There's something about Endless Wurm that makes him awesome. Far more awesome than other fat sacrificers like Yawgmoth Demon, Minion of Leshrac, or especially Bog Elemental. Is it because enchantments are cooler than other permanent types? Is it because he's a 9/9 trampler (back in the days when that was unusual)?
I don't know exactly why I love him, but I do, and today's article is going to discuss various strategies for him before eventually presenting a couple of decklists.
What enchantments should I play with him?
There are currently 1,564 to choose from, many of which are fine choices, but I can help you whittle it down a little.
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You know what's better than dealing 9 damage? Also gaining 9 life. |
- Recurring enchantments. This is the most famous strategy, especially with Rancor. Also consider the rest of that cycle, and future versions in Aspect of Mongoose and Spirit Loop. Now, playtesting is suggesting that a recurring enchantment is usually superfluous, because how many upkeeps will you have after your 9/9 trampler is out? But certain games and decks do call for it.
- Acceleration. Use cards like Wild Growth, Eladamri's Vineyard or Exploration to get out your Endless Wurm quickly. Then, not needing them anymore, feed them to the wurm.
- "Enters the battlefield" triggers. The whole Fists of Ironwood cycle is the best example of this. Rise of the Hobgoblins and Shape of the Wiitigo are also good, as are cantripping enchantments like Stupefying Touch.
- "Leaves the battlefield" triggers. Hatching Plans is the poster boy of this genre. Reality Acid also works. The Wurm will certainly help them leave the battlefield.
- Ones you want destroyed. Sarcomancy is my favorite example. Colfenor's Plans and Necropotence also work (although neither seems like a natural fit with the Wurm otherwise).
- Ones that work from your graveyard. Bridge from Below is currently the only enchantment that does this, and it hardly plays well with a 9/9 trampler. Maybe sometime in the future we'll have others to choose from though.
- Better in the early game. Shut down a creature with Paralyze for a few turns. And when it's no longer useful, lose it to the Wurm. Same idea with Propaganda and actually most mana accelerators, above.
- Color hosers. You can now maindeck these. In some random games, they'll work as printed. In the other games, they'll at least be Wurm food. See Eyes of the Wisent and (Life Force) for instance.
- "Hidden" cards. This works on the same principle. In some games, Hidden Herd is a great first-turn drop. In other games, you get the sense that it will be sitting there forever. So you feed it to your Wurm.
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When your Endless Wurm eats this, is he eating a fish? Discuss. |
- Other situational cards. Crosswinds, Back to Basics, Aegis of Honor, etc.
- Leylines. You have to put four in your deck to increase the odds of having one in your opening hand. But you never want to draw more than one. So what do you do when you do? Give it to the Wurm.
- Moribund enchantments. Nemesis and its Fading Enchantment cycle aren't currently online, but we do have enchantments with cumulative upkeep. Just feed them to your Wurm before they become too expensive and die anyway (just make sure to stack in the right order!). There are so many great ones to choose from: Cover of Winter, Elephant Grass, Infernal Darkness, Magmatic Core, Mystic Remora....
- Nefarious Lich (just kidding)
- Enchantments your deck already wants to use. I'm putting this last because it's the most important, and I also have the most to say about it. Don't just grab playsets of Hatching Plans and Endless Wurms and call it a deck. What will you do with the Plans when you don't draw a Wurm? Likewise, any combo specific to the Wurm is a bad idea, since only 4/60 of your deck can be the Wurm. Plus, even when you do draw him, there's no guarantee he'll survive to your next upkeep. So don't build a deck that's just a bunch of random Wurm combos. But, if you have an existing deck that's heavy in enchantments anyway — enchantments that are synergistic with each other — maybe the Wurm could be added as that deck's finisher? If you already have a mono-green Enchantress's Presence deck, there is probably room for Endless Wurm in it. If you already have an Energy Field / Wheel of Sun and Moon deck, maybe the Wurm could go there.
But because I like to break my own advice, this first deck is going to completely ignore the last bullet and focus entirely on the Wurm. (It's okay because it features Wurm tutoring to make sure I do always get him. The other decks won't be as reckless though, honest.)
So this deck was the result of a huge train of thought starting with the Wurm. From him I went to Hatching Plans, and from there I went to Launch. (I personally like Launch on Endless Wurm better than Rancor on him, although either one is obviously a fine combo.)
