#betor

I finally drew the new spirit dragons, I almost gave up in finishing this...but I'm glad I did.

smaugust #13 is the dragonstorm cheese dragon and my saproling commander, Betor. back at release i got the art foil version of them in a booster :)

decklist:

(Reblog for larger sample size!)

Betor, Kin to All, illustrated by Alexander Ostrowski

Alright, then I'll start with some more generic advice for the deck. Unlike most pillowfort decks, you likely don't want to spend slots on traditional pillowfort effects like Ghostly Prisons and friends. Your creature's toughness already do that, prevent attacks at you.

On the other hand, 20 and 40 toughness is a LOT, even with some chonky critters, it'll likely take 3 or 4 creatures to hit 20, and 5 or 6 for 40. This means protecting your board or rebuilding will be important. Spells that can save your board from a sweeper will be key (something like Flare of Fortitude or Cosmic Intervention), or bring back several creatures at once (Nethroi, Eerie Interlude,...)

With all that in mind, I'd also skew your board wipes away from creatures in general, despite there existing a number of excellent toughness-based creature board wipes. The main threat of creatures, attacks, you should be able to handle just fine. There will still be ones with problematic abilities, but handling those with more pinpoint removal should be more efficient if you're not scared of combat in general. Having ways to clean problematic artifacts/enchantments/planeswalkers off the board seems more relevant.

Alright, as far as individual cards...

Sometimes a whole lot of toughness also comes along with a lot of power. Betor don't really care if you also have power. These tend to scale towards VERY BIG even without effort on your part, and are likely to at least bring you to 20 toughness by themselves, if not 40. Notable for Soul of Eternity is that Encore exiles the tokens at end step, so you can stack the triggers so that Betor's resolve first, and then the toughness goes away once it's done its job.

Oh, and sometimes they might attack too, since they untap with Betor anyway.

Within the same bucket of power AND toughness source, the two Tendershoots do similar things with a different angle. They won't give you immediate toughness for Betor, but generating 12 toughness per turn cycle for them is nothing to scoff at.

Wall of Mourning is a card that's easy to have overlooked, in a random precon. If you can reliably have Coven on, it's a slow draw 3 on a 2-mana wall, hard to beat that rate. Coven isn't that hard to achieve assuming you're not full on on walls.

While Vehicles aren't great a pillowforting, they're also pretty good at providing extra toughness in your end step, since they're still animated by then. Better yet, if you're up to the 20 threshold, Betor untaps them and their crew to help with blocking. If you have a few, you can daisy-chain crew them to add all their toughness to your count. And they survive creature sweepers in most cases. Now, I know you already have a Vehicles deck, so have a selection of three that I think fulfill other roles in the deck, and two that add a whole lot of toughness by themselves. Hearse in particular will scale fast if Betor's untapping it and provide invaluable instant-speed graveyard hate for the deck.

Armadel's grimoire is truly one of a kind. Little concerned with worldly desires, he is oriented towards the gnosis that can be granted by various Angels and Demons. Of relative interest for the Left Path, I found these seals and uses that seemed useful to me:

• The seal of Betor to understand the virtues of the Angels of Darkness and attract them to us (without apparently constraining them as is the case with other sigils)

• Those from Lucifer, Belzébuth & Astaroth, to have the gnosis of the angels of darkness, their functions, and their life before the fall.

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