A 2007 Common Won cEDH's Biggest Open. It Cost One Green Mana.

cEDH · by Andreas Graw · September 02, 2026

Sprout Swarm is a $4.99 common from 2007 with convoke and buyback. Under Witherbloom, the Balancer its total cost with buyback is {4}{G}, affinity for creatures deletes the {4}, and the Saproling it just made taps to pay the {G}: infinite bodies for zero mana, and every one of them is a Razaketh tutor. That engine won Breach the Bay 2, the year's largest cEDH open at 429 players, with a commander that sits in 26 of the 24,778 lists our corpus has tracked since June. We walk the rules line by line, run the exact 100 through the DeckCortex engine, and say what would have to happen before this counts as an archetype rather than one pilot's very good weekend.

A 2007 Common Won cEDH's Biggest Open. It Cost One Green Mana.

Breach the Bay 2 was the largest cEDH open of the year: 429 players in San Mateo on August 22–23, a $25,000 prize pool, and a top 16 that looked like every other top 16 this summer, with three Blue Farm lists, two Kinnan and two Sisay among them (edhtop16's standings). None of them took the trophy. Andrei Blanton [TOODEEP] won it with Witherbloom, the Balancer, a commander that appears in 26 of the 24,778 cEDH decks our corpus has tracked since June 4. One tenth of one percent of the format.

The card that makes his 99 work is older than most of the field. Sprout Swarm is a common from Future Sight, printed in May 2007, $4.99 today for the original and $8.24 for The List reprint, the only two printings it has ever had. In this deck it costs one green mana with buyback, and then it costs nothing at all.

Two keywords and a cost reducer

Read the card slowly, because every word on it is doing work. Convoke: each creature you tap while casting this spell pays for or one mana of that creature's color. Buyback : pay an additional as you cast it and the card goes back to your hand as it resolves. The effect is a 1/1 green Saproling.

Now put the dragon on the table.

Witherbloom has affinity for creatures itself, and its last line hands the same discount to every instant and sorcery you cast: "Instant and sorcery spells you cast have affinity for creatures." Affinity for creatures means the spell costs less for each creature you control (Comprehensive Rules 702.41, effective August 7, 2026).

Here is the order of operations the rules enforce, and it is the whole trick. When you cast a spell you start with its mana cost, add additional costs, then apply cost reductions, and only then pay (601.2f). Buyback is an additional cost (702.27). Convoke is neither an additional nor an alternative cost; it "applies only after the total cost of the spell with convoke is determined" (702.51b). Scryfall's ruling on Sprout Swarm says it in plain English: convoke applies after the total cost is calculated, and if you pay buyback that total cost is .

So, with Witherbloom and at least three other creatures in play:

  1. Sprout Swarm with buyback has a total cost of .
  2. Affinity for creatures removes the . Four creatures, four generic mana, gone. What's left is .
  3. Convoke pays the . You tap one green creature. A Saproling is green.
  4. The spell resolves: one new Saproling, untapped, and the card returns to your hand.
  5. Cast it again. The Saproling you just made pays the convoke cost. The ruling is explicit that summoning sickness does not matter here: "You can tap any untapped creature you control to convoke a spell, even one you haven't controlled continuously since the beginning of your most recent turn."

Every loop leaves one more tapped Saproling on the battlefield and Sprout Swarm back in hand, for zero mana. There is no upper bound. DeckCortex's combo engine lists Witherbloom plus Sprout Swarm as a complete two-card line in the list, producing infinite creature tokens, infinite creature ETBs, infinite magecraft triggers, and an infinite storm count. Commander Spellbook counts the same pair in 10,806 decks.

A pile of tapped 1/1s doesn't win a game of Magic on its own. That's what the other 98 cards are for.

Razaketh turns bodies into anything

"Pay 2 life, Sacrifice another creature: Search your library for a card, put that card into your hand, then shuffle." With an unbounded supply of Saprolings, every two life is a Demonic Tutor at instant speed, and a counterspell can't touch an activated ability. Blanton said it himself in the EDHREC interview published September 1: "At its core, this is a Razaketh toolbox deck." Sprout Swarm is the fuel line, not the finisher.

The finishers are cheap, and they were the part of the list most other Witherbloom pilots didn't play:

Marionette Apprentice ($2.21) is the table-wide drain: "Whenever another creature or artifact you control is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, each opponent loses 1 life." Feed the Saprolings to any sacrifice outlet and every body is a point from each opponent. The outlets in the list are Razaketh (2 life a pop), Warren Soultrader ("Pay 1 life, Sacrifice another creature: Create a Treasure token."), Yawgmoth, Thran Physician (1 life, a −1/−1 counter and a card), and Culling the Weak for a one-shot .