Since I was in blue-green at this point, and since I was building the deck to want the Wurm every game, I went to... say it with me... yeah! Wood Sage! Obviously!
With Wood Sage came Mirri's Guile, Brainstorm, and Gaea's Blessing (any of the three combo excellently). Then came Lignify for defense, Seal of Primordium for not only the obvious but also as emergency Hatching Plans removal, and Cradle Guard for the 3-drop aggro creature of choice.
Cradle Guard sounds like a weird choice, I admit, but consider: He can be cast on turn two with a Wild Growth. Or on turn three, following a 2cc spell on turn two (strangely, most of the deck ended up costing 2 mana). And he also gives us something productive to do with our mana on turn four, while we're waiting to build our mana up to 5 for the Wurm. Anyway I made him a playset for the Wood Sage's sake, who works best with large numbers. You could certainly run Blastoderm, Yavimaya Enchantress (my second deck does), Iwamori of the Open Fist or whatever else in his place, but I like Cradle Guard here.
My last addition was 2 Confound, to protect our Wurm. And after some playtesting / tinkering (and removing several of the cards mentioned above during my train of thought), here's the final decklist!
Unexpectedly, during playtesting I discovered that Frog Tongue seems to play much better than Launch. It's cheaper, it's productive before the Wurm hits, and it's useful in multiples. Even after the Wurm hits, I usually have enough enchantments in play where recurring one of them becomes unnecessary. What started out as a 2-4 split became a 4-2 split over time.
I also ended up with more Mirri's Guiles than originally planned. Unlike 99% of other decks, it can be useful to have more than one in play at the same time with this deck. That's because of Wood Sage. Look at three cards. Do I like them? Nah, mill 'em all away. Then look at another three cards! I still haven't even reached my draw phase yet. It sounds silly but it really helps out.
Lastly, I took out 2, then 3, then all 4 Hatching Plans from my original build. If I was able to sacrifice one, it usually meant I already had a Wurm in play, which usually meant I didn't need to draw many more cards. Sorry, Plans.
The deck has a lot of choices to make on some turns, so I recommend doing some solo testing before taking it to an opponent. It can be a blast to play though.
The Wurm in Vanguard
If you know my column, you know I like vanguard. What avatars can pair with the Wurm?
- Heartwood Storyteller - Cheapen the Wurm, stall your opponent... and enable a first-turn Argothian Enchantress! A playset of those is out of many players' budgets, but boy would this deck be sick. Your Wurm will never run out of food, and your hand will never run out of cards. Cheapened ones, at that!
- Higure, the Still Wind - My above deck used Wood Sage to find the Wurm. Instead of using something so fragile, clumsy, and unreliable, you use... every creature in your deck.
- Haakon, Stromgald Scourge - If you're counting on a single huge creature to win you the game, you can also count on a Terror being pointed at it. Haakon helps you recoup your fallen guy. (Plus, I cannot overstate how cool Endless Wurm looks with a black frame. Seriously, if you have two minutes to kill, run this through in photoshop.)
- Loxodon Hierarch - If you're going to be running a Hatching Plans build, there's no better avatar.
- Lyzolda, the Blood Witch - Emptying your hand may be tricky with a playset of 5-mana guys. But... can you imagine the double damage ability with a 9/9 trampler?? (Don't mention Dread Slag to me. This is not his article; it's the Wurm's.)
- Peacekeeper - I think this works, unless the M10 token-ownership rules muck it up (does anybody know?). But the idea is, a Peacekeeper deck usually ends up with way more Arrest tokens than it needs, often having four or five on a single creature of the opponent's. So Endless Wurm would give you something to do with all of those tokens. Not to mention, he'd be pretty hard to block!
- Mayael the Anima - The Wurm does have more than 5 power, after all. Depending on your build, this could work nicely.
- Sakashima the Impostor - Picture this, ready? Two Endless Wurms.
- Hermit Druid, Birds of Paradise, or Royal Assassin - Obvious Prime.
Out of all those, I'm for some reason drawn the most to Higure. Let's do it!
Humorously, this deck started as a GW Femeref Enchantress / Auratog deck and, several iterations later, didn't even have white in it anymore. (One version even had Rabid Wombat in it but I'd rather not talk about that. Let's just get to the drastically different final draft.)
