Super Grow (or Super Gro or Supergro, whatever) is a Blue/White/Green aggressive-control deck. It's packed with loads of counters and card drawers, Quirion Dyrads and threshold creatures, some removal, and a little land. The interactions between all of these cards make the deck a bundle of inner-synergies that is both competitive and loads of fun to play.

Legacy Super Grow
Though it was originally developed to beat combo and control decks (Extended Trix, Mono-Blue Control, etc.), our versions of Legacy Super Grow have been tuned to compete in a fast, creature-based environment, as this appears to be the situation given our experience and the available data. Yet, it still holds its own against the kinds of decks it was originally designed to beat.

No Gush. Yep, Gush is banned (in Type 1.5/Legacy since July 2003), get over it. To replace this missing card drawer, Super Grow now packs 8-10 cantrips, plus a set of Accumulated Knowledges, as the engine of the deck. These play a vital structural role in Super Grow by growing Dryad, filling up the graveyard for the threshold creatures, optimizing your hand, and thinning the deck. Running this many cantrips also allows us to cheat on the land count (most builds only run 17 or 18 mana sources) and pack more spells where those lands would be. Furthermore, they allow us to play with 1-land opening hands, lessening the need to mulligan.

Here are our current deck lists.

Aaron's Build: Legacy Super Grow
(draw and tutors)
4 Accumulated Knowledge
4 Brainstorm
4 Serum Visions
2 Merchant Scroll

(counters)
4 Force of Will
2 Counterspell
2 Daze
2 Misdirection
2 Stifle

(removal)
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Nevinyrral's Disk

(creatures)
4 Quirion Dryad
4 Werebear
2 Mystic Enforcer

(land)
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Island

Sideboard
3 Meddling Mage
3 Aether Vial
3 Legacy's Allure
3 Damping Matrix
3 Seal of Cleansing

Dan's Build: Legacy Super Grow
(draw and tutors)
4 Accumulated Knowledge
4 Brainstorm
4 Serum Visions
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Merchant Scroll

(countermagic)
4 Force of Will
3 Daze
2 Counterspell
2 Misdirection

(removal)
4 Swords to Plowshares
1 Engineered Explosives

(creatures)
4 Quirion Dryad
4 Werebear
3 Mystic Enforcer

(other)
1 Isochron Scepter

(land)
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
2 Windswept Heath
1 Polluted Delta
2 Island
1 Forest

Sideboard
3 Blue Elemental Blast
3 Seal of Cleansing
3 Null Rod
2 Sphere of Law
2 Control Magic
2 Cursed Totem

They're essentially the same build with Dan's designed to be a little more aggressive and Aaron's opting for more control cards.

Card Analysis
For a card to be considered for inclusion in Super Grow it basically needs to be very cheap and not Green. Being cheap means you can play multiple spells per turn, which is helpful to fill up the graveyard and grow Dryad into a serious threat. Only Werebear or another Dryad (the only Green cards) will stop an in-play Dryad from growing when you cast a spell.

The essential components of the deck are distributed among the colors this way:

Card Draw & Counters = Blue
Removal = White
Creatures = Green

Card Draw and Counters: Blue
4 Serum Visions (SV)
Ah, another chance to beat the badly-beaten "Opt/Sleight of Hand/Serum Visions Cantrip" Horse. Poor guy. Running only 17 or 18 lands is a little risky and when it comes to hitting all of your early land drops, Serum Vision is the best of all of the cantrips (including Brainstorm). Getting and keeping your early mana will often decide who wins or loses a game. So in decks with a low land count, like Super Grow or Grow-a-Tog, Serum Visions is the best of the options, in our opinion. It's ability to find land in the early game makes it better, in our minds, than Sleight of Hand, which gives you better drawing option in general. Sorry, cantrip horsey.

A few brief notes on how to play Serum Visions correctly. We've seen many novices cast SV, draw their card, look at their two scry cards and put them back on top of their library in some order. This is rarely the right play, unless you played a one-land hand and those two cards are "land, Swords to Plowshares." Now this is obviously basic stuff, but the more cards you see, the more options you have; and the more options you have, the better your odds of winning. This is where SV is stronger than the other competitors for its slot: it digs deeper than anything else for its cost. How many other one-mana spells will let you draw the fourth card of your library on your second turn? Not many. So, unless you really need your scry cards, it's often best to send one or both of those cards to the bottom of your library.

