Green is simple: Ramp, play huge dudes, smash face. Sounds like fun, right? Sometimes, we just want to play Magic the way we did when we first started: Fill up our deck with the biggest creatures we own, slam them on the table, and turn them sideways.

But the days of nothing but 6-drops are behind us. We play grown-up Magic now. We tune our ninety-nine-card stacks with love and tenderness, fill them with answers to problems that first deck would have never noticed, and play to the metagame of our shop or playgroup. But what if we meld those two things? What if we can play giant guys and still answer threats? What if our inner Timmy is actually a bit of a prankster?

Yeva may not be the most obvious choice—she’s probably not going to win any games on her own—but she gives green a fighting chance in the world of answers, where it most often suffers. With some tight play, Yeva can make combat math such a nightmare for your opponents that they just won’t bother attacking you! More than that, she gives us an excuse to play a bunch of creatures we’d probably never play otherwise and do so with a straight face—or a maniacal, childlike grin of joy—as we flash in Stingerfling Spider against an attacking Gisela, Blade of Goldnight.

And we’ll want to attack with some large creatures, so to do that, we have to draw them. Fortunately for us, green actually has a lot of card-draw—it just comes in some strange forms. Garruk's Packleader, Drumhunter, Soul of the Harvest, Masked Admirers, and Primordial Sage will all draw you cards based on creatures—sometimes when you play them, and sometimes when you have them. Soul's Majesty and Momentous Fall both care about the power of your creatures. Because Momentous Fall requires a sacrifice but is an instant, you can use it in response to a Wrath or removal spell, and it can pull double-duty of saving Yeva from being tucked. Hunter's Prowess is risky but can be absurd when it hits—an 11/11 trampler that draws you eight cards upon connecting seems worth the risk.

Answers are harder in mono-green though. We do our best with a lot of artifact and enchantment hate, especially tacked on to creatures like Indrik Stomphowler and Reclamation Sage. Staff of Nin does double-duty of drawing cards and pinging things, which can kill random X/1s, but it also helps out in the red zone. Acidic Slime and its little (big?) brother Mold Shambler both take care of troubling permanents, and Bane of Progress will put a serious wrench in the plans of all these artifact decks running around now—the person playing Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient doesn’t deserve to be happy anyway. My catch-all Spine of Ish Sah makes an appearance as an answer to just about everything, and Desert Twister joins it from back in the day, when green did stuff it shouldn’t be allowed to do. (“Destroy any card in play”? Really!?) However, be prepared to make some deals and play some politics—if you can partner with a W/B player so he or she handles creatures and you handle everything else, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Finally, we have a couple of truly spectacular spells that will not only often win you the game, but will make the whole table laugh and cheer as they resolve. Praetor's Counsel is hardly believable at twice the price, but for 8 mana, it’s hard to find a better deal. Don’t be afraid to cast it fairly early in the game as long as you have some reasonable stuff in your ’yard; the card advantage it grants will pull you ahead pretty quickly. Also, you haven’t lived until you’ve Genesis Waved into an Avenger of Zendikar. The army it creates is both formidable and funny—it’s a bunch of walking Plants! It’s worth noting, here, that as the active player, we are able to stack the triggers however we want. So, if we want more Plants, we have our lands come into play first and the Avenger last, so we count all the lands we hit off the wave. If we want bigger Plants, we have Avenger hit first and then let the lands come into play so we gain the counters from Avenger’s landfall trigger.

Yeva, Nature?s Herald ? Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (40)
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Bane of Progress
• 1 Brawn
• 1 Diligent Farmhand
• 1 Drumhunter
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Farhaven Elf
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Fierce Empath
• 1 Frontier Guide
• 1 Garruk's Packleader
• 1 Giant Adephage
• 1 Hornet Nest
• 1 Hornet Queen
• 1 Indrik Stomphowler
• 1 Masked Admirers
• 1 Mold Shambler
• 1 Moldgraf Monstrosity
• 1 Mwonvuli Beast Tracker
• 1 Ondu Giant
• 1 Paleoloth
• 1 Paragon of Eternal Wilds
• 1 Primordial Sage
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Roaring Primadox
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Seedguide Ash
• 1 Soul of the Harvest
• 1 Soul of Zendikar
• 1 Stingerfling Spider
• 1 Terastodon
• 1 Thragtusk
• 1 Tornado Elemental
• 1 Viridian Emissary
• 1 Wolfir Silverheart
• 1 Wood Elves
• 1 Worldspine Wurm
• 1 Yavimaya Dryad
• 1 Burnished Hart

• Spells (21)
• 1 Momentous Fall
• 1 Beacon of Creation
• 1 Desert Twister
• 1 Genesis Wave
• 1 Hunter's Prowess
• 1 Hunting Wilds
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
• 1 Peregrination
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Ranger's Path
• 1 Restock
• 1 Soul's Majesty
• 1 Dragon Throne of Tarkir
• 1 Explorer's Scope
• 1 Loxodon Warhammer
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Spine of Ish Sah
• 1 Staff of Nin
• 1 Trading Post
• 1 Bow of Nylea

• Lands (38)
• 33 Forest
• 1 Encroaching Wastes
• 1 Khalni Garden
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 Slippery Karst
• 1 Tranquil Thicket

Buy This Deck

Because this is a good-stuff list, there were a bunch of things that were considered and cut for any number of reasons. Feel free to do some swapping around with what you have or based on personal preference, but do watch the mana curve—it’s easy for a deck like this to wind up having way too many big-mana plays. Brutalizer Exarch is additional search and semi-removal, but it was just too high on the CMC. Hydra Omnivore, Primordial Hydra, and Polukranos, World Eater were too pricey and didn’t work as well with Genesis Wave, but if you have one, I’d run it for sure—talk about must-answer threats! Engulfing Slagwurm and Pelakka Wurm are both solid choices, but we sometimes have to cut cards we like. Either one could replace Giant Adephage though—Engulfing Slagwurm might actually be a better choice, but I just like the big Insect.

If you want to spend a bit more, or if happen to have some extras of these around, I’d seriously consider a few of the colorless Wraths—Perilous Vault isn’t too pricey, and All Is Dust, Nevinyrral's Disk, and Oblivion Stone all could do good work in a deck like this. Asceticism and Nylea, God of the Hunt are both solid adds as well; protection and abilities for your team are well worth it. Genesis is awesome in any deck that can support it, as is Woodfall Primus (again, awesome on a Mimic Vat), and Seedborn Muse, the godfather (godmother?) of all groan-worthy cards, would be really spectacular here.

I’m also curious—what do you all think of Tower of Fortunes in a list like this? I had it in, and my editor cut it, I think correctly. Any other changes you’d make?

This deck will lose at least as much as it will win. We have no combo to close out the game, and our win cons are all giant dudes crashing into the red zone. But it will always be fun, will always be fair, and should always remind us why we started playing this game in the first place.

Total cost: $73.10