Tell me if this experience is familiar to you.

You go online to check out the latest spoilers from the newest upcoming Magic: The Gathering set. You're scanning through cards, and a Legendary Creature jumps out at you. It has decent stats, a reasonable Mana Value, and an interesting and cool ability. "This card is awesome!" you think to yourself.

Later, you're reading some content creator's review of "the best Commanders in the new set" and... your card doesn't even get mentioned. They don't say it's good, they don't even say it's bad... they just don't say anything.

So, you find another review, one that promises to review every. Single. Card. In the set. You scroll to your Creature, anxiously waiting to read what they have to say... and it's "another mediocre Legend. Pass."

As someone who spends a good deal of time thinking about article ideas and Commander decks, this has happened to me a lot. I'm no expert in card analysis or ranking, but I've played a lot of Magic over the years, and I'd like to believe when I see a card and think it has potential, there's probably some value there.

I'd like to spend the next few weeks looking at some Legendary Creatures which simply haven't gotten the love they deserve. Sometimes they got overshadowed by higher-profile Creatures, or got lost in a shuffle of too many other Legends, and other times they were simply ignored. But exercises like this are good for a variety of reasons, and here are two: building around a lesser-known or less-popular Legendary Creature is a great way to build a deck for much cheaper than the most recent headline-making General. And, figuring out what makes this particular Legend less popular and turning that into an advantage: that's how a deck-builder's mind is created. I'm grateful to each and every one of you who read my articles and consider building one of my decks, but my goal is to get you to think about deck-building on your own. Find ways to break cards, bend them, twist the game, show your style, have different kinds of fun - all of those happen when you start to think about how to leverage the tools you have, or pick up a tool no one else is using.

Let's get started with one of my favorite ways to play: Mono-Green Stompy, baby!

When Surrak Dragonclaw first showed up, there was a fight card (Savage Punch) where Surrak was punching a bear. It got a lot of chatter around my LGS at the time, because it was just so awesome. Turns out, when the threat of Phyrexia was big enough, Surrak and that bear teamed up to become one of Tarkir's most formidable (pun intended) fighting teams. We get a 6/5 Human Bear (!) with Trample for six mana. We also give all our other Creatures Trample, and each nontoken Creature which enters gets a +1/+1 Counter and Haste until end of turn. This lets us do all kinds of absurd things, if we do it right. As usual, it starts with mana.

We have 40 Lands, but more importantly, we have 15 ramp spells, all of which get us two Lands. We're running some Cultivates (one Land to Hand, one to the Battlefield), some Harrows (sacrifice a Land, get two Lands on the Battlefield), and some Explosive Vegetations (two Lands on the Battlefield), but the hope is starting on turn three, we're going to pull Lands from our Library and put them on the Battlefield. We shouldn't have any trouble getting to 10 mana from Lands by around turn six.

Drawing cards at a rate higher than one per turn is also super key. There are a few ways to go about it in Green, mostly still tied to Creatures. We can go with what I call the Drumhunter method (named after Drumhunter, a wildly underplayed card from Shards of Alara I absolutely adored and regularly used to win games back then), where there is something that checks if we have played a Creature (Soul of the Harvest, Beast Whisperer) or have a Creature of a certain size (Drumhunter, Garruk's Uprising). These are solid ways to draw cards, and one of the reasons Green is so strong. There's also the Soul's Majesty method, which basically says "draw cards equal to the size of one of your Creatures". (Also named after a card from Shards of Alara.) Because we have such huge Creatures in this deck, and we make a ton of mana, I decided to go the latter route, so we have several spells which draw us a huge grip of cards. We also have Hunter's Insight and Hunter's Prowess, which are absolute houses in this deck.

To win, we're going to wallop people with huge Creatures most people don't play. I'm talking stuff like Dawnglade Regent, an 8/8 that makes us the Monarch and, as long as we're the Monarch, gives all our Creatures Hexproof (we're probably going to be the Monarch a lot). How about Hierophant Bio-Titan, a 12/12 with Vigilance, Reach, and Ward . It has no evasion and costs 12 mana, but we don't care - we can afford it, and we give it Trample! The Tarrasque is hilarious here, as is Impervious Greatwurm.

