Thromok Devour Jank EDH (EDH / Commander)

Entering the Restaurant

Do you like mukbangs? Competitive eating? Swallowing entire packs of small animals whole? Would you like to take those activities, and do them in MTG as well? If so, this deck may be for you! As far as EDH decks go, this isn’t exactly a top-tier deck, and your main win conditions can be foiled by a single counterspell or removal card. But if you find the idea of making everyone else in the pod go “damn, they did how much damage?”, (and occasionally pulling off some ridiculous burst of damage that wins you the game in a single turn) appealing, then this deck won’t disappoint.

Meeting the Gourmand

Before getting to the 99, let’s take a look at our commander. Thromok the Insatiable is a fairly expensive creature, and his base power and toughness is 0/0. He doesn’t really provide any boosts to your other creatures, nor does he himself provide any card advantage, powerful activated abilities, or graveyard manipulation. What he does have is Devour X, and indeed is the only creature in the game to have a devour value of X, as near as I can tell. What this means is that as you feed him more and more creatures, the number of counters he gets increases nearly exponentially. If you feed a creature with Devour 3 five creatures, it will get fifteen +1/+1 counters. If you feed them them six, they get 18 counters, and if you fed them ten creatures, they would get 30 +1/+1 counters. As you can see, while a huge boost in power, it doesn’t scale as well as it could. Now let’s compare it to Thromok. If you feed Thromok 5 creatures, you get 25 counters. If you sacrifice six, that number increases to 36. Increase the sacrifices creatures to seven, and you get 49 counters. Feed Thromok ten creatures, and he gets 100 +1/+1 counters. As you can see, each creature devoured by Thromok has a much bigger impact (if you sacrifice ten creatures to a creature with Devour 3, you get 30 counters, whereas if you sacrifice the same amount to Thromok, you get 100 counters). With Thromok’s strengths established, let’s talk about his weaknesses.
Aside from Devour, Thromok doesn’t have any other keywords. Most frustratingly, he lacks both Haste and Hexproof or Ward, meaning that once you play him, everyone else at the table will have a chance to kill him with removal, exile him, Mind control him, or otherwise neutralize Thromok before he can do anything. Furthermore, he lacks Trample or any form of evasion, meaning that should he survive, he can have all his damage negated by a single 1/1 creature. Lastly, his strength and toughness are both entirely dependent on giving him creatures to devour; if he is killed, you will need to build up a fresh batch of creatures to sacrifice, which can be difficult if someone else in the game starts using board wipes. And lastly is the issue of dealing with multiple players; Thromok may hit hard, but he is only one creature, which means he can usually only KO a single opponent at a time, even if he deals with the issues above. If you aren’t careful, you could easily find yourself taking out a player, only to be ganged up on and defeated by the remaining two. So with these problems in mind, how can you work around his weaknesses? Lacking haste, trample, or even Hexproof is easy enough to remedy; this deck packs a bunch of equipment and enchantments to deal with this problem. This isn’t foolproof, but it will do a great deal to improve our commanders usefulness. Fists of Ironwood, Lightning Greaves, Boots of Haste, Chariot of Victory, Swiftfoot Boots, Runes of the Deus and Haunted Cloak help ensure you can reliably give your Commander haste, trample, and protection against enemy spells. In order to allow us to deal with multiple opponents at once, the deck makes use of Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar, Soul’s Fire, Electropotence, Fling, and Blade of Selves.

Stocking the Buffet

Moving on from Thromok himself, let’s talk about our sacrifices. In addition to the standard token generating instants and sorceries, like Krenko’s Command, Molten Birth, and Saproling migration, this deck makes use of token generating permanents, with some of the standouts being Parallel Lives, Awakening Zone, Dragonlair Spider, Mycoloth, Krenko, Mob Boss, and Scute Swarm. Parallel Lives and Primal Vigor especially are some of the biggest stars of this deck, each doubling our token production. Krenko, Mob Boss can provide potentially exponential growth, and Mycoloth can do similar when combined with the Hydra’s Growth enchantment. Thromok himself can get in on the token production as well with Scepter of Celebration, and cards like Rapacious One, Hornet Nest, Broodhatch Nantuko, and Tana, the Bloodsower all can generate more tokens in the combat phase. Board wipes will still screw us, but that is sort of unavoidable when using tokens.

Becoming Thicc

Thromok is a big boi, but we can still do better. Branching Evolution, Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider, and Primal Vigor, all effectively double our power, while Hydra’s Growth and Fractal Harness both make our commander double his power and toughness each turn (this gets sort of nuts once you start stacking them. Runes of the Deus and Fireshrieker both provide Double Strike, and if you really need to win right the frak now, Berserk can double Thromok’s power once again. Thromok is truly reaching MAXIMUM THICCNESS. To protec our hangry boi further, Heroic Intervention can be used to ensure he lives to fight another day, while Predator’s Rapport turns his thiccness into life gain.

Final Course

Some of the cards in this deck are sorta pricey; Vorinclex, Primal Vigor, Parallel Lives, Arachnogenesis, to name the most notable. My recommendation would be to proxy the most expensive ones as needed, since the expensive cards in question are good, but nowhere near broken enough to warrant their price tags. If you are morally opposed to proxying for some reason, you can probably safely swap Vorinclex for another card, which should help reduce the cost significantly.