For me, the most exciting of the recent unrestrictions was Doomsday. Doomsday was long regarded as a weak card that was placed on the restricted list to neuter a combo deck that really wasn’t even that good in the first place. Thus Wizards, in their infinite wizdom, finally unrestricted the card.
It’s not that simple.
The original Doomsday deck made the following stack:
Timetwister
Regrowth
Black Lotus
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Braingeyser
It had to pass the turn after casting Doomsday so that it could draw into Timetwister. It also had to have exactly two cards in hand when casting Doomsday. If it didn’t, when the deck cast Timetwister it would either deck itself (by drawing only Regrowth, Lotus, LED, Doomsday and Braingeyser) or it would fizzle when it failed to draw Regrowth, and probably take a lot of mana burn and die.
If you had exactly two cards in hand when you cast Doomsday, and you were able to survive until the next turn, you were ready to go off. After casting Timetwister, you would draw Regrowth, Lotus, LED, Braingeyser, Doomsday, and you two random cards. You play your Lotus and your LED, and then sacrifice the Lotus for GGG in order to cast Regrowth on your Timetwister. In response to your Regrowth, you sacrifice your LED for UUU in order to cast Timetwister. You repeat this about fifty times until you have enough mana for Braingeyser…
…that is, if your opponent didn’t draw Ancestral Recall or Force of Will. And while I’m not that great when it comes to doing probability and statistics, the probability that your opponent will draw Ancestral Recall starts approaching 100%*. If you update the card pool and use Tendrils of Agony instead of Braingeyser, you reduce the number of Timetwisters that you need to cast to about three instead. This still only lowers the probability that your opponent will not have Ancestral or Force from 100% to 85%.
Therefore, it’s easy to see why everyone abandoned that combo in favor of different ones. I tried a ton of different ones and saw people experimenting with various other ones as well. The first one that I thought of was the following:
Ancestral Recall
Black Lotus
Illusions of Grandeur
Donate
Chain of Vapor
I wanted to try out two-card kill combinations first. The key with figuring these out is to minimize the amount of mana that you need when you untap by as much as possible. Here, I need eight mana and I can only count on the three mana from Black Lotus. That makes this combo too hard to pull off unless I really break it up over the course of three turns. The next combo that I saw decreases the mana required by quite a bit:
Ancestral Recall
Helm of Awakening
Disciple of the Vault
Conjurer’s Bauble
Conjurer’s Bauble
This combo only needs four mana after you untap, but you can’t count on your Doomsday stack to give you any. Since you’ll probably be relying on Dark Ritual to generate your initial BBB, this wasn’t reliable enough. I was then informed of the following combo by everyone’s favorite jeek, TJ Eckman, who you may remember as “that guy that gives Phil Stanton the scripts to automate his statistics”:
Ancestral Recall
Black Lotus
Dark Ritual
Mind’s Desire
Beacon of Destruction
This combo only required you to only have three mana in play when you wanted to go off, which was the most efficient yet. In case you don’t see the combo, here’s what happens:
1) Draw Ancestral Recall
2) Cast Ancestral Recall, drawing Black Lotus, Dark Ritual, and Mind’s Desire (Storm=1)
3) Play a mana source, if necessary
4) Cast Lotus and Ritual (Storm=3, UUUBBB in pool)
5) Cast Mind’s Desire (Storm=4)
6) Mind’s Desire’s Storm copies go on the stack. The first copy flips over Beacon of Destruction, which you cast. This shuffles it back into your deck.
7) The next copy resolves, flipping over (you guessed it!) Beacon of Destruction. Lather, rinse, repeat for 20 damage. If your opponent gains a little life, you can try to use a Mox or Dark Ritual in order to up your Storm count by another card before you cast Mind’s Desire.