There is a second, self-contained loop the engine also finds complete: Warren Soultrader plus Chatterfang, Squirrel General plus Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel. Sacrifice a Squirrel to Soultrader for 1 life; a Treasure is created, and Chatterfang's replacement effect adds a 1/1 Squirrel alongside it; the sacrificed Squirrel died, so Sephiroth triggers: "target opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life." Net life change: zero. Repeat until the table is dead, one opponent at a time (Sephiroth targets one player per trigger; after the fourth resolution in a turn it transforms and its emblem keeps the drain running). Chatterfang also improves the Sprout Swarm loop directly: every Saproling arrives with a Squirrel, and only one of the two needs to tap for the next cast.

The third complete line is the backup: Saw in Half on Eternal Witness makes two token Witnesses, each returning a card, so you rebuy Saw in Half and Cabal Ritual; with threshold the Ritual makes for and the loop is mana-neutral, two enters and one death per pass. With Witherbloom in play and four creatures, affinity discounts both spells and the loop nets black mana instead. Blanton's use of it at the event is undocumented; it is capacity, not a report.

Hatebears that pay for themselves

The other half of the design is what Blanton called the reason for the meta call: the deck could keep pace with the proactive decks he expected and throw creature-based roadblocks in their way. Affinity counts creatures, not what they say. So a hatebear is a discount and a lock piece at once.

Dauthi Voidwalker exiles anything that would go to an opponent's graveyard. Collector Ouphe turns off activated abilities of artifacts, which in a cEDH pod means the mana rocks. Opposition Agent takes control of opponents while they search their libraries. Each is also one generic mana off every instant and sorcery in the deck, and one generic mana off the commander. Witherbloom is ; the spell on the stack doesn't count itself, so six other creatures make it , and because commander tax is a generic cost increase applied before reductions, affinity eats the tax too.

The same math is why Stinging Study is in the list. X is the mana value of a commander you own on the battlefield or in the command zone, so X is 8 either way; with Witherbloom on the battlefield granting affinity and four creatures out, it costs and draws eight. Last March of the Ents and Finale of Devastation get the same treatment on their generic parts. The mana base underneath is 33 creatures, seven of them one-mana creatures that tap for mana, plus Gaea's Cradle and Badgermole Cub, which adds every time a creature taps for mana.

What the data shows

Our window is June 4 to September 2, 2026: 24,778 tracked cEDH decks from Topdeck.gg standings and MTGTop8 lists. That is share of tracked decks, not the field share of any one event, and it counts every registered list in an event, not just the top cut.

| Archetype | Share of tracked decks | Decks | Top-cut conversion (labelled sub-sample) | |---|---|---|---| | Kraum + Tymna (Blue Farm) | 7.2% | 1,781 | 31.7% (n=1,453) | | Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy | 7.0% | 1,725 | 28.6% (n=1,449) | | Rograkh + Thrasios | 5.3% | 1,306 | 29.9% (n=1,099) | | Rograkh + Silas Renn | 4.6% | 1,148 | 26.2% (n=934) | | Sisay, Weatherlight Captain | 3.9% | 970 | 28.9% (n=812) | | Magda, Brazen Outlaw | 2.0% | 507 | 35.3% (n=425) | | Witherbloom, the Balancer | 0.1% | 26 | not computed (n too small) |

Twenty-six lists is a niche, and we treat it as one: no trend line exists for a commander this far below the archetype threshold, and no conversion rate is worth printing on that base. What the 26 lists do show is where Blanton's build parted ways with the rest. Sprout Swarm is in 25 of 26. Chord of Calling, Badgermole Cub and Delighted Halfling are in 25. Warren Soultrader is in 19 and is one of three cards the model flags as rising in the sub-corpus, alongside Shifting Woodland and Formidable Speaker. But Razaketh, Sephiroth, Yawgmoth and K'rrik all sit below the 80-card cut of the presence table, under 54% of the 26 lists. The Sprout Swarm engine is the archetype; the Razaketh aristocrats kill is the homebrew, and that is the half that won.

The result rows around the win are worth reading in full. Before August 22 the commander's best tracked finish in our window was eighth of 19 at a Friday local. After it: sixteenth of 123 at the Nacional de CEDH 100K on August 29 with a different pilot, fifth of 41 at Cash Cards Unlimited on August 30. One entry in our corpus, a 15-player event on August 28, lists the commander alongside Aziza, Mage Tower Captain, a Boros card with no partner ability; that row is a registration error at the source and is excluded here.

