Witherbloom, the Unbalanced? Strixhaven Spoilers

As Secrets of Strixhaven rapidly approaches, the amount of leaks and spoilers will gradually ramp up in frequency and impact on the community. Today's card is Witherbloom, the Balancer (reddit post by u/kellis12594), and oh boy is it a doozy. Let's do a deep dive.

Affinity for What?

Affinity for anything is famously a busted mechanic in Magic's history, and this Witherbloom rendition that bears a variant is no different. Affinity for creatures means that every single creature on our board is effectively a ramp piece not only for our commander, but for any instant and sorcery spells our deck wants to cast. In essence, with the additional cost of one green and one black mana, every instant and sorcery spell in our deck gains a colorless mana discount equal to the number of creatures we have on our battlefield.

An important note is that this affects alternate casting cost mechanics like flashback or overload as well. There are some seriously powerful cards that Witherbloom makes incredibly cheap for us. While I will mostly focus on the buyback mechanic for a card I presume will be Witherbloom, the Balancer's signature spell, there are several options for alternate-cost spells that we will go over later.

Witherbloom decks are going to need two specific things:

1. Lots and lots of creatures. Fortunately, as a green-inclusive pairing, Golgari has access to a ton of valuable creatures that fulfill a huge variety of roles and utility functions, as well as a varied suite of creature token generators that will quickly build an army on our side of the battlefield.
2. Expensive instant and sorcery spells or X-cost/alternate casting cost spells. In low-power commander, this will give us an opportunity to play slow but exciting spells with huge impacts, while in high-power, we will present fast and consistent win conditions.

Let's go through some fun tech cards and synergy pieces that will advance our gameplan with Witherbloom at the helm of our commander deck!

Did Someone Call Pest Control?

Let's start by looking at some high-power synergies. The card everyone is already buzzing about is Sprout Swarm, a spell with both buyback and convoke, the latter being a discount effect that stacks nicely with Witherbloom's built-in discount. After casting it once, you can tap the token Sprout Swarm generates to convoke out the next copy, and make an infinitely large board of tokens at instant speed.

I want to pause for a moment and break down exactly how this interaction functions. If Witherbloom discounts the spell by at least 4 (meaning a player would only need four creatures on board, including Witherbloom), the buyback rider effect is discounted to the point of being free, which means we get to pay the buyback cost for zero mana, putting the spell back into our hand. Then, the single green Saproling the spell generates can pay for the subsequent cast, making another untapped green creature to pay the convoke cost for the next one, and so on and so on until our board is overgrown with friendly fungi. For anyone in the audience who likes overkill (or a backup plan), Chatterstorm can follow up this chain of casts to give us tons of squirrels as well. I would stay away from token doublers, however, as they're expensive do-nothing enchantments that will only scare our opponents into attacking us before we can get our board going. Consider Second Harvest or Parallel Evolution instead if you absolutely need token generation in a higher-power brew.

The instant-death three-card combo, though, involves the use of Mirkwood Bats, which causes each opponent to lose a life whenever we create a token, and is itself a creature, meaning that it is essentially a ramp spell as well. There is also Blasting Station, which lets us shoot players for a single damage and will untap each time a creature enters. Once we've dumped a million Saproling tokens into play, with all of the Station's untap triggers on the stack, we can sacrifice our whole board to shoot down all of our opponents, single point by single point. There is also Altar of Dementia, which can mill out every opponent (or ourselves, if there is another combo in the deck that we can access from the graveyard).

I recommend including several redundancies for win conditions, as your deck will want to be able to combo off and win reasonably quickly before anyone can wipe away our board. Fortunately, there are several ways to tutor up these cards as a black-inclusive deck, and many of them have extra synergy with repeated creature token generation and/or large boards of creatures.

A Token of Affection

Next, we can look at some low-power tech cards that will help us construct a big board state to help our mushroom mama discount our spells.

Sedgemoor Witch and Witherbloom Apprentice are two flavorful inclusions, who also happen to be students of the Witherbloom College of Essence Studies. The white-haired witch generates Pest tokens, the adorably ugly little mascots of Witherbloom, every time we cast or copy any instant or sorcery, which will let us snowball instant and sorcery spells together by gaining a progressively increasing discount on each one. Witherbloom Apprentice, on the other hand, will help pad our life total and pressure our opponents by draining them for each cast. The Apprentice also serves as an additional win condition for the infinite combo with Sprout Swarm detailed earlier.

There are some fun token-generators with buyback that aren't as immediately broken with Witherbloom as Sprout Swarm as well. Lab Rats is a low-power alternative to Sprout Swarm. It doesn't have convoke, so we can't infinitely cast it, but once we can cover the buyback cost, we can make as many 1/1 Rat tokens as we have black mana available. Wurmcalling will let us do similarly with green Wurm tokens, except they'll get progressively bigger and bigger with each subsequent cast, giving you a board of huge creatures for only two green mana a pop.