4 Accumulated Knowledge (AK)
The truth is, AK is good without Intuition. With no Mana Drain, (good) Moxen, Sol Ring, or Mana Crypt, mana bases are tight in Legacy (Daze in consequently better too); so you can't rely on casting Intuition (or Cunning Wish) reliably. But as a control deck, Super Grow needs to draw more cards than your opponent, and the cantrips don't do that. Most Super Grow builds run maindeck tutors such as Merchant Scroll or Mystical Tutor as a way to get that hard-to-find third or fourth Accumulated Knowledge. Still, AKs are on the slow side and they're often sided out to make room for Chill or Blue Elemental Blasts games 2 and 3 against Goblins and other Red-based aggressive decks.

4 Brainstorm
Not one more, not one less. There's a good reason this card has been on Wizards' Restriction Watch-list in Vintage. And with 6-8 fetchlands, you'll have many opportunities to shuffle away hand filler (extra land, etc.).

4 Force of Will (FoW)
Do you know why that guy in the illustration is so pissed off? It's because someone once questioned putting 4 Force of Wills into their control deck. It's either that or explosive diarrhea.

Daze
Daze is another free counter and helps you control the early game, where control decks are most vulnerable and where the current metagame is strongest.

Counterspell
The vanilla counters in Super Grow augment the "free" counters for control in the mid-late game.

Misdirection (MisD)
This is somewhat metagame dependent, but Misdirection is generally useful enough to include in the maindeck. Against control decks, MisD is Force of Will #5 & 6. Against decks packing burn and other targetable removal, MisD is insurance for your win conditions and, um, not dying. You'll always be happy to have one in hand when you have an early Dryad on the table or a huge one that's about to win the game. However, it is the card that's most likely to be sided out for games 2 and 3 of a match.

Removal: White
Swords to Plowshares (StP)
This is the most efficient and versatile spot removal card ever printed. Against a field largely dominated by aggressive creature-based decks and utility creatures (like Rofellos, the effeminate elf), four StP is the right number. And don't forget, if you're only a turn or so away from winning against that burn deck, you can always StP your own dude to give yourself enough life to get to your next attack phase. In general though, StP's utility depends on the game state and your role. Playing in control mode, StP allows you to remove your opponent's permanent, saving your countermagic for other threats; in aggro-control mode, StP is used to remove blockers, etc.

Seal of Cleansing
A few artifacts and enchantments in Legacy are a real nightmare for Super Grow. So, Seals are in the maindeck and/or sideboard to keep you in the game against decks that run Survival of the Fittest, Blood Moon, Moat, Goblin Charbelcher, and a few others. We opt for Seal over Naturalize because Naturalize is green and consequently doesn't grow a Dryad. And Disenchant requires you have White mana available after an opposing artifact or enchantment hits play. Think of Seal as an investment that's redeemable when you really need it. At worst, it's just an inefficient way to make a Dryad a little bigger.

Creatures: Green
Quirion Dryad
One of the most powerful aspects of Super Grow is the interlocking synergies that the cards have with one another. Cantrips fills your graveyard while drawing cards and setting up your turns; fetchlands also fill the graveyard while developing your manabase and turning Brainstorm into a combination play; Daze, Misdirection, and Force of Will offer protection while you tap out to play your threats. All of these effects (sans fetchlands) work to create enormous Dryads, all for the cost of 1G. For many decks, she can grow too big to contain, and she'll often win games on her own. But of all of the creatures in this deck, she requires the most amount of skill to use properly. Use your cantrips and tricks with the stack to get the most out of her.

