Magic Deck Vortex: Card Spotlight: Spiritmonger.

As the scene opens, we see an old man sitting behind a desk, dwarfed by the monstrosity that has just entered the room.

"Excellent! Let's take a look at your resume, shall we? I see that you are both Green and Black. That's good; we like the enemy color pairs. Do you mind going hybrid?"

"I see. We'll discuss that later, if it becomes relevant. What else? Black regeneration is fine... oh, I see you can change colors—we're looking for some good color-changers. Perhaps we can overlook your golden tendencies, as long as you can paint with all the colors of the wind, so to speak.

"Hmmm, I'm afraid this just won't do though. It says here you add +1/+1 counters? No, I'm sorry, but there is a strict policy against +1/+1 counters in Eventide. I'm afraid you'll have to look elsewhere. I hear the Extended format needs some muscle in its Rock decks. Why don't you give that a try?"

When it comes to under-cost, overpowered fatties, few creatures have the pedigree and clout of Spiritmonger. At 6/6 for five mana with no drawback and some serious abilities, it has been a fan favorite for BG "Rock" decks since its creation. Speaking of its creation, let’s take a trip in the way-back machine and examine the origins of this Beast.

Did you know that Spiritmonger was the result of a contest run on the Wizards of the Coast website? They put out a call for fans to submit a creature design that could potentially be made into an actual Magic: the Gathering card. Out of more than 12,000 entries, this submission by "Gregory and Bradley of Wisconsin" was eventually chosen:

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The creature is called the Spirit-monger. Its body is a large hulking dark brown mass, that is hunched over slightly. Its body has a large hole in the center of it with a glowing energy aura in the hole. From the rim of the hole are six tusks that extend into the aura with only their tips. The spirit monger has broad shoulders and has a row of curved spikes that lines its upper back. Its head is found not on top of its shoulders, but below its shoulders slightly, like a primate. Its face is blunt and small, with an overgrown lower lip with large fangs sticking up. It has a snout like nose, with two narrow squinted red eyes. It also has two yellowish horns that curve like rams' horns. Its face is also brown. The Spirit-monger's arms almost reach to the ground and are as thick as tree trunks.

It has a strip of spikes down the outside of its arm and has three large bulky fingers on both hands. Just before the wrists of the arms are four curved spikes that jut outward past the hands of it and curve inwards. When the Spirit-monger punches the spikes shoot out and clamp the target in place... sticking into its prey’s skin. Its legs are like short arms. Picture a human walking on his hands and make those arms its legs; that's a Spirit-monger's legs. It has an outer rim of spikes on its legs and has three toes that stretch out over the ground like its hands. This way it can swing in trees and grasp enemies with three of its four appendages. The creature’s skin is fragmented and rocky; greenish lichens grow in the skin's cracks. It also has a tail. The tail splits into three right off its origin at its butt. The three pieces are fairly thin sinew-covered bone and stretch out half their arm length. They have small balls on the end of them with a short poisonous spikes on each of the balls. Its tail's ball-ends are red, the rest is brown like the rest of its body. The hole in the Spirit-monger's chest and stomach cavity has spirits of dead men and creatures flowing through its glowing aqua-colored flame.

The spirits spiral around the Spirit-monger like a protective shield as it lumbers through the forests. It also carries a giant oak club. The club is not really designed like a club, but instead is a piece of lumber that starts out medium-thick and then expands into an incredibly thick and solid chunk of wood with small nubs all over it. The nubs glow blue as the spirits float around it as well. The spirit monger by the way is twice the size of an average human, so about 11' tall.

How's that for a boatload of flavor! From there, Wizards R&D went to work to produce the final result that we all know and love. In fact, it took them 13 months before they found a suitable habitat for the enemy-colored beastie in the Apocalypse set!

But enough about flavor. You readers of this fine "what the casual players use" website don't really care about flavor, do you? I know what you hunger for: power! Let’s talk about the big guy's powerful attributes.

