Historic Sapling Greenshell: Fun & Jank Episode 65

Hello! Welcome back to Fun & Jank, with me, Plum! As you know, we aren’t just here to play the best deck; we’re here to play the most interesting one. It just so happens the brew we’re talking about this week is both sick as frick aaannnnnd pretty strong.

ECL brought us a lot of interesting new toys to mess with. If you’ve been hanging out with me on stream lately, you know that my life has essentially been consumed by the release of Lorwyn Eclipsed. We’ve been knee-deep in the trenches, testing every weird synergy and tribal oddity the set has to offer.

But amidst the sea of flashy mythics and high-profile spoilers, one deck—even in its earliest, clunkiest stages—piqued my interest more than any other. As we refined the list and tightened the mana base, what started as a “what if” experiment started putting up some genuinely scary numbers on the ranked ladder.

That deck revolves around Sapling Nursery.

At first glance, Nursery looks like one of the more innocuous cards from Lorwyn Eclipsed. It’s an eight-mana enchantment in a world of turn-three kills—easy to overlook, right? But in the right shell, it is an absolute powerhouse. We took some inspiration from a hot brew from last year, and gave it a few upgrades.

So let’s talk about it.

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The Idea

The magic of Sapling Nursery lies in its keywords. It features Affinity for Forests, meaning for every Forest you control, that intimidating eight-mana cost drops by 1. In a deck running Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth, your entire board—Ghost Quarters, Yavimaya Coasts, and Breeding Pools—becomes a Forest. Suddenly, you’re casting this game-warping enchantment for two or three mana.

Once it hits the table, the Nursery turns every land drop into a 3/4 Treefolk creature with Reach. This is the ultimate defensive stabilizer; it clogs the air against flyers and halts ground aggro in its tracks. But the real fun begins when you look at the passive ability: you can pay two mana to exile the Nursery to give all your Treefolk and Forests Indestructible until end of turn. It’s a built-in insurance policy against the board wipes that usually ruin “go-wide” strategies.

While Sapling Nursery is great on its own, it found its true calling when we slotted it into the existing “Toughness Matters” shell featuring Plagon, Lord of the Beach and Fecund Greenshell that put up some good numbers (and still does based on this list by CubeApril) last year.

Before the Nursery arrived, this deck was already doing some powerful things. Fecund Greenshell is a value engine that says “whenever a creature with toughness greater than its power enters, look at the top card; if it’s a land, put it into play.” Plagon acts as the glue, drawing you cards and eventually allowing your high-toughness blockers to attack with their butts for lethal damage.

Sapling Nursery completes this triangle in a way that feels almost intentional by the designers:

• The Landfall Loop: You play a land. Sapling Nursery triggers and creates a 3/4 Treefolk.
• The Greenshell Trigger: Because a 3/4 has higher toughness than power, Fecund Greenshell triggers. You look at the top card. If it’s a land, you put it onto the battlefield.
• The Chain Reaction: That new land triggers the Nursery again, making another 3/4, which triggers Greenshell again.

In one turn, you can go from an empty board to five 3/4 blockers and five extra lands in play. It’s a “mini-storm” sequence that doesn’t require a single spell to be cast once the pieces are down. When you add Plagon to the mix, you’re drawing cards for every one of those 3/4s that enters, ensuring that even if you don’t hit a land on top, your hand is refilled with more gas.

Sapling Nursery was the perfect addition to the list, but lets talk about some other supporting cards.

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Support

To make this engine hum, we need the right supporting actors to bridge the gap from the early game to the finish line. The most notable new inclusion to vary from the older lists is Icetill Explorer.

’ve talked a lot on stream about how Midrange is somewhat dead in Historic. If you’re not doing something broken, or incredible targeted to hate on the top decks (Eldrazi and Boros), you’re going to have a bad time.

Explorer happens to help our game plan immensely while also doing just that. Icetill not only ramps us, but also let’s us play main-deck land hate in the form of Ghost Quarter (which Yavimaya makes into a Forest) to punish Eldrazi and greedy mana bases. And guess what? It’s also a 2/4, perfect for Plagon and Greenshell.

With this core suite in mind, I had a powerful creature base to build around, but my initial versions were just a little too clunky for my tastes. We could create some insane board states, but sometimes we drew the wrong half of the deck and just ramped into nothing. In order to solve that (in classic Plum fashion) we added Yorion to the deck.

Yorion allows us to play a bigger manabase, meaning we have access to more utility lands like Blast Zone, while allowing us to also play additional redundancy of “glue” or “oh shit” cards.

Which is where these two bad boys come in.

Riddler has proven to be a fantastic pairing with Plagon, not only for the additional card draw, but also the small synergy that we gain between it and Fanatic of Rhonas, giving us extra mana when we warp it while Fanatic is out. It triggers both Fecund and gives extra cards with Plagon, and a 4/6 flyer can close out games quickly on it’s own.

Culling Ritual is the “oh shit” card I mentioned earlier. Yes, we’re playing a lot of mana dorks, but Ritual is honestly so good right now that having a maindeck “oops, I win” card against Boros, Auras, and Val Combo (which we crushed on stream) feels too valuable to pass up. There’s some cases where it actually ramps us as well, putting a bigger lead between us and the opponent. I’ve been very happy with the inclusion.

So while it might seem a little counterintuitive to add more cards to a deck in order to make it more conistent, the Yorion version of the list has been the strongest by far, just because it has so much redundancy and lines of play to achieve the same end result.

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The rest of the list stayed pretty consistent with its previous versions.

We’re basically trying to get to ~5 mana as quickly as possible most games, so 12 mana dorks is a must. Each of these also has synergy with Plagon and Greenshell making them auto-includes. Malevolent Rumble rounds out this low end of the curve by helping us dig for our haymakers and ramping at the same time.