It should be noted I chose a few Creatures with Annihilator, like Pathrazer of Ulamog and It That Betrays. It's one thing to throw an 11/11 at someone; it's another to make them sacrifice their stuff. Consider your playgroup before including those cards. Mine? It'd be fine - as long as I didn't play this deck every game.

We have several Creature-based solutions for enemy Creatures - one-sided Fight, basically, like Bite Down or Ram Through. Spinning Wheel Kick is the big one, but we've got enough mana to make it worth it. We're normally bigger than other people's stuff, so it's not a big deal, but sometimes we might want to kill something. Additionally, we have sweepers for things like Enchantments and Artifacts; we only have one Artifact (Navigation Orb) and we sacrifice it anyway, and just one Enchantment which destroys all other Enchantments, so let's just get rid of them all. Besides, when was the last time you saw someone play Tranquil Grove? Finally, we have Inspiring Call as our Heroic Intervention that also draws us at least a couple cards, and You Look Upon the Tarrasque as a way to save something or just randomly Fog, which can be a game-breaker.

Surrak and Goreclaw Stompy | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Surrak and Goreclaw

• Creatures (22)
• 1 Apex Altisaur
• 1 Apex Devastator
• 1 Bane of Progress
• 1 Bellowing Tanglewurm
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Colossus of Akros
• 1 Dawnglade Regent
• 1 Desolation Twin
• 1 Giant Adephage
• 1 Hierophant Bio-Titan
• 1 Hydra Broodmaster
• 1 Hydra Omnivore
• 1 Impervious Greatwurm
• 1 It That Betrays
• 1 Kogla, the Titan Ape
• 1 Pathrazer of Ulamog
• 1 Primeval Protector
• 1 Terastodon
• 1 The Tarrasque
• 1 Titan of Industry
• 1 Worldspine Wurm
• 1 Zopandrel, Hunger Dominus

• Instants (14)
• 1 Back to Nature
• 1 Bite Down
• 1 Clear Shot
• 1 Entish Restoration
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Hunter's Insight
• 1 Inspiring Call
• 1 Master's Rebuke
• 1 Momentous Fall
• 1 Ram Through
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker
• 1 Roiling Regrowth
• 1 Windswift Slice
• 1 You Look Upon the Tarrasque

• Sorceries (21)
• 1 Creeping Corrosion
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Fade from History
• 1 Far Wanderings
• 1 Growth Spasm
• 1 Hunter's Prowess
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Last March of the Ents
• 1 Life's Legacy
• 1 Migration Path
• 1 Nature's Way
• 1 Nissa's Pilgrimage
• 1 Nissa's Revelation
• 1 Peregrination
• 1 Rabid Bite
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Soul's Majesty
• 1 Spinning Wheel Kick
• 1 Vastwood Surge

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Tranquil Grove

• Artifacts (1)
• 1 Navigation Orb

• Lands (40)
• 31 Forest
• 1 Blighted Woodland
• 1 Bonders' Enclave
• 1 Castle Garenbrig
• 1 Karn's Bastion
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 War Room

Buy This Deck Export text format

This is one of the simplest ways to play Magic: make mana, play a giant Creature, and attack people with it. The nice thing is, we get some of the stranger (and cooler) Creatures in Green because we don't need the ones that have Trample - often we get more powerful Creatures because they don't have Trample, which means more fun. (That said, we're still running Giant Adephage, which has Trample but is also hilarious.) This is a great deck for a beginner, a friend who needs to borrow and hasn't played in a while, or a casual, fun game where no one is out for blood. That said, it certainly won't roll over; often the 12/12s will just kill people before they can do anything about it.

One key to playing this deck is not to over-extend. Sometimes you'll need to play out more than one or two big Creatures, because people might have a 40/40 or something, and you need to throw multiple things at them to kill them, but don't empty your hand because you can. You will get Wrathed with this deck, and it'll be worth it to have a few Creatures in Hand to rebuild quickly and keep the assault going.

What do you think of Mono-Green Stompy in Commander? Who are your favorite under-loved Commanders? Let us know on socials!

Thanks for reading.