyard combo deck, this is an interesting place to start. You have a lot of the advantages of the other reanimator decks, but the added ability to win the game on the spot rather than needing combat steps. You’re dedicating extra slots to combo pieces so there’s less space for disruption, but that might be okay depending on the metagame you’re expecting to play in.