The engine's read on the exact 100

Run the list through DeckCortex's engine and the bracket-fit model lands on floor 5, cEDH, without needing the power-level simulation: 11 Game Changers (Ancient Tomb, Chrome Mox, Crop Rotation, Demonic Tutor, Gaea's Cradle, Mana Vault, Mox Diamond, Necropotence, Opposition Agent, Orcish Bowmasters, Vampiric Tutor), four fast-mana cards, twelve tutors by the Oracle "search your library" heuristic, and the three complete combo lines above. The combo count is a signal, one of six inputs, not the bracket itself.

Seventy-three more lines are one card away, which tells you how much latent redundancy a 33-creature Golgari shell has: Springheart Nantuko wants a Lotus Cobra or a Tireless Provisioner, Chatterfang wants a Pitiless Plunderer, Opposition Agent wants a Maralen. None of those cards is in the deck, and that is a design choice: Blanton's redundancy is tutors, not extra combo pieces.

The flex-slot model, on the low evidence of 26 lists, flags Wandering Archaic // Explore the Vastlands, Forbidden Orchard, Disciple of Freyalise // Garden of Freyalise, Braids, Arisen Nightmare and Lurking Predators as the softest slots, and Yawgmoth and K'rrik as "rising tech". If you are copying the list to tune it, those are the seams.

What actually beats it

Golgari has no counterspell. The interaction suite is Veil of Summer, Imp's Mischief, Deadly Rollick, Force of Vigor, Abrupt Decay and Culling Ritual, a sweeper for everything at mana value two or less that makes or for each permanent it destroys, the deck's own dorks included. Against a turbo Ad Nauseam deck, none of that stops a resolved spell. The hatebears are the plan against midrange, not against a turn-two kill.

The engine-specific answers are narrow and cheap, and most of them are white:

Context since the window closed

Three things happened around this win that shape how to read it. The same weekend, the TopDeck Invitational (80 players, August 22) went to Sterling Sellards on a Kinnan list; a community breakdown on r/CompetitiveEDH put Blue Farm at 13 entries and five top cuts there, and named Knacksaw Clique the key card of the finals. In the last week of August a thread titled "Does the meta feel stale?" drew 162 comments on the same subreddit. And on September 1 EDHREC published the Blanton interview, framing the deck as a homebrew tuned to the maximum and piloted excellently.

The market didn't move on the win. Sprout Swarm's big spike happened in late March 2026 when Witherbloom leaked, from around $0.60 to around $6 per Wargamer's report at the time; MTGStocks data cited by our research shows both Witherbloom and Sprout Swarm down 26–27% month-on-month at the start of September, and the borderless Witherbloom at $11.03 against $4.27 for the regular printing on Scryfall's aggregate. Warren Soultrader, $16.99 on Scryfall, is the one core piece that same MTGStocks read shows drifting up. The deck's real cost is elsewhere anyway: Gaea's Cradle is $1,631 and Mox Diamond $1,139 on the same aggregate.

The read

This is a specialist's deck that won a very large event, not a new tier-one archetype, and the data supports the narrower claim. Outside our corpus, edhtop16 lists four Witherbloom entries and 0.01% meta share as of September 2; inside it, the commander went from an eighth place at a 19-player Friday local in July to a 429-player trophy on August 22 and back to sixteenth of 123 a week later. What separates Blanton's list from the other 25 is precisely the package the other pilots skipped: Razaketh, Sephiroth, Yawgmoth, K'rrik, and the willingness to spend life as a resource with Necropotence next to them. That package is a Yawgmoth aristocrats deck wearing an affinity dragon, and it is a good one.

Two thresholds would change this read. If Witherbloom reaches 1% of edhtop16's meta share within about 60 days, or puts two more lists into top cuts at 100-plus-player events, it stops being a specialist deck and becomes an archetype. Watch the white hate too: if Authority of the Consuls starts showing up in Blue Farm, the format's most-played deck at 7.2%, that says more about this engine's future than any Witherbloom result.

If you want to try the engine, the list above is the exact 100 cards Blanton registered; copy it into DeckCortex and run the combo check; it returns the three complete lines and the 73 you are one card away from. Start by playing Sprout Swarm with buyback once, by hand, with four creatures in play. The moment the Saproling pays for its own successor, you'll understand why a 19-year-old common is in 25 of 26 cEDH lists for this commander.

Data: DeckCortex cEDH corpus, 24,778 tracked decks, June 4 to September 2, 2026 (Topdeck.gg standings and MTGTop8 lists; share = share of tracked decks, not field share; Witherbloom n = 26, quoted as a niche sub-corpus). Engine analysis of the Breach the Bay 2 winning list, Topdeck snapshot of August 22, 2026. Prices are Scryfall paper aggregate, pulled September 2, 2026, not a live TCGPlayer feed. The combo count is a signal, not the final 1–5 bracket. EDHREC, edhtop16, Commander Spellbook, Reddit and MTGStocks figures are external and dated in the text.

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