If we're running this avatar, we'll want lots of guys who are hard to block. Green can supply that. Without even dipping into a third creature (although we easily could), playsets of only Scryb Sprites and Treetop Scout is already 8 cards, which should be enough to set up a second-turn swing from almost any opening hand we're likely to get.
If we're having guys go unblocked, we might as well capitalize on that. In addition to getting avatar triggers, why don't we also simultaneously get triggers from One with Nature and Keen Sense? (Both of which, fortuitously for the Wurm's sake, are also enchantments.)
Mirri's Guile makes an encore appearance in this deck, but for a different reason. In this deck, when it's working properly, your avatar will shuffle your deck every single turn. This makes Mirri's Guile pretty good.
Rancor not only recurs with the Wurm, but also can help your 1cc guys slip through some trample damage to trigger your avatar. And the damage it racks up isn't insignificant.
The avatar's tutoring ability is strong enough that I was able to cut a 4th copy of Endless Wurm — we don't really need him before the midgame anyway — as well as a 4th copy of the deck's other big finisher, Yavimaya Enchantress (told you it was coming).
Yavimaya Enchantress may seem dis-synergistic with Endless Wurm. To some extent it is. But practically speaking, if the Wurm makes your Enchantress shrink from a 6/6 to a 5/5, it's not that big a deal. Both creatures still have power drastically above what's usually accessible at their CCs. And you're still attacking for 14 points of damage, in addition to whatever fliers you already have out.
This deck has one huge weakness, and that's cheap direct damage. If you Lightning Bolt my turn one Scryb Sprites, I'm in trouble. Even if I didn't get card disadvantage by losing an aura in the process. Because that Scryb Sprites is how I power through my deck. My original answer to this was Avoid Fate, until I realized that Vines of Vastwood was a strict (and sizable) upgrade. I'm still not completely invulnerable, but what deck is?
If this deck isn't stopped early, it plays very fast and can pretty easily overwhelm the opponent. It frequently finds itself drawing 4 cards a turn once it gets going. And since the curve is so low, it has no difficulty dropping those cards immediately. I recommend giving it a try. (And be honest, isn't it a breath of fresh air to see Higure used for something besides Sligh decks?)
Deck 3 (more vanguard)
This was the result of another train of thought. It started with "Wouldn't Endless Wurm combo well with Ritual of Subdual?" The curve is nice... the Ritual protects the Wurm... and the Wurm can eat the Ritual when its upkeep gets too big (if the opponent is still alive by then). And then I wondered, how could I speed these 5- and 6-mana cards up a little? The Eladamri avatar.
It's a good enough core for a deck. Without running any further acceleration or even forests, we can have a Wurm out by turn three. And a Ritual of Subdual out by turn four. Our opponent will be stuck with nothing to cast but colorless or green cards, unless they have some nonland color producers. And even if they do, which most decks don't, do we care? We're attacking them with a 9/9 trampler!
The acceleration from our avatar helps our opponent, true, but our deck is built to capitalize on it. For instance, instead of tapping out for a first turn Wild Growth, we can tap out for a first turn Overgrowth. Which would give us access to six mana on our second turn! If you prefer, you could also get a first turn Awakening Zone or Rites of Flourishing as your accelerator of choice.
With this avatar, we're free to run all sorts of usually-overcosted cards. Instead of casting Frog Tongue as our cantripping aura, why not use Shielding Plax? Instead of Keen Sense, why not Snake Umbra?
All of this and we haven't even left green yet. Which, with this avatar, is easy to do, since it lets us run green without even devoting deck slots to green sources. Really, taking the above core, you could go in any color direction you wanted. I eventually arrived at a black Chains of Mephistopheles deck, myself.
It features the Chains' most famous combo, Anvil of Bogardan. It also has Liliana's Caress for further synergy. And since everyone's hands will so often be empty, it also has Gathan Raiders and Howltooth Hollow.
Roar of the Wurm is a great discard target (although between our avatar and our Awakening Zone it's not impossible to hardcast). Gargoyle Castle gives us something to do after our hands are locked down. And I'm using Seal of Primordium and Seal of Doom instead of their instant-counterparts — not only because they're enchantments for the Wurm, but more importantly because we can drop them earlier than we need them (in a Chains of Mephistopheles deck, this can be important to do).
Here's the list!
Yeah, I ended up cutting the Ritual of Subduals. I still like the idea though.