Regeneration: Spiritmonger's regeneration ability is fairly mundane in the realm of modern Magic cards, but at only one Black mana, it’s still a bargain.

Aggressively Costed: For a long time, Spiritmonger was the only 6/6 (or greater) for five with no drawback. Two new challengers have recently appeared that look to be directly influenced by Spiritmonger's stats: Shadowmoor's Deus of Calamity lacks regeneration, but adds trample, and Eventide's Deity of Scars not only has trample and regeneration, but adds insult to injury by starting out (sort of) bigger than Spiritmonger! Spiritmonger still has the advantage that it is easier to cast, however, which means you can use some off-color lands or colorless-producing utility lands while still avoiding mana issues.

Color Changing: Spiritmonger also held the distinction of being the only non-Blue, non-artifact creature that could change its color, until Wild Mongrel was printed in Odyssey. These two are still the only ones of their kind.

Self-Aggrandizing: The ability to add a +1/+1 counter whenever Spritmonger deals damage to a creature has never before or since been duplicated. This ability finds its roots in classic Vampire cards, like Sengir Vampire, but the damaged creature has to go to the graveyard for the Vampire to get the bonus. An update to Spiritmonger's ability can be seen on Mirri the Cursed, but her ability triggers only on combat damage, while Spiritmonger's ability triggers on non-combat damage, as well.

With all this power, you'd think that Spiritmonger would be the go-to-guy for Green-Black decks everywhere, but it is missing one key attribute: evasion. Without a means to deal damage to the opponent through blockers, something as simple and harmless as Bitterblossom can hold Spiritmonger at bay. A favorite and very Green way to remedy this problem is to give Spiritmonger trample. An old hand at granting trample, and one of the best enchantments ever printed, Rancor loves to attach to Spiritmonger and really stick it to the man! Check out the card suggestions at the end of the article for a few other cards that help Spiritmonger bring home the bacon.

I suppose after all this jibber-jabber, you'll now be wanting proof that Spiritmonger really is a good card. Well, here are a couple of classic deck lists that rocked the 'Monger, back in the day:

This deck's game plan is to drop early blockers, accelerate mana, and reset the board with Pernicious Deed. Ultimately, it hopes to drop Spiritmonger on an empty board and swing for the fences. Note how well Spiritmonger plays with Pernicious Deed. You often don't need to Deed for more than four, but if you ever do need to Deed for five, an extra mana saves our hero from destruction, ideally leaving him the sole inhabitant of an empty battlefield.

The basic "Fires" plan is to drop a mana accelerator on turn one, followed by Fires of Yavimaya on turn two, resulting in a big, bad, hasty monstrosity on each of turns three and four. This variant's plan included splashing black for the difficult-to-remove Spiritmonger. No board resets in this maindeck—just a little spot removal and a lot of angry critters!

That's nice and all, but it was so long ago! Is Spiritmonger still relevant today? By all means, yes! For all the cards that have since passed under the bridge, Spiritmonger still has a lot of staying power. Check out this recent deck from the Extended format:

Not much to say about this deck that hasn't already been said, but it shows that Spiritmonger still stacks up as a real threat. These are just a few examples of Spiritmonger's tournament-proven abilities. If you poke around the right websites, you can find plenty more examples in Extended and Legacy of modern Rock variants with our friendly neighborhood Spiritmonger.

What's that you say? MDV isn't a tournament website? I suppose this is all becoming too cutthroat for you. You'd rather see some casual decks with Spiritmonger, I bet. Here are just a few of the decks in MDV's Deck Database that use Spiritmonger:

I see you are convinced, and I'm sensing that you want to be able to build your own decks with Spiritmonger. You are in luck, my friends; here is an assortment of cards that might just get along well with Spiritmonger. Some of these are old standbys, while others are raw, untested card ideas which still need a chance to be proven worthy of the Spiritmonger:

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