Legends Legends - Jacques le Vert
Honhonhon! Oui Oui! It's time for another Legends Legends! This week, we're playing notorious Frenchman Jacques le Vert! Monsieur Jack the Green is here with an army of green Dinosaurs ready to receive his toughness boost and go stomping across the battlefield, crushing friend and foe alike underfoot!
Escargot! Baguette! Let's dive into this deck guide before I run out of French words! Note: no offense is meant to the wonderful people of France.
General Thoughts
Jacques le Vert is a four-mana 3/2 Naya creature that gives your other green creatures +0/+2. Fairly simple by today's standards, but with just enough applicability that we can build something truly special. Limiting us to our green creatures means Jacques will have a heavy focus on Forests and green mana, but there will be some staple Naya Enrage cards that are just too good to pass on! We'll use the extra toughness from Jacques effect to trigger our Enrage effects and to survive combat with creatures that'd otherwise crush us. In fact, we can use the extra toughness to trade up into similarly costed creatures rather than trading our creature for theirs.
Dinos
The majority of our deck takes the form of Dinosaurs with Enrage. These creatures are the perfect recipients for Jacques's toughness boost since that's another two whole points of damage they'll survive while at the same time triggering their Enrage mechanics. Many of these cards hail from the various Ixalan sets, but there are a select few with similar abilities with some surprising origins.
Siegehorn Ceratops is the Enraged-coded bear-with-set's-mechanic. It makes a great early play, and it can start threatening opponents in just a turn or two once we get some damage sources on the field. Ravenous Daggertooth is another simple Enrage dino without a particularly flashy ability, but it's nonetheless valuable if it hits the field early and sticks around.
Ranging Raptors takes the place of what would typically be reserved for another mana dork, but with the potential to fetch multiple tapped lands per turn from our library, it ekes out ahead of another simple Llanowar Elves.
Ripjaw Raptor is one of the best ways to draw cards off of damage, and it has a pretty hefty body before we count Jacques's anthem.
Bellowing Aegisaur is the quickest way to buff the power of our entire board, and, despite its mono-white color identity, will still manage to stick around in combat for a while without our commander's toughness boost. Trapjaw Tyrant, another mono-white dino, takes the place of some targeted removal a la a repeatable Banisher Priest effect.
Silverclad Ferocidons, Polyraptor, and Apex Altisaur are our three main Enraged threats. With a consistent source of damage on the field, like Fire Ants, any of these can swing the tide of battle in our favor and create a mess of a board state for our opponents to deal with.
Finally, I want to call out Cacophodon for its combo with Fire Ants and Rite of Passage. With these three permanents on the field, you can activate the Fire Ants an indefinite number of times, obliterating all of your opponents' creatures while simultaneously buffing your entire board.
Now on to our selection of non-Dinosaur creatures with pseudo-Enrage effects. Most commonly found on Hydras, many creatures have an effect that creates +1/+1 counters whenever they're dealt damage. Assuming they survive the damage (and hopefully they will, with that extra toughness from Jacques), these creatures will swell in strength with each passing turn.
Protean Hydra was the bane of my existence in high school. As a burgeoning mono-red player, I just couldn't deal with this creature without splashing black for a Doom Blade. Hungering Hydra works similarly, with the added benefit of being blockable by only one creature at a time. Fungusaur has a similar effect, but it's locked in at being a 2/2 when it enters. Also, when did they switch Fungusaur's type from "Fungusaur" to "Fungus Dinosaur"? Why does everything have to synergize with everything? Why can't we have anything fun?
Phytohydra is my favorite of these Hydra effects, though. Rather than the delayed trigger of Protean Hydra or the possibility of dying before the counters arrive, like on Hungering Hydra, Phytohydra just straight up ignores the damage and turns it into +1/+1 counters. Of course, we could just stick our Vigor to the field and not worry about losing any creature to damage, but then we lose out on our Enrage triggers. Be careful when employing this card, otherwise you may end up with a non-bo (am I using that right?)
A selection of Insects help us go wide with Hornet Nest and Sporeweb Weaver. Saber Ants has a little more stability in play, but all three of these will need Jacques's toughness boost to hang around long.
Damagers
With a hearty base of creatures just begging for a good punch in the face, we've got nothing left to do but give it to them.
Fire Ants is my favorite way to ping our entire board all at once, followed closely by Pyrohemia. Both of these deal just enough damage to trigger our Enrage effects ("just enough" meaning one).
