Golgari Swarm

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There are two Guilds on Ravnica that comprise the lower classes of society: the Gruul Clans, who are basically the multiverse's largest Anarchist Bike Gang, and the Golgari Swarm, which are what would happen if you kicked all of the Underdark races in Dungeons & Dragons out onto the street, then forced them to work either as fast food servers or garbage men. That's right: there's Soy-lent Green in Ravnica, and it's more than just people.

History

The Golgari Swarm was originally created to deal with dead bodies (possibly by making them zombies), and feeding the homeless (possibly to zombies), and their core belief is that death and decay are important parts of the cycle of life; in a nutshell, they believe that nature is comprised of a great cycle of birth, death, decay and rebirth, and that the key to power is tapping into all of the aspects of this cycle. They are aligned with the Green and Black colors of Mana, which represents that viewpoint well, and wield a weird combination of necromancy and druidic magic, with a big emphasis on inducing decay, controlling & manipulating fungal growth, raising the dead, commanding vermin, and afflicting others with parasitic vermin & fungus. A Golgari defense formation usually consists of waves of predatory mushrooms, slime-like masses of carnivorous lichen or mold, zombies (often infested with bugs or fungus for extra nastiness) and giant bugs, backed by the outcast humanoids who make up the actual rot-farmers, fungus-druids and necromancers. Like the Rakdos, Dimir and Simic, the Golgari occupy the underground of Ravnica, tending to claim the damper regions where they can cultivate their precious fungus and vermin for food.

The original Golgari who signed the Guildpact was Svothgir, who was killed by the Sisters of Stone Death, three Gorgons, and then replaced by the Elf-Lich Savra. Who was also killed. Then came back as a lich. And then killed again. And replaced by Jarad. Who was also killed. And then came back as a Lich.

In fact in the entire history of the Golgari and Ravnica they are the guild whose leaders have been killed the most. Seriously, they can't hold on to a decent leader. The only reason Jarad has seemingly remained in power is because nobody else in Ravnica cares.

Most of the Golgari is composed of humans, zombies, elves, plant-zombies (which are apparently grown like a fungus,) gorgons, more zombies and plant-zombies, giant beetles, kraul (bug-people), and trolls (like the living under bridges and regenerating kind, not the internet kind.) Ancient lore suggests the presence of other monstrous humanoids, like harpies, but there are no cards supporting this.

Recent history has been pretty sad for the Golgari. Despite getting the first green-black planeswalker in the form of Vraska, they contributed next to nothing to the recent story.

Structure

The Golgari Swarm currently functions in a similar way to an organism with each member being connected by a hive-mind. Jarad basically controls the entire swarm from Karazda, the newest and slimiest Golgari Guildhall. (The old one is a giant cathedral that contains Svothgir's severed head and moves around and is considered the exact center of Golgari territory.) There is a hierarchy but no one exactly knows how it works except the Golgari, who aren't telling, being busy nomming brains and feeding homeless.

Guild Members

Guild Master

Svothgir

The original Parun of the Guild. Given that the Golgari like elves a lot, he was probably some combination of Elf and Zombie. He was beaten by The Sisters of Stone Death and then made a deal with Savra to help deal with them. They of course killed two and outed the third. But then Savra got greedy and was way more powerful, and then promptly played Fulgrim to his Ferrus Manus. His severed head wound up placed in an Orzhov Cathedral, and being not quite dead, proceeded to grow fungus tentacles and take over the place. The cathedral is now named after him and moves. So he might have gotten the better end of the deal.

Sisters of Stone Death

Three Gorgon Sisters who took over after whupping Svothgir's ass. They broke every bone in his body and took over after serving him as lieutenants and gave themselves PROMOTIONS. But this did kill two of the original five, and they couldn't turn him to stone since he was still pretty strong. Ludmilla was the last one alive as of the end of the Ravnica block, but hasn't been seen since.

Savra

Savra was the high-priestess of the Dark Elves in the Golgari. Svothgir came to her for help after his defeat, and she of course helped him, giving him a new body. And then killed him after they beat the Sisters. She took over the Guild and promptly gave it up to her true master, the vampire Szadek who led the Dimir Guild. She also gained part of the control of the Selesnya Guild and the Boros Legion, giving Szadek control of all four guilds. Szadek then snapped her neck, she got possessed by Svothgir's spitit, and then got crushed and destroyed (possibly raped,) in a fight between a Simic Experiment Kraken-Fungus-thing, and Rakdos. Yes, that Rakdos. She is very, very dead.