Since I already mentioned buyback, there are some other alternate-cost mechanics that can work really well in our deck. Specifically, Army of the Damned is a great instant-board card with flashback that puts a whopping 26 zombies on the board for the measly cost of six black mana. Revenge of the Rats, Spider Spawning, and a flashbacked The Final Days also dump tokens onto the board, but depend on the number of creatures in the graveyard. Vengeful Regrowth can put up to six tokens on board as long as we have lands in our graveyard, while Crush of Wurms puts six tokens on board for six mana, but the bodies are pretty huge. Only one kicker spell helps us out with tokens — Saproling Migration gives us six tokens for a single green mana.

Finally, for some more generic or miscellaneous options, I have a few well-known cards and some neat tech inclusions.

Army-in-a-can creatures coupled with reanimation spells can slap a ton of creatures onto your board quickly. Avenger of Zendikar, Hornet Queen, and Abhorrent Overlord can all drop several creatures into play as they enter, and can be pulled out of the graveyard on the cheap with Animate Dead, Victimize, and Reanimate. Some cards that can make us creatures and are fun in multiplayer include Curse of Disturbance, Tendershoot Dryad, Verdant Force, and the OG Beledros Witherbloom.

Force multiplier spells like the aforementioned Second Harvest and For the Common Good can multiply our boardstate even farther. For some neat tech, try Their Number Is Legion for a burst of life and tokens that we can cast even if it ends up milled or discarded. Gelatinous Genesis is another option for bigger tokens, and Entreat the Dead is a lesser-known reanimation spell that benefits from a big discount.

Cast the Night Away

Starting at the finish line, we have several options for bombastic win condition instant and sorcery spells that will either immediately close the game with a sufficient discount, or bring our opponents low enough that finishing the job will be child's play. Torment of Hailfire and Exsanguinate are the Rolling Stones of big mana finisher spells in black made much more accessible with our creature-based discount. Green Sun's Zenith or Finale of Devastation can tutor a Craterhoof Behemoth into play for a combat damage win condition. With a sufficiently uncountable amount of creatures on board, Nuclear Fallout and Dread Summons can mill out all of our opponents. Damnable Pact can shotgun out a single player, and Outrageous Robbery can steal an opponent's entire deck — including their juicy instant and sorcery spells.

If we just want to have fun, there are some pretty hilarious things we can do that might not necessarily win the game on the spot. Green Sun's Twilight, Animist's Awakening, Genesis Wave, and Kamahl's Druidic Vow are all big X-cost spells that can vomit out permanents from our library (which probably wins us the game, but doesn't everyone love non-deterministic Commander games?). Sylvan Offering gives an opponent a gigantic board too (or your partner in Two-Headed Giant). Exponential Growth can make a single creature insanely large, while Hurricane can force the game to a draw by killing us as well as our opponents.

For more conventional-use spells that aren't meant to end the game, we have a lot of flexibility and ways to fill out the foundational categories of a good Commander deck. Buyback spells like Disturbed Burial and Corpse Dance offer flexibility for recursion and reanimation. Ezuri's Predation is a soft boardwipe that continues to develop our own board state, while In Garruk's Wake gives us an asymmetrical board wipe that can discounted to just two black mana with six creatures in play alongside Witherbloom. Pest Infestation doubles as removal and token generation, Arachnogenesis is a fog effect that also generates lots of tokens, and Slice from the Shadows is a good, uncounterable, single-target creature removal spell. Suffer the Past can hose a self-mill or graveyard player with a ton of cards in the yard at instant speed. Discard spells like Mind Twist and Death Cloud can grind the game to a screeching halt. We can even cast some neat colorless spells for free like Not of This World, Scour from Existence, and Mascot Exhibition.

Big Mana, Small Problems

To wrap up this article, I want to throw out a few more fun cards or neat synergies that you might want to consider for your brew before I provide you with my own build for Witherbloom. Let's do some rapid-fire cardboard consideration:

• Full Flowering can let us get into some shenanigans by using the populate keyword to make token copies of nontoken creatures that we created with cards like Bramble Sovereign, Abyssal Harvester, Helm of the Host, Saw in Half, or Mimic Vat.
• Tooth and Nail is one of the most famous one-card win-cons in Commander. While there aren't very many cards with entwine out there, Tooth and Nail is one of the best cards to feature the keyword.
• Unbound Flourishing is a massive value piece for X-cost spells and will put our value engine into overdrive.
• Stinging Study is a powerful draw spell that works with high-mana-value commanders that we can get discounted easily.
• Reshape the Earth gives us 10 lands for the cost of a Cultivate.
• Alternate-cost spells that I didn't get to mention previously: Scale Up, Sadistic Sacrament, Waste Management, Strength of the Tajuru (multikicker also benefits from cost reduction), and Zuko's Conviction.

Check out my decklist for Witherbloom, the Balancer on Archidekt or load up the EDHLAB decklist for a test drive with our playtester app! Did I forget any niche tech cards you may have thought of? Join our Discord server and toss out some ideas! I hope you all are as excited for Secrets of Strixhaven as I am!

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When Ben Alban-Berth isn't taking awkward promotional selfies and casting Craterhoof Behemoth on empty boards, he plays roguelikes and Dota 2 and promises people that he will finish his novel soon (he won't).

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