This is the other most important card in the deck. Of course the incidental grave hate and card draw is nice, but we’re here mainly for the other two abilties.

This deck needs at least some form of interaction, and being able to recoup that cost by making tokens as blockers or ramp is great. The real power comes from making a lot of tokens though. If we hit that critical 5 mana, we can usually land a Greenshell on the board. Which means a big K-Command will trigger Greenshell X times when you make all those tokens. This interaction usually puts you miles ahead of the opponent by dumping lands or putting cards straight into your hand. The best part is being able to chain multiple Commands into one another.

In this match, I casted K-Command for X=8, X=6, and X=4 all in the same turn.

Along with all that, if we hit the magic number of 10 lands on the field for Greenshell, suddenly all of your creatures get +2/+2, basically turning your tokens into an army.

Kozilek’s Command is cracked.

To top off the list we’re playing a single Emrakul.

• 1.) We can cast it relatively easily in the late game
• 2.) There’s games where I’ve literally draw my entire deck with Greensheel and Nursery triggers, and discarding Emmy to hand size keeps us from losing to ourselves
• 3.) I hate Mill.

Anyways, moving on.

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The Mana Base

In a 80-card Yorion pile, your mana base can’t just be a way to cast spells—it has to be a toolbox. Because we are playing Icetill Explorer, our graveyard is essentially a second hand for our lands. When you combine that with the fact that Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth turns every single one of these utility spots into a “Forest” for Sapling Nursery, the mana base becomes the most proactive part of the deck.

Ghost Quarter: This is our primary weapon against the current Historic meta. Against Eldrazi or Tron-style decks, looping a Ghost Quarter with Icetill Explorer is a legitimate win condition. Since Yavimaya makes it a Forest, it’s a land-destruction piece that also helps us cast our eight-mana enchantment for cheap.

Blast Zone: Sometimes you just need to clear the board. Between our mana dorks and the sheer land-ramp from the Nursery/Greenshell loop, we can put counters on Blast Zone incredibly fast. It’s our “break glass in case of emergency” button for dealing with 1-drop aggro or pesky 3-cost planeswalkers.

You’ll see some additional stuff like Woodlands, the Channel Lands, etc. which can be flexible. My main problem is balancing the colored and colorless requirements of the deck, which is why we’re jamming pain lands, starting town, and others. So far the mana has been buttery though.

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Gameplay

The deck can do some outrageous things. Most notably we beat Val Combo, Bogles, and Mono-G Devotion on stream. And here’s an example of me beating a player who had Emrakul out for 6+ turns in a row and somehow couldn’t kill me.

The deck is rather straight forward, and you can watch the video to see how our games went (5-1 overall on stream). But I would like to talk about the sideboard, which I took from the CubeApril list I linked earlier.

Usually, a sideboard is a collection of surgical tools—a Disenchant here, a Rest in Peace there. But because we’re running an 80-card Yorion pile with a massive amount of mana at our disposal, our sideboard looks a little… different. We aren’t looking for “answers”; we’re looking for game-enders. Since we can find our specific creatures through the sheer velocity of Plagon and Quantum Riddler, the sideboard is designed to act as a “toolbox of terror” that pivots our strategy based on the matchup.

Sideboard

• Sowing Mycospawn (4 Copies): This is our premier tool for the big mana matchups. It exiles key opposing lands while tutoring for our own Yavimaya or Ghost Quarter to keep the loop alive.
• Fade from History (3 Copies): A complete reset for artifact and enchantment-heavy decks. It wipes the board of everything from Affinity to Auras
• Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines (2 Copies): The ultimate value-multiplier. She doubles every Greenshell and Nursery trigger we have while completely shutting off the opponent’s “enters-the-battlefield” effects.
• Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite (2 Copies): A massive “win now” button against aggro. She wipes out small creature boards (like Boros Energy) and pumps our Treefolk army into 5/6 monsters for the lethal swing.
• Soul-Guide Lantern (2 Copies): Graveyard hate of choice to pair with K-Command.
• Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger (1 Copy): Our ultimate “over-the-top” finisher. In games where we’ve ramped to 20+ mana, Ulamog deletes two permanents on cast and puts the opponent on a quick clock regardless of their board state.

We’re basically just playing cards that can end the game on their own.

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Closing Thoughts

Sapling Greenshell deck is a powerful evolution of the older lists, proving itself as a legitimate ladder monster so far with a current 11-2 record in recent testing. The deck’s strength lies in the disgusting synergy between Sapling Nursery and Fecund Greenshell, which creates a massive landfall loop that can fill the board with 3/4 Treefolks and extra lands in a single turn. By moving to an 80-card Yorion shell, the deck gains the space to run a “toolbox of terror” in the sideboard, featuring high-impact haymakers like Elesh Norn and Ulamog instead of traditional reactive spells.

A pivotal shift in this version is the inclusion of Culling Ritual in the main board. In a meta currently defined by low-to-the-ground aggressive strategies like Boros and Auras, this card serves as a reset button that often results in an immediate win by clearing the opponent’s board and generating enough mana to follow up with a massive threat.

Overall the deck has not only been strong, but also a blast to pilot. We had a lot of come-back victories on stream and the engines of the deck have proven to be a powerful thing to be doing in the format despite not being over-the-top broken. It just feels like the deck has game against everything. Very happy with this list overall, and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can refine it even more!

That’s it for me!

Thanks for reading!

As always, feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below. And make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!

If you want to see these decks in action, come hang out with me on stream where we test, refine, and have a ton of fun together.

Happy Brewin’!