Welcome to another edition of Deck of the Week, this time we are talking about an old favourite from standard that now has the chance to shine in modern; Green Devotion.  This one in particular has a small red splash, in order to accommodate some powerful cards in the form of a Kessig Wolf Run and Ancient Grudge in the board.

The basic aim of the deck is to make a lot of permanents early on, flooding the board with green mana symbols, then using Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx in order to create a ton of mana which you can then use to win the game.  Nykthos is really the main part of this deck and allows for some crazy things early in the game, such as making 10+ mana as early as turn 3.  While this deck can still win without this legendary land, it is involved in the most explosive draws and is usually the first thing you want to find with your Primeval Titan.

A match made in heaven

Early game you will be utilising different forms of mana producers in order to begin powering out your powerful spells early in the game.  Arbor Elf combined with Utopia Sprawl gives us 4 mana on turn 2, and with Garruk, Wildspeaker as a follow up things start to get silly.  Birds of Paradise act as another essential mana dork, without the combo ability of creating lots of mana with Utopia Sprawl.  Although, the best part about these 1 mana mana-sources is that with a Nykthos in play, they are essentially Sol Rings, which may sound crazy, but they provide 1 mana themselves and also count as 1 mana for devotion, meaning you are getting 2 mana a turn for your one mana investment.  Sounds like a Sol Ring to me.

Burning Tree Emissary and Wistful Selkie provide similar roles in this deck as they are cheap or free creatures which provide a lot of devotion for your Nykthos.  BTE means you can get a large number of permanents and mana symbols into play on turn 2, while Wistful Selkie provides 3 green devotion and replaces itself.  This lets you dig deeper for your finishers, keep your devotion increasing and provides a body for your game ending Craterhoof Behemoth to be more effective.

Speaking of Craterhoof…

Finally, an opportunity to play possibly the biggest and baddest green creature ever in Modern.  This creature will just end the game on the spot if it resolves.  No-one ever does the math for Craterhoof as almost all of the time they are just dead.  Having the benefit of early Burning Tree Emissaries and Wistful Selkies in play alongside your mana dorks, means all of your creatures are getting pumped by even more and you can swiftly Hoof your opponents.  This card is probably the best finisher in your deck, and is often what you find with your Primal Command, however there are some other threats that also need to be answered immediately or face a quick loss.  Primeval Titan is a huge threat in itself, but when combined with some insanely powerful lands it becomes incredible, although it does make a nice change to have a Primeval Titan fetch Nykthos and Kessig Wolf Run, rather than 2 Valakuts…  The mana provided by the Nykthos can keep your engine going, or you can use all of this mana to overrun with the Wolf Run.

So many combos in this deck, it is almost hard to keep up

Another way to end the game, or at least lock your opponent out of it while you beat them down, is to use the combination of Primeval Command and Eternal Witness.  These 2 cards combine together to effectively ‘soft-lock’ your opponent.  You can use the Command to put an opponent’s land on top of their library and search for an Eternal Witness, and, if you have enough mana can replay the Witness in order to get back the Command and repeat a few more times.  Eventually when you run out of Witnesses, you can find that Craterhoof we talked about and turn you team sideways.  Primal Command is probably the card you want most in order to finish the game, it slows the opponent down severely and lets you continue to develop your board and attack.  It also has the potential to randomly get a Death’s Shadow player, forcing them to gain 7 life and shrinking their Death’s Shadows to a tiny size or even killing them entirely.

One weakness of this deck is its sideboard, being an almost mono-green deck, this means the potential power of sideboard cards is quite weak, especially against combo decks.  Green does not really have a way to disrupt these combo decks and as we are a devotion deck, we would rather not play artifacts without any coloured mana symbols.  As mentioned earlier, the red splash gives a little more option in the sideboard and provides us with the effective answer to affinity that is Ancient Grudge, although I would not try to include too many red cards in my Green Devotion sideboard.  It can be useful to play with some cards in the sideboard such as Pithing Needle or other artifacts as a way to stop some combo decks, depending on your local meta.

So, if you like to rekindle your love with devotion from a few years ago, or you would like to make some huge creatures and turns 3 and 4 of the game and swiftly attack your opponent to 0, try out Green Devotion in your next modern tournament.  This deck is really powerful against most of the creature decks, including Jund, Abzan, Elves and Death’s Shadow, however it has a hard time dealing with combo decks, so tweaking the sideboard to change this could improve these match ups.  The deck is about 50-50 against control decks, meaning if you can predict the meta correctly, this deck could be a perfect choice at your next PPTQ.  

Don’t forget to check back next week for another deck of the week and let me know what format you would prefer, another modern deck? Or standard? Let me know in the comments, and, a small challenge, let me know in the comments how much mana you can make on turn 3 with this deck, with a 7-card hand on the play.  I will reveal my answer in my next article, so see if you can beat me.