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By: CottonRhetoric, Cotton Rhetoric
May 07 2012 9:45am
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Recycle

Kaboosh!  What a card!  4GG and you turn into a card drawing machine for the rest of the game!

Of course, it's not without its dangers.  Here are the most common ones, along with their solutions.

 

Danger #1: Too much land
Most players trying out Recycle for the first time will get stuck with two lands in their hand after already having played one for the turn.  They somberly pass the turn and wait until their next turn to play one of those lands, only to draw another land and be stuck again!  This is an inefficient use of Recycle.  We want to draw more than the normal one card per turn, and in order to do that we have to drop more than one card per turn.

    Exploration

Solution: Explore effects
We're playing green!  Dropping more than one land a turn is easy.  Exploration is the best option, but is a lot of tickets, so you can also look into Gaea's Touch, Summer Bloom, Explore, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Oracle of Mul Daya, or, if you're reading this article later than 2012, the several variants they've printed since then.

Just don't use Rites of Flourishing, because Recycle skips your draw phase, so you won't get to benefit from its Howling Mine effect.

 

Problem #2: Uncastable stuff
"Whoops, my hand is a Naturalize and a Plummet and there are no legal targets!"

If you missed the implication, you are not drawing a single card until your opponent casts an artifact, enchantment, or flying creature — which may be never.

Solution: Make every card castable, always
Do not use Naturalize.  Use Seal of Primordium or Viridian Zealot.  Do not play counterspells — who knows when you'll be able to use it?  Do not play giant growth effects or auras — what if your opponent casts a wrath?  Be wary of even playing creature removal, because some decks are creatureless!

Seal of Primordium    

In fact, be wary of even playing legendary creatures in multiple, because you will not want to cast one when one's already out.  And, I must reiterate, a Recycle player wants to play every card they draw as soon as they draw it.

 

Problem #3: Empty hand
This is when you're really dead in the water.  If there is a Recycle out and your hand is empty, you've locked yourself out your library.

Solution: Play smart and build smart
There are a few things to consider regarding this point.

For one thing, if the Recycle isn't out yet, don't cast too many cards.  If you have only one card in your hand, and you draw the Recycle, casting it would cause you to be stuck having one card in your hand forever.  Which is doable, but far from ideal.

For another, avoid cards that don't get cast.  Recycle triggers off casting, not grandeur, not channel, not copying a spell, not putting things directly onto the battlefield, and certainly not off a spellshaper activation.  Take that Stormbind out of your Recycle deck.  And that goes double for your Sakura-Tribe Scout.

 

    Blightning

Problem #4: Opposing discard effects
No matter how well you follow the above advice, sometimes you will just get hit with a Blightning.  Or a Hymn to Tourach.  Or a Cao Cao, Lord of Wei (at least theoretically...).

But whichever spell it is, you're stuck with what you have on the board for the rest of the game.  As I see it, there are two solutions.  One is just to ignore it and hope you don't face a discard deck — which, honestly, will work just fine most of the time.  But the other, if you want to be more proactive:

Solution: Other draw sources
And I don't mean Harmonize, because that's no use when your hand's empty.  But if you have something on the battlefield that lets you draw cards, like a Mind Stone or Yavimaya Elder, you'll be up and running again in no time.

Also consider self-bounce effects, like Stampeding Serow.  Or even a Genesis* in the graveyard!

* He does what Nintendon't.

 

Diabolic Tutor    

Problem #6: Getting the thing in the first place
Let's be blunt: your entire gameplan revolves around finding and casting one four-of.  What if you never draw it?

Solution: Tutors
Or looting.  Or Mirri's Guile plus shuffle effects.  Or just building your deck such that it can win without a Recycle

 

Problem #7: Six mana is a lot of mana
Even if you can find the thing, you still need to find a way to cast it.

Solution: Ramp and/or stall
The good news is we're still playing green.

 

As you can see, there's a lot to consider when building a Recycle deck!  Fortunately I've already considered them all for you.  Twice.  Here are two Recycle decks.  (If you aren't familiar with my articles, I write for the casual room only.)