Brash Taunter is another great way to get your creatures all beefed up and ready for a fight, with the added benefit of putting some damage directly into your opponents. Best of all, you can target a different opponent for each Brash Taunter trigger, as opposed to a Stuffy Doll's single target.
Pariah's Shield works great with this deck, as well; just be careful you're not taking too much damage all at once and losing our dinos in the process.
You might be surprised to see we aren't running a Blasphemous Act in this deck. That's because we've got two other cards that I think do the job just as well, if not better in this deck.
The first is Solar Blaze, a pseudo-board wipe that should destroy every other creature with power equal to its toughness (spoilers: there're a lot of creatures with power equal to their toughness in Magic: The Gathering). The second is Klauth's Will, which pulls double duty as both a board wipe and noncreature permanent removal, perfect for punching apart those pesky stax decks and their Ghostly Prisons.
What's Having a Big Butt Good For, Anyways?
...besides the obvious reasons...
Many of the creatures in this deck are threats in their own right, especially after we've triggered their Enrage mechanics a few times. We shouldn't be content with using solely their own effects to buff them up, though. That's why we've included a suite of supporting cards to change them from merely threatening to game-ending.
Many of our Dinosaurs and Dinosaur lookalikes gain +1/+1 counters when Enraged. Others produce tokens for each damage they've been dealt. Every good green player knows there's one card to capitalize on both of those effects, and it's Primal Vigor, baby! Just in case that wasn't enough, we've got Hardened Scales for good measure, and let's not forget our Rite of Passage effectively doubling up on any of our Enrage mechanics that produce +1/+1s. Urban Daggertooth just throws even more gas on the counters fire.
+1/+1 counters increase a creature's toughness, too, and with Jacques le Vert's static anthem on the field, many of our already big-butted Dinosaurs will end up with a toughness much higher than their original power, so we'll use Bedrock Tortoise and Assault Formation as an additional boost to their combat effectiveness.
It hurts to lose a creature we've spent so much time enraging to an opponent, so Asceticism helps keep them safe from targeted Path to Exiles, and we can use its regenerate effect to remove all the damage from a creature in case we want to Enrage it a few more times.
Mirari's Wake's static anthem effect is all well and good, but its mana-doubling effect really shines when we can cast a late-game Protean Hydra where X=10 or more.
Abzan Beastmaster is almost guaranteed to draw us a card each turn while our huge Dinosaurs are on the field; just be careful not to lose it to your own Fire Ants. Speaking of losing our own creatures to our damage effects, we're opting for Timeless Witness over Eternal Witness for the simple fact that the 4/4 eternalized token will survive a few pings from our Pyrohemia.
Jacques le Vert won't end games by himself, but his board of Dinosaurs can if we hit them with an Overrun and go crashing through our opponents' battlelines. Nature's Cloak is another surprise game-ender, if only against the other green decks out there.
Jacques le Vert Deck List
View this decklist on Archidekt
Budget
This deck's budget runs about $210. That's fairly cheap for a functioning Legends Legends deck, and most of it is tied up in the $26 Jacques le Vert himself. Let's take a look at the next most expensive cards, and see what we can cut.
Polyraptor and Pyrohemia both sit at about $10/pop on TCGplayer currently. Polyraptor rightfully so since it's one of the best ways to crank out 5/5 tokens ever printed. Pyrohemia less so, its price being artificially inflated as it is because of its single printing (outside of Mystery Booster). We've got no shortage of green Enraged Dinosaurs to pick from, so something as simple as Snapping Sailback can take Polyraptor's place. Pyrohemia is a little harder to replace; I'd suggest Caltrops, a card I originally omitted to make room for the boring stuff in this deck (you know, Beast Within, Sol Ring, that stuff).
Note that I've included the shocklands in Naya colors in our mana base; these are by no means required, either, and can be replaced with some cheap Guildgates or gainlands to save a quick $30.
Wrap Up
I do sincerely apologize for what came over me in the introduction. I've got nothing against the French, it's an ingrained American thing to tease them. I'm sure Jacques le Vert is a fine fellow with a normal and moderate appreciation for cigarettes and a refined palette.
What do you think? Does Jacques le Vert make sense at the helm of an Enraged dinos deck? Or should we go all-in on a toughness matters theme? How can we tweak this build to make it better? Shout it out in the comments! If Disqus doesn't log me out again, I might even reply!
Thanks again for reading!