Werebear
While he doesn't look that hot on paper, and his flavor text is some of the most awful crap written ever, anywhere, he is one of the stars of deck. Assuming you have threshold (which you'll likely hit by turn 4 or 5), he's a 4/4 for 1G, one of the most efficient beaters ever printed. His mana ability doesn't go unused either; tap the bear to pay the colorless cost to AK or help cast another bear or a Dryad. You can also use "bear-mana" as an accelerant, casting Mystic Enforcer or Fact or Fiction as early as turn 3 (bear-mana, heh). Having a four toughness, he is a reliable blocker against aggro decks and often guards the fort as Enforcer flies over for the win. If you have gained complete control of the board, it's not uncommon to have a Werebear and an Enforcer swinging for ten damage a turn.

Mystic Enforcer
We don't know what this creature exactly is. There's no flavor text to give us a hint and the creature type just identifies he/she/it just as a "Nomad Mystic." Fine, we have imagination. But we do know that he/she/it, just wins games. For 2GW, it's bigger than almost anything else in this format and it flies and has Protection from Black too. Why? We have no idea.

Meddling Mage
A proactive "designer-counter" that blocks and swings for two. Against decks with a narrow strategy (Charbelcher, Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze, for instance), this guy can seal a match quickly. But his power diminishes as your opponent's win-options grow broader, so he often starts a match in the sideboard.

Experimental Technology
The above cards are more or less undisputed in their utility and efficiency in Super Grow, but there are many others we've tested and thought about, and we would be remiss if we didn't share this with you.

The Great Mystical Tutor vs. Merchant Scroll Debate
Between the two of us, we've played several hundred matches with this deck, and neither of us can solidly endorse one over the other. One experiment we've tried to crown the winner: keep one in your deck and pretend it's an Invasion-block split-card: "Mystical Tutor / Merchant Scroll," and see how many times you prefer it be one over the other. We've found that we prefer to have Scroll just slightly more than Tutor, but not significantly so.

On to the cards themselves, Mystical Tutor has many things going for it: it's an instant, it costs U (so it fits Super Grow's mana curve perfectly), it can get Sorceries and Instants, and you're not committed to using it on your turn. Obviously, its biggest con is that it costs a card and doesn't replace itself. Vintage Super Grow has Balance and Ancestral Recall to fetch, but Legacy Mystical Tutor is likely to only fetch AK, StP, Brainstorm or SV (underwhelming), or a post-sideboard removal spell (like Disenchant or BEB).

Merchant Scroll, however, is a true one-for-one tutor but it costs one more than Mystical, and can only be played on your turn. It's also limited to fetching a Blue card drawer (most likely AK), a counter or BEB.

The best way to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses is through direct experience, and between our experiences, we can only conclude that they're both good.

Winter Orb
Winter Orb was a key Grow card in Extended because of its synergy with Gush (banned in Legacy) and the mana-intensity of the top-tier decks at the time. However, the engine of modern Super Grow isn't free, and you'll find most of your mana tapped before your Untap phase. So the Orb would do as much harm to us (if not more) that it will do to our opponents. Moreover, most good decks are too mana efficient to be significantly deterred by Winter Orb anyway. ATS and The Rock run creature-based mana producers, Goblins can still operate with two lands up, and many other decks run artifact mana. Sadly, Winter Orb just isn't as effective as it used to be.

Fact or Fiction (FoF)
Even though this deck has only 17-18 lands, you'll be casting so many cantrips that you'll reliably hit most of your land drops. So, getting four mana up for FoF isn't problematic. However, it is at the top of the deck's mana curve and many players won't play it on account of that. That said, Fact or Fiction has a bunch of things going for it:

• It's real card advantage, not cantrip-y deck manipulation
• You can pick the pile that gives you threshold
• It helps pull you out of a mid-game stall
• Lastly, it's Blue and an instant

You don't want to see it in your draw, and if you do, it's often going to get pitched to FoW or MisD, but it's useful and powerful enough to justify running 1 or 2 copies anyway. Another of the deck's synergistic cards, Werebear, helps cast this as early as turn 3.

Stifle
Like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects this. It's a supplement to your already plentiful counter-base, extending it to counter Wasteland activations, opposing fetchlands, Pernicious Deeds and Powder Kegs, and Storm and Cycling effects. It's inclusion in your maindeck and/or sideboard really depends on your local metagame.

Annul
Another tertiary counter. If ATS, other Survival of the Fittest-abusing decks, or artifact decks (Affinity, etc.) are popular in your area, this is another weapon to sideboard in against them.