Jarad vod Savo

Savra's brother and a former bounty hunter. But when Savra and Szadek began being giant buttholes he opposed his twin. When she eventually got crushed (possibly lit on fire, raped, eaten, and whatever else we don't wanna know that Rakdos did,) Jarad took control of the swarm. Later was kiled in a Rakdos blood ritual involving a child of his, but being a Golgari and an elf of course he knew necromancy (which must be step one for being in the Golgari swarm to start, unless you're a giant beetle,) he possessed his own corpse and didn't let death slow him down, LIKE A BOSS. In card form he gets stronger for every creature card in the graveyard, and can also pay mana and *BLAM* one of his own dudes to make your opponent lose life. Finally by sacrificing land he can return to your hand from the graveyard, because you can't keep a good Elf(possibly zombie, possibly plant-zombie,) down.

Guild Champions

Varolz, The Scar Striped

Being a giant swarm of zombies (possibly plant-zombies) there aren't a whole lot of indviduals in the Golgari Swarm (and considering the number of dead Guild Masters it might pay to blend in.) But the implicit maze was discovered and there was no way the Golgari were passing that prize up, so in went Varolz. Varolz is a 12-15 foot tall troll (making him possibly tied for largest guild runner with Ruric Thar, but Ruric Thar is more interested in crumping fools with his axe then measuring stuff, LIKE A REAL ~~MAN~~ OGRE!) Varolz has a parasitical fungus that heals his wounds, making him a tough cookie in a race of tough cookies (theoretically.) Oh, he didn't do shit. He did reach the end and was fighting the other maze runners, but other than that he just ran through like everybody and killed everybody in his way. (Hmm, maybe him and Ruric Thar would get along.) In card form he is notable for some next-level cheese. He can scavenge any creature in his graveyard for their CMC. Combine with some one-drop creatures that have a power of 12-or-13, and you pay one black mana to put 13 +1/+1 COUNTERS ON ANY CREATURE! Even that unblock-able infect creature? Even that unblock-able infect creature. Defense-wise he's a joke though, every other troll in the game can crump his head easily, since he needs to sacrifice a creature to regenerate and only has a 2/2 body to back it up.

Others

Mechanics

Dredge

Dredge is one of the most powerful key word mechanics in M:tG. A small entry here is not able to do justice to the influence it had, and continues to have, on the metagame and ban lists of multiple formats.

Simply put, a card with Dredge allows you to return it to your hand from the graveyard as an alternative to drawing a new card card whenever you are able to draw a card. In exchange you take X cards from the top of your library and put them in the graveyard. This is broken because in a deck built around abusing Dredge you have lots of cards that can be pulled from the graveyard to your hand, so in effect Dredge is "Put this card in your hand and then make so many cards available for you to then put into your hand later", this breaks the game because it basically ignores a bunch of rules that other decks have to follow. It also has a few other bullshit strengths such as being immune to most disruption effects (opponent makes you discard a card, bring it back and then add a bunch of cards into that pool of potential dredge cards in your graveyard). Not to mention that when built right the graveyard is basically an extension of the player's hand which leads to circumventing the hand limit without having to bother with an artifact, enchantment or creature that can get removed and force you to dump the hand. Coupled with Black's frequent return from the graveyard creatures and cards, triggers based on cards going into or out of the graveyard, sacrifice triggers etc, it can be very, very frustrating playing a Dredge deck that flatout plays an entirely different game of Magic.

Countering Dredge isn't hard so much as having super-specific cards on hand that can stop it. But these cards do fuck all against everything else except a few related archetypes like Reanimator and decks that rely on recursion meaning that you will almost never have the right cards main-decked for game 1 unless Dredge decks are on the upswing in popularity in the meta. Game 2 is about how well the Dredge player can recover from being castrated by cards like Leyline of the Void, or (more likely) their ability to sufficiently gain the upper hand before castration and be able to win the game (or better yet, for them, beat you before you castrate them).

Scavenge

Scavenging a creature in the graveyard means exiling it and putting +1/+1 equal to its power on one of your field creatures, for a cost (which is independent of the casting cost, unless it's scavenge is being granted by Varolz, the Scar-Striped). Coupled with a quick and huge ramp (a given with green), a large amount of scavengable creatures, sacking and triggers-on-sacking (a given with black) this can result in a huge stampede of creatures with ridiculous power/toughness. Keyword-givers round out the field populator.

Scavenge may seem as cheesy as dredge, but defenses exist in the form of counters (preventing keywords being given) deathtouch creatures (ubiquitous) and penalizing and boardwipe spells, effectively rendering the enemy's wall of meat and muscle a moot point.

Undergrowth

Undergrowth is less so much an ability, and more a signpost that says, "The following effect cares about how many creatures are in your graveyard". Usually this means something like giving a creature +X/+X where X is the number of creatures in your graveyard.