The Great Henge is an awesome piece of the Legendary artifact cost reduction cycle in Throne of Eldraine. We’ve already brewed up a Feasting Troll King deck that seeks to cheat it into play, but we can also built a typical aggressive Stompy deck that can cast it easily and to great effect.
Mono Green Stompy with The Great Henge
The Great Henge generates absurd value the second it hits play, so we want to play as many ways to get high-power creatures into play cheaply as we can. This deck is pretty reliable at casting this card in the mid-game and then immediately using it to cast one of its many 2-drops and drawing a card.
There’s a lot of new cards in this list, so let’s go through the curve:
Pelt Collector is still the best aggressive 1-drop in this style of deck. We’ve suffered a rather large blow by losing access to Llanowar Elves, and Gilded Goose doesn’t fit very well in this particular build. To get another 1-drop into the deck, we’re trying Lovestruck Beast. As we’re sure to see in the coming weeks, Adventure creatures are generally better than they look due to the high flexibility. We get to play a 1-drop and a 3-drop just by drawing this card. Granted, 1 mana for a 1/1 isn’t the best play in the world, but a 3-mana 5/5 makes up for it and curves perfectly into The Great Henge.
These 2-drops are just solid creatures to be included in a green creature beatdown deck. Barkhide Troll and Growth-Chamber Guardian happen to play very nicely with the extra +1/+1 counters provided for free by The Great Henge, and Kraul Harpooner (in addition to shoring up one of this deck’s weaknesses) has the potential to stay in play as a super high-powered creature for 1 turn in order to cheat out our Legendary artifact.
We’ve already covered the other 3-drop of the deck, but Yorvo is exciting as well. It’s Legendary so we don’t want to run 4 copies, but it’s an efficient creature that grows quickly. We can’t often take advantage of the double-growth effect, but this deck should be very good at putting several green creatures into play. Vivien can also give it trample if you’re having trouble connecting with it.
Shifting Ceratops has been an impressive card since it was released, but Questing Beast from Throne of Eldraine looks even better. It’s got enough keywords that even if some of them aren’t relevant in a given matchup, it’s likely that others are. It’s nice to be able to pressure the opponent’s life total while still keeping planeswalkers in check.
Vivien, Arkbow Ranger is an excellent planeswalker for this strategy, even though we are a bit overloaded on 4-drops. The ability to give our fatties trample is nice, but there’s also quite a few toolbox type creatures that can be extremely valuable to tutor for. In addition to Voracious Hydra, Feasting Troll King and Wicked Wolf are some new options to consider.