Deck 1 Lots of forests

I mentioned above how important it is to keep your lands flowing with explore effects to avoid getting your hand gummed up.  So what ends up happening when you're drawing 4 to 8 cards per turn and dropping several lands along the way is you end up with a lot of lands in play.  Why not make a deck that can put them to use?

Option one is to just play with a bunch of cards costing 10 or more mana... but I don't like this option because what if you have two in your hand with only 9 forests in play?  Stuck!

    Dauntless Dourbark

No, let's go with option two: cards that scale with the number of forests in play.

Green is full of these, and you can pick whichever you like, but my favorites are Battlewand Oak, Dungrove Elder, and Dauntless Dourbark.  (Sorry, Coiling Woodworm!)

There's also stuff like Reach of Branches, which is a little slow for my taste, although it would help you against potential discard decks.

Next we need to add some ramp.  Wild Growth effects are better than Llanowar Elves in this deck because they have "haste," which you definitely want once the Recycle is out.  You want to burn through as many cards per turn as possible, not wait for some dork to get over his summoning sickness.  Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary is powerful enough to consider, although he is very fragile, and honestly a little overkill.  If you have seven forests in play, you probably don't need an additional seven.  Even if you are drawing oodles of cards.

As for tutoring, green isn't stellar in this capacity, so I went with a white splash for Enlightened Tutor.  Remember than if you cast one with Recycle already out, you will draw a card before it resolves, meaning you will need to cast a second card to draw into the thing you just searched for.  (But if you already have a Recycle out, whatever you were searching for is probably not too urgent.)

Here's my list!  This deck is a blast to play, pretty consistent, and far from overpowered, making it perfect for the "just for fun" room.  I encourage you to tinker with the contents to fit your own liking.

Land (23):
19 Forest
4 Plains

Creatures (10):
3 Battlewand Oak
3 Dungrove Elder
4 Dauntless Dourbark

Noncreatures (27):
4 Enlightened Tutor
4 Exploration
4 Utopia Sprawl
3 Lignify
2 Seal of Primordium
4 Overgrowth
2 Harmonize
4 Recycle
Utopia Sprawl Battlewand Oak

 

Deck 2 Lots of... swamps

That's right, swamps!  Because this time our Recycle deck is actually a Null Profusion deck.

Null Profusion

I didn't want to bore you with a minor variation on the mono-green Exploration and Overgrowth idea.  This deck's totally different!

Most jarringly: no explore effects!  I went with something much different, which ended up working surprisingly well: preemptive sifting.  We won't gum up our hand with land if we simply don't draw as much land in the first place.  How, you ask, in black?

    Crystal Ball

The answer is Crystal Ball.  It not only lets us make the most of our Null Profusion once it's out, it even helps us get it out in the first place!  And helps us avoid drawing multiples of it (a flashy but generally superfluous play).  The ball really is amazing in here — it started out a 2x before playtesting but quickly became a 3x and then 4x.  In fact, they're the second-most common target for my Demonic Consultation (after the Null Profusion itself)!

When I first started playing this deck, I would use the first Crystal Ball to sift away other copies of it... but you don't even always want to do that!  Having two in play next to a Null Profusion is a great situation to be in.

So this deck won't be playing as many lands as the forest deck, above, but it will (pretty reliably) be playing one for every turn in the game, which is still enough to make lands our theme.  And black is just as much a champion at this as green is, with cards like Korlash, Heir to Blackblade, Nightmare, Tendrils of Corruption, Lashwrithe, Cabal Coffers, Mind Sludge... I could go on, but you get the idea.

We actually don't want to include the usually stellar Mutilate, for one simple reason: Recycle decks want to play every card they draw as soon as they draw it.  And if you have a Korlash and/or Nightmare out... you do not want to cast Mutilate.

Dark Ritual is as profitable a ramp spell as ever, helping us not only to drop the Null Profusion, but to speed through our deck once it's out.  My original version had redundancy with Bubbling Muck and Cabal Ritual, but they simply weren't as useful as I expected.

A cool trick in a deck like this is Dross Golem — he gives us something to do in the pre-Profusion turns, and is free free free after the Profusion is out!  There's nothing like a free card that also cantrips.