Engineered Explosives (EE)
This is an optional supplement to Super Grow's removal repertoire. You'll normally blow EE at x=0, 1, or 2, so having only three colors is rarely a problem. Since EE nukes artifacts and enchantments (as well as creatures), it allows you to justify not running Seal of Cleansing in the maindeck. This isn't an exhaustive list, but here's a brief roster of popular targets:

x=0: Chalices of the Void, Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond, all morphs (face-down Exalted Angel), and all token creatures (Decree of Justice, Roar of the Wurm, etc.), etc.

x=1: Basking Rootwalla, Cursed Scroll, Disciple of the Vault, Goblin Welder, Grim Lavamancer, mana birds/elves, Savannah Lions, Sligh/Goblin dudes (Jackal Pup, Goblin Lackey, Mogg Fanatic, Skirk Prospector, Kird Ape), etc.

x=2: Arcbound Ravager, Fish dudes (Cloud of Faeries, Spiketail Hatchling), Gilded Drake, Goblin Piledriver, Isochron Scepter, Madness outlets (Wild Mongrel, Aquamoeba, Waterfront Bouncer), Powder Keg, River Boa (blow it when your opponent is tapped out), Rofellos, Sphere of Resistance, Standstill (proactively), Survival of the Fittest, White Weenies of all varieties, etc.

x=3: Back to Basics, Goblin Sharpshooter, Goblin Warchief, Ophidian, Phyrexian Negator, Psychatog, Stax lock parts (Trinisphere, Crucible of Worlds), Troll Ascetic (when opponent is tapped out), etc.

The right way to play Engineered Explosives is as a "sorcery" on your turn (i.e. casting it and activating it within the same turn). So lure them into developing their board position and then play it. In this way, your opponent can't play around it as they can Powder Keg or Pernicious Deed.

Powder Keg
While on the slow side, Powder Keg shines against Affinity, Goblins, and other beatdown decks. It will often trade two-for-one or three-for-one, but even if it's an even trade, you'll likely have slowed your opponent's tempo as they'll be fearful of over-committing their resources with a Keg on the table.

Nevinyrral's Disk
Magic's original reset button gives Super Grow even more control over the board. Playing Disk allows Super Grow to play the "Draw-Go" role easier since you gain card advantage by two-for-one or three-for-one'ing your opponent. After you pop the Disk, then you can play your threats and adopt the aggro-control role (more on this in Part II).

Aether Vial
Much like Affinity, you want this card set to two counters. Play your Dryads (and a slew of cantrip effects) in response to their declaration of attack or play Werebear at the end of their turn to swing in the next. Additionally, Aether Vial allows you to save your mana to cast spells that will pump your creatures, slow your opponent, or draw more cards. And since the majority of Super Grow's creatures are Green, it's no loss that Vialed critters don't pump Dryad.

Isochron Scepter
Scepter fits into a Super Grow as a "One-of" bomb, like Balance or Library of Alexandria in Vintage Super Grow. And Imprint targets abound (about 14 good ones): Accumulated Knowledge, Brainstorm, Swords to Plowshares, and (to a lesser degree) Counterspell and Mystical Tutor. Imprinting Swords against Aggro or AK against Control decks will give you a strong strategic advantage against those decks, an advantage that often makes it hard to lose. But be aware that Scepter is another skill-intensive card, like Quirion Dryad, so don't be careless with it.

Legacy's Allure
No, this isn't just a pun-reference to the appeal of playing this format. This card benefits the deck in the same way that Seal of Cleansing does; it's an early investment whose rewards are reaped later.

Wax / Wane
Old School indeed. This is a cheap and versatile card that's quite powerful against the Survival 0f the Fittest-based decks. As a sideboard card, Wax can really catch your opponent by surprise, and Wane is another tool to deal with Survival.

That's it for today. Join us tomorrow as we discuss how to play Super Grow in a competitive environment.

Dan Spero
bardo_trout on TMD and MTS
email: bardo49 at yahoo dot com

Aaron Hill
Strick09 on TMD and MTS
Email: strick09 at electric dot dreamhost dot com