By Gibson aka KaipaLin

Hey everybody! If you’re just joining us, this is the third article in a series about the Nephilim, that cycle of bizarrely-limbed four-color monsters from Ravnica who really ought be legendary.

Given that they’re not actually legendary, but are definitely interesting and unique, we’re exercising our house-rule muscles and issuing the decree (with the consent of our gaming compatriots) that henceforth they shall be treated as legendary, with all the rights and responsibilities pursuant to their station. Of course, you may have trouble eliciting that consent, and since no player is an island (except blue mages, and who likes them?), you’re going to have to give a strong case as to why your unusual choice should be allowed. My favored tactic is to impress upon your fellow players how cool the deck is going to be: focus on building an interesting, unique deck, based around your Nephilim’s color identity and flavor (for Vorthos) and/or what it does mechanically (for Melvin). If you can incorporate both and construct your pitch to appeal to your fellow players, you should have relatively little trouble convincing them to let you take your wacky new deck out for a spin.





Enter today’s Fallen: the cruel, twisted, and strangely combat-focused Witch-Maw Nephilim. Essentially a mobile mouth, this Nephilim ignores the existence of red, not unlike some EDH players I know. Unfortunately, the absence of red mana does strange and terrible things to a mind: without passion, freedom, and individualism, ideas stagnate, responses are sluggish, and plans seem to progress infinitely without ever really concluding. On the other hand, without red’s focus on doing everything right now, this Nephilim can focus on the future. It crafts its plans carefully, recycling its resources and growing fat on power, preparing the perfect moment in which to strike. When the time is ripe, its opponents will find themselves suddenly ensnared its coils, their usual tricks useless and their demise soon at hand. If you’re really feeling it, give a maniacal laugh (and relish these moments, because really, you’re playing a deck with a bunch of +1/+1 counter creatures, so it won’t happen often). How to represent these twin foci in deck construction? In the future department, we’ll be playing recursion and lots of “growing” cards, while in the restraint department we’ll be adding some specific common-strategy hosers and a series of legendary creature and planeswalker packages.

Mechanically, the Witch-Maw Nephilim is all about growth; it starts off tiny but gains +1/+1 whenever you cast spells, becoming a thundering trampler easily capable of one- or two-shotting opponents. While adding Voltron elements could increase your speed in this department, I’ve found that the Nephilim gets the job done just fine all on its lonesome. All you really need to do to pump this guy to magnificent proportions is cast spells early and often. This has the tangential benefit of forwarding two game plans at once, and thus being twice as hard to deal with. Recursion does the lion’s share of making sure we have spells to cast at all points of the game. +1/+1 counters, meanwhile have other uses besides just making things big and smashy, so we’ll explore those avenues as well. On to the deck!

Led by the tag-team duo of Innistrad’s still-living Lunarch Mikaeus and the older, wiser incarnation of Ajani, this section of cards focuses on buffing your team via +1/+1 counters. You could say their efforts are counter-productive.



A Display of My Dark Power