Tag: Spider-Man

A pig dressed in red and blue pajamas might seem like a crazy idea, but it’s just another day in Marvel’s Earth-8311. This setting isn’t far from the world of Magic: The Gathering, where angelic cows and evil rabbits battle with friendly ponies and mysterious monsters.

Earth-8311 is Marvel’s cartoon parody world, full of animal versions of popular Marvel heroes, from Captain Americat to Goose Rider. Spider-Ham, a friendly neighborhood pig hero, wants to bring his zany animal team to your next Commander game. Grab a pizza slice and get ready to go wild!

Sample Decklist

This deck is in Core: Bracket 2, but it’s a fun way to play with all creature types.

The Commander

Just like Spider-Man was an ordinary guy bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Ham is a regular spider bitten by a nerdy radioactive pig. This odd accident gave him pig-like qualities and a smart brain. His backstory involves Aunt May Porker trying to make a nuclear-powered hair dryer. His origin is pure fun.

Spider-Ham came into the main spotlight during the 2018 movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and that’s the version you see in Magic. He’s a 2/2 Spider Boar Hero that costs one green and one generic mana to summon, and he enters with a Food token.

Although Spider-Ham is a team player, his universe features Captain America as a house cat, Thor as a dog, and Ant-Man just as an ant. He provides a +1/+1 boost to 18 different creature types you’d expect in a forest, such as Spiders, Boars, Wolves, Rabbits, and Lizards.

He doesn’t buff himself and can’t imitate web-slinging to avoid blockers. This means he might not win many battles directly, but his boosts make all your other creatures stronger, threatening your opponents’ boards.

How to Build Spider-Ham’s Commander Deck

Spider-Ham, Peter Porker is pretty straightforward yet versatile enough to build a fun deck around. He works well in a Food-themed deck, but he also provides a broad boost to 18 creature types and encourages creative deck building. You can focus on specific creature types if you want, but the deck is more about using the types as a pool of options to create a powerful, coordinated army.

The deck mostly features mana-generating creatures and small lords that buff themselves and others, creating a snowball effect. It’s like playing Slivers, but with a pig and farmyard friends.

One card that may seem unnecessary at first is Maskwood Nexus because your entire deck shares creature types supported by Spider-Ham. But it’s useful because it allows you to treat all your creatures as all creature types, making abilities like Thornvault Forager’s more flexible—especially for searching your library for specific types.

With Maskwood Nexus, you can also generate tokens that match Spider-Ham’s supported types. Several cards in the deck create creature tokens, helping you build a strong board without relying solely on your hand.

Ramp

Since this deck is mono-green, you can rely on classic land tutors to quickly increase your mana instead of mana rocks. You also have mana dorks that fit the theme and boost your mana production, especially if you plan to maximize Spider-Ham’s abilities.

The top choice is Birds of Paradise, which costs one green mana and can tap for mana of any color. Llanowar Elves might be slightly cheaper, but only tap for green, while Ttrailtracker Scout taps for one mana and gets the buff from Spider-Ham.

Another useful creature is Twitching Doll. When you tap it for mana, it gets nest counters. Later, you can sacrifice it to summon a 2/2 Spider with reach for each counter, turning an early mana source into a swarm of spiders late in the game.

This deck doesn’t focus heavily on Food cards, but it includes some that let you generate Food tokens. The Gilded Goose can turn Food into mana, and can store mana by creating Food tokens to use later for mana, health, or to create Rhino Warrior tokens via Killer Service.

Cemetery Prowler doesn’t produce mana, but it helps lower the costs of other spells by exiling cards from graveyards. Each exiled card of a certain type (creature or enchantment) makes spells of the same type cheaper, which is handy for graveyard strategies. For example, exiling a creature reduces the cost of all your creatures, and exiling an enchantment reduces the cost of your enchantments.

Note that only cards with a single type are fully affected. For example, only Arasta of the Endless Web, which is an enchantment creature, gets its cost reduced twice because Cemetery Prowler’s effect only applies to colorless mana, not colored mana in multi-type creatures.

Instead of Gaea’s Cradle, which would be perfect but is very expensive and on the Reserved List, the deck uses Evendo, Waking Haven. It enters tapped and taps for one green mana. Once your creatures reach a total power of 12 or more, you can pay one green and tap Evendo to generate one mana for each creature you control.

Drawing Cards

Green isn’t known for strong card draw, but there are ways to turn your creatures into a reliable draw engine. Toski, Bearer of Secrets, is a small squirrel that’s indestructible, and whenever a creature deals combat damage to a player, you draw a card. Swing wide or trample over defenses to get more cards.

Guardian Project makes you draw a card whenever a non-token creature enters the battlefield, with the only limit being that the creature must have a unique name. Since more than a third of your deck is creatures, it will keep your hand full.

Garruk’s Uprising lets you draw a card whenever a creature with power four or more enters. Many of your creatures, especially with Spider-Ham in play, meet this threshold. It also grants trample to your creatures, making it a good combo with Toski.