It was about this time I noticed a funny pattern, which is that every creature in my deck had 3 or more power, which is when I turned to my favorite trumper of chump blockers, O-Naginata.

I also wanted some stall for the pre-Profusion turns, and Wall of Souls is remarkable efficient at this.  Try it!

My Korlashes, being legendary, were running into problem #3, above, but they were so synergistic with my gameplan that I kept them in anyway.  My workaround was to also pack a few Urza's Baubles, which is probably suboptimal but it does protect us against those Cao Caos!  Here's my list:

Land (23):
23 Swamp

Creatures (13):
3 Wall of Souls
4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
4 Dross Golem
2 Nightmare

Noncreatures (24):
2 O-Naginata
4 Dark Ritual
1 Demonic Consultation
4 Crystal Ball
2 Engineered Plague
4 Seal of Doom
4 Null Profusion
O-Naginata Dross Golem

If you've had any different approaches for Recycle (or Profusion), please post them below!

37 Comments

love the card by Familyman608 at Mon, 05/07/2012 - 10:39
Familyman608's picture

Personally it would be awesome with Madness cards. Basking Rootwalla, and others that have madness, i see it being strong draw for that kind of a deck.

that second deck is nice, I by bread expert at Mon, 05/07/2012 - 14:55
bread expert's picture

that second deck is nice, I forgot about Null Profusion... maybe it could become Modern-legal

Uhhh... by BlippyTheSlug at Mon, 05/07/2012 - 15:06
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Null Profusion *IS* Modern-legal.

But the deck isn't, which is by Asdrael at Tue, 05/08/2012 - 07:12
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But the deck isn't, which is what I believe is what he was referring to.

That said, building Recycle for casual has always been tricky. On one hand, it's hard to resist the temptation to (potentially) go infinite with free spells and rituals to build up a storm count. Those decks tend to get old quickly and don't leave much room for interactivity. On the other hand, non-combo decks run the risk of not fully the draw engine, turning it into a "win more" scenario by the time it hits mid-to-late game.

I like your decks because they seem to be pretty standard beatdown decks that have a late game plan via Recycle, but might I recommend Elixir of Immortality for any deck cycling through a ton of cards every turn? Also, the threat count for the first deck (10 total) seems kind of low without some kind of recursion or protection. Oblivion Ring also seems like a good fit over (or in addition to) Lignify.

Another idea could be to use Recycle as normal, and then to later Donate it when the opponent's hand is empty. I can see something like a Stunted Growth/Plow Under deck (black and blue have a few of these as well) being nasty with Donate and some random finisher like Meloku (also good for bouncing lands to replay). Edicts and global removal would be great here since they don't target specific permanents.

Going into less savory territory, Fastbond seems obvious, as do cards that untap lands like Frantic Search and Cloud of Faeries. Anyway, good to see articles for casual that actually tackle interesting cards.

Hmmm I was rereading my by CottonRhetoric at Mon, 05/07/2012 - 15:53
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Hmmm I was rereading my article and noticed that I made an error in the second decklist. I left off the three Urza's Baubles.

Yeah those cards rule. I had by GainsBanding at Tue, 05/08/2012 - 00:29
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Yeah those cards rule. I had no idea until I watched a TPF draft video where the dude took it (Null Profusion) pretty highly and proceeded to destroy every late game that he cast it. It reads bad, but when it's late in the game and you have like 8 land out, you can be drawing and casting 3 or 4 cards a turn.

Blue by Rerepete at Tue, 05/08/2012 - 07:54
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5

I love recycle/null profusion effect. I'd pair either with blue to take advantage of Oona's grace to ditch extra land, or Looter to ditch extra Legends/uncastable stuff.

Deleted by Rerepete at Tue, 05/08/2012 - 07:55
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5

Duplicate post.

If you're playing Modern, why by KaraZorEl at Wed, 05/09/2012 - 15:26
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If you're playing Modern, why not just play Reliquary Tower?

You could. That would be by CottonRhetoric at Wed, 05/09/2012 - 21:28
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You could. That would be good in certain decks. It's honestly superfluous in my particular ones.

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