(Shroofus Sproutsire | Art by Yukihiro Maruo)

Just a Fun Little Guy

People have told me that I am a fun guy. Luckily, no one has ever told me I am a fungi. The same cannot be said for Shroofus Sproutsire. Few things in magic take a player back to the old days as much as making a Saproling token. I aim to make many of these little guys, and I am using a crop of cards that some players know all too well and others will be seeing for the first time.

It is fitting that Shroofus Sproutsire comes from Foundations Jumpstart because we are returning to the format's foundations with this one. I am Nick, and I hope you will join me as I Tech this Deck.

There is a Fungus Among Us

Two creature types in the game are forever joined at the hip; Fungus and Saproling. Plenty of Fungus creatures, even six, have become legendary. But it wasn't until Shroofus that we got the first legendary creature - Saproling. So why is this a big deal? Because Shroofus is just a little guy, and it would not be very nice if you were mean to him. I joke, but this is a very cool commander with many synergies with cards seen across the many years the game has been around. So, let's go deep into the forest and find some fungi.

Mushroom Monsters

It's the most classic of the monsters in our list and the one that explains the core of what our creatures are all about. Thallid can remove spore counters to make Saproling tokens. It's a simple effect, but without help, it will take three turns after casting before you can get a single 1/1 creature. While this effect isn't fast, it's frequent across many other Fungi.

Four more Fungus monsters, all with the same ability to get spore counters. But each one brings its twist to the same recipe. Utopia Mycon is not only the lone creature not having Thallid in its name of the above four, but it also can cash in your tokens for mana. Savage Thallid brings a double dose of older themes with Regenerate, a keyword that card designers have moved away from as years gone by.

Psychotrope Thallid might be one of the best of the bunch outside of the Mycon. If we are not making mana, the next best thing to do is draw cards, and this Thallid knows a thing or two about drawing cards. Finally, Vitaspore Thallid can allow us to send in our commander immediately or use some of our other nonfungus creatures in this deck when they hit the board.

But all of these cards have the same problem: they're slow. Even if all the other players let me put these four creatures on the board on turn one, they still would not look great when I got around to my fourth turn. The best scenario is I now have four additional 1/1 creatures, and I can parlay that into mana or card draw. The worst case is right before I get enough counters, someone casts a Wrath of God, and I am out of the game. So what do we do to go faster?

We Evolve

Join me in the glorious evolution of this deck featuring a green all-star for any strategy that requires someone to carry a dice bag with them,

. Proliferation is one of the best ways to send our Saproling generation into overdrive. Evolution Sage is one of the best cards for helping us out since all it requires is to make our land drops. We also have a few extra pieces of proliferation to pair up with the sage.

Cankerbloom is a Swiss army knife creature offering us proliferation, artifact removal, and enchantment removal on a cheap body with great stats. I have undervalued this card for a long time, but I am glad that I got to see just how good they could be before putting this deck together.

Karn's Bastion gives us a repeatable proliferation effect on a land, so playing it with Evolution Sage on the battlefield should make you chuckle at the table. While Staff of Compleation does cost three life every time we want to use it, getting the one last counter we need could make all the difference. Believe it or not, we have a few other ways to use this proliferation in our deck besides strictly adding spore counters.

Proliferating the Proliferation

Proliferation would have been much different if it specified what counters you could add. Luckily for us and many other players, it does not. So, what are we proliferating outside of spore counters and +1/+1 counters?

How about Fading?

gives us a choice between a single 7/7 token that slowly shrinks until it is no more or a surprise of seven 1/1 tokens that will only be around for a single turn. But what if we could add more counters? Not only could we get multiple tokens that could be larger than a 1/1, but we could also increase the number of 1/1s that we can make.

Maybe you need to close out the game and do not have many turns left. If you have a few counters on your Beastmaster Ascension but not enough creatures to get the magic number of seven, proliferation can help you close out the game.

Similarly, Door of Destinies can get more and more and MORE counters growing our mushroom army. But the heart of this deck is and always will be the Saproling tokens, so let me show you what we've got.

Saproling Synergies

Brightcap Badger is one of my favorite cards in the deck because it does everything. Makes Saproling creatures for us at instant speed and every end step. As well as turning all of our Saprolings and Fungi into mana dorks. Saddly, as a Badger Druid, it will not gain any synergies from our next card, Thelonite Hermit.

While Thelonite Hermit does have an expensive Morph cost at 3 after playing it face down, the payoff is worth the steep investment. Four 1/1 tokens that get buffed up will do just as well, if not better, than most of the cards in our deck at closing out a game or keeping us alive.

Verdant Force is objectively past their prime. But I would be forced to turn in my deck building license if I did not include it in the list. We are in mono green, so there is a reasonable chance we can cast this large lad ahead of the curve, even with the heavy mana requirement. If we can't, we also run Tendershoot Dryad so that we can win the game.

A few cards in this deck will elicit a groan from others at the table, but one, in particular, has the possibility of sending someone into a breakdown.

.

If you ever find a player who was around when this card first came out, be careful when mentioning Sprout Swarm. With the mix of Convoke and Buyback , the swarm will eventually give someone an unending swarm of Saprolings. This card can only be described as a mistake that should never have seen the light of day. But luckily for us, we got to pair it up with our happy little mushroom man. Sometimes, saddly, Saprolings beating down your opponents is not enough to win the game. So, the last part of our deck is where all the spice lives.

Spicy Mushrooms

Every good deck needs a plan B. Since our deck combines Fungus and Saproling typal, we start the game around plan C. Never fear because alternate win conditions are here.

While it might be cheating to consider Triumph of the Hordes or Strixhaven Stadium as alternative ways to win the game, giving all of our creatures trample and infect drastically changes the math during the combat step. One moment, all of your opponents think they are safe with a few creatures to block; the next, they are shuffling up for game two. Strixhaven Stadium is a risky card for most decks. Ideally, we should have less incurred risk since we should have enough creatures to stop getting counters removed from the stadium, and we can pair it with proliferation to up the counters as close to ten as possible.

There is no way that Epic Struggle can be considered anything but an alternative to winning the game. The biggest downside to this card, and the reason most people have never seen it on a battlefield, is that it will become the immediate target no matter what. Someone will try to remove it, your creatures, or you from the game before losing to this card. But if you can pull off the win, it becomes a card where the name perfectly fits the feeling coursing through your body.

Wrap Up

Shroofus Sproutsire is a card I expect to show up at a surprising amount of tables. It's a bit of a perfect storm for a commander deck. The art of this card is adorable, and while no one would ever say this card is broken, it can be made to be powerful. This deck hits the perfect middle on the Venn diagram of a new player getting into the format and a long-time player trying to recapture the feelings when they first found themselves tapping lands and slinging spells.

If you want to see more content around the new cards from Foundations or Foundations Jumpstart, check out the other deck techs I did or any other fantastic articles on both EDHREC and Commander's Herald. Once again, I'm Nick, and I will see you the next time we Tech the Deck.

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