The Swarmweaver "Too Many Card Types is Making Me Delirious" - Plot Twist #18

Welcome back to Plot Twist, the series where we build a Commander deck that looks like it'll tell one kind of story only to throw out a twist for our opponents mid-game. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! I'd encourage you to check out the previous articles in the series to get a sense of the types of stories we're looking to tell.

In our most recent article, we took a breather from Bloomburrow too explore my signature Secret Commander: Wild Pair deck helmed by Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder

How Does The Swarmweaver Work?

The Swarmweaver

If we pop over to The Swarmlord's EDHREC page, we can see that though there's a relatively small sample size of The Swarmlord decks built so far (less than 50 as of the time of writing), players are leaning heavily into building Insect/Spider kindred decks, with cards like Grist, the Hunger Tide

While we're definitely going to be running some Insects and want to trigger Delirium, this wouldn't be a Plot Twist deck if we did either of those things in the expected way. This week's strange decklist is instead going to use cards like Biotransference

Doing the Twist

When I got back into Magic in 2016, Eldritch Moon had just come out, and I bought some booster packs because the set was dripping with flavor. While jumping in in the middle of a block (remember blocks?) was perhaps not the best idea, Delirium was one reason that I found myself hooked all over again. While Delirium can be easier to trigger in singleton formats thanks to fetch lands, artifact/enchantment creatures, and even kindred spells, it's never really had the kind of support needed to build a commander deck around it. With the added Delirium support in Duskmourn, and the wide variety of cards that are now multiple permanent types, I think we've finally got the density to do something interesting with Delirium in Commander.

Biotransference

There are truly some wild ways to trigger Delirium in this week's deck. I did briefly consider loading up on cards with the Adventure mechanic, assuming that they had both card types, but in reading the rulings on Adventure for Beanstalk Giant, it appears that only the permanent type of Adventure cards count because an "Adventurer card is a permanent card in every zone except the stack, as well as while on the stack if not cast as an Adventure." That's kind of a bummer, but that just means we'll have to get more creative! If I'm wrong about my interpretation of this ruling about adventure cards, feel free to yell at me about it in the comments below.

The Core of the Deck: Making Everything Insect Artifacts

Since this deck is relying so heavily on Delirium and Insects, the glue that holds it together is going to be cards that help us add additional permanent and creature types to our other cards. In addition to Biotransference

More than a quarter of this week's deck consists of cards that that are multiple card types. We're also running a suite of fetch lands and plenty of ways to mill cards directly into our graveyard. We shouldn't have any issue triggering Delirium normally, but we want to be able to do it as reliably as possible.

Once we've gotten the benefits of Delirium, we'll definitely want have plenty of Spiders and Insects to buff with The Swarmweaver

Using & Abusing Artifacts

One thing about The Swarmweaver

The TL;DR version of the combo is: we equip Nim Deathmantle

If we're able to make all of our creatures into artifacts with Biotransference

Baba Lysaga, Night Witch

Creepy Crawlies

Let's take a look at some of the payoffs in the deck for Insects and Spiders. We have more than 20 Spiders and Insects in the deck, plus a handful of cards like Canoptek Scarab Swarm, Grist, the Hunger Tide, Grist, Voracious Larva, Scute Swarm, Spider Spawning, and Springheart Nantuko that can create an army of Insect and Spider tokens. The deck is running more than 40 creatures total, so when you add in the ability of Conspiracy and Maskwood Nexus to turn our remaining creatures into Insects or Spiders, we shouldn't have any issues accumulating an intimidating force.

Ishkanah, Grafwidow and Rotwidow Pack both have activated abilities that can quickly knock out one or all of our opponents under the right circumstances in addition to generating Spider tokens themselves. Both of these effects remind me of Lathril, Blade of the Elves in that they will quickly close out the game if left unchecked. Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest and Amzu, Swarm's Hunger both help make our Insects into lethal threats and reward us for sacrificing permanents and having cards leave our graveyard, two things we're going to be doing a lot of anyway. Giant Adephage speaks to the child in me who thought Thorn Elemental was the best card in the world and always seems to become a huge threat when it's cast. Last, but not least, Shelob, Dread Weaver can occasionally steal an opponent's best creature and then return it to the battlefield on our side. If you ever manage to steal an opponent's Hellkite Tyrant with Mycosynth Lattice in play and steal all of their permanents, you'll be telling that story at every Commander Night for the rest of time.

A Few Additional Twists for Good Measure

We get to triple-dip on weird cards this week by looking at both zany interactions with permanent types and two niche creature types. Bane of the Living caught my eye as a morph creature that also acts as a board wipe. With even more cards that create face down creatures than ever thanks to the new manifest dread mechanic from Duskmourn, people are soon going to have to not assume that every face down card is Willbender. I don't know why I don't see more Lignify in Commander given how devastating effects like Darksteel Mutation and Imprisoned in the Moon can be, but it might be the best kindred card for this deck, and I want to find room to add it to my Yeva deck now. Monumental Corruption is both a great card draw spell and a way to potentially knock out an opponent if we have enough artifacts in play. It's like Sign in Blood on steroids!

Gleancrawler is a really interesting card advantage engine for aristocrats decks like this one. It might be too slow because it has to survive till the end of our turn to trigger, but the fact that it's an Insect means this The Swarmweaver deck is the perfect home for Gleancrawler. I also want to shout out Stag Beetle even though it was one of the final cuts because it could become absolutely massive in a tokens deck. Perhaps if we had more ways to give Stag Beetle trample or evasion it would be worth revisiting. Last but not least, Arasta of the Endless Web is such a strong value engine that generates Spider tokens when our opponents cast instants and sorceries. I run it in my Chatterfang tokens deck and am always happy to draw it because it accumulates so much value seemingly every turn.

Here's the full decklist for you to peruse:

Roll the Credits

I hope you enjoyed reading the latest edition of Plot Twist featuring The Swarmweaver. Next time you sit down for a game of Commander, see what sort of plot twists you can add to take the game's narrative in a new direction.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's deck and what cards could find a home in it in the comments below or on Archidekt. The Maybeboards of my decklists are always filled with cards I thought could work but didn't make the final decklist.

You can check out my other articles here or see what decks I'm currently playing here. I recently took apart two decks (my Isshin, Two Heavens as One Deck and my Killian, Ink Duelist Reanimator Deck) because they no longer sparked joy, and I built a Karador, Ghost Chieftan Cycling-Reanimator Deck that has been a complete blast to play. I'm constantly toying with new ideas like this Colorless Combo deck and would love to hear your thoughts on them there.

Stay tuned to see what other twists and turns are headed your way in the next edition of Plot Twist.