This brought us to our first preliminary version:
4 Polluted Delta
4 Underground Sea
4 Bayou
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Swamp
1 Island
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mana Crypt
4 Doomsday
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
4 Unmask
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Necropotence
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Mystical Tutor
4 Lim-Dul’s Vault
1 Beacon of Destruction
As far as we can tell, this is the best way to kill someone the turn after casting Doomsday. We got to thinking, though: is there a way to kill someone the turn that you cast Doomsday? After a lot of thought, we came up with this:
Ancestral Recall
Black Lotus
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Yawgmoth’s Will
Tendrils of Agony
As you can see though, there’s nothing built-in to this stack to draw those cards in the first place. We then remembered one of the big plays from Long.dec: using Chromatic Sphere to draw a card that you know is one top of your deck (for instance, from Brainstorm.) From here, everything began clicking:
(Meandeck) Doomsday
4 Polluted Delta
4 Underground Sea
2 Swamp
1 Island
5 Moxes
4 Chromatic Sphere
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Vault
1 Mana Crypt
1 Black Lotus
1 Lotus Petal
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Dark Ritual
4 Doomsday
4 Duress
4 Unmask
2 Cabal Ritual
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Necropotence
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
4 Brainstorm
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Gush
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Timetwister
1 Mystical Tutor
If I didn’t want to be lame and name this deck in our standard “Meandeck Important Card” format, I figure someone could give it a pretty sweet name, like “The Rapture” or something.
Rather than using Doomsday as a way to stack your deck, we shifted to using it as a Burning Wish/LED-type card. Here’s how this deck’s combo works:
0) Cast Chromatic Sphere
1) Cast Doomsday for the aforementioned stack (Storm=1)
2) Activate Chromatic Sphere for U, drawing Ancestral Recall
3) Cast Ancestral, drawing Black Lotus, Lion’s Eye Diamond, and Yawgmoth’s Will (Storm=2)
4) Play Lotus (Storm=4,) LED (Storm=5,) and Will, sacrificing LED in response (Storm=6)
5) Replay Lotus, LED, and Chromatic Sphere (Storm=9)
6) Activate Chromatic Sphere for B, drawing Tendrils
7) Cast Tendrils for 20 (Storm=10)
With this stack, it is actually preferable to go off on the turn that you cast Doomsday. If you don’t, you need to figure out some way to draw the Tendrils at the bottom of your deck (as you’ll deck yourself if you try reusing Ancestral with Will) and because your Storm count may end up being a spell or two short of having a lethal Tendrils.
I keep emphasizing various ways to play Doomsday, but it’s also important to note that with this setup, the deck can also get fairly standard TPS-style combo kills. It has been quite common in our testing to get hands full of artifact mana and a draw-7 and go off from there. The earlier deck, with its heavier emphasis on Doomsday, lost out of this alternate way to kill.
I hate them, but it’s important here: The card-by-card analysis
Basic land: As you can see, this deck has a really tight mana base which requires you to keep land in play. This is even more pronounced when you need to pass the turn. It’s best if you can kill the turn you cast Doomsday, but sometimes your opponent will fight over Doomsday and lose the fight, but you won’t have sufficient mana (or don’t have the Chromatic Sphere) to kill this turn. At first, we played a version with Bayou and Gemstone Mine in order to support Green for Xantid Swarm and the ability to possibly cast Beacon of Destruction. However, when we tested against decks like Fish with strong mana denial components, we would often win the war over Doomsday and set up a stack to win the next turn only to be hit with a timely Wasteland which would throw off the delicate mana base by making me fall below the mana threshold that I needed to go off and effectively winning the game since there are no more lands left in the deck. The deck is able to run well with only three basics despite this weakness to mana denial because of the relatively low mana requirement to go off. Therefore, between fetchlands and these basics, you should be able to keep two lands on the table when it’s time to go off.
Chromatic Sphere
Chromatic Sphere is the card that lets the deck work. Without Chromatic Sphere, you need to pass the turn in order to get your combo going. As we discovered in testing, and smart opponents will figure out as they start playing out the match, it actually becomes beneficial to them to let you resolve your Doomsday and then to fight over the victory condition because now Doomsday has gone all-in. If you fight to resolve your Doomsday but fail, you can always try again next turn, but if they counter your Will or Lotus, the game will end in a turn or two.
Duress
At first, we ran Force of Will in this deck. Force of Will is good at keeping you from randomly losing to Trinisphere, but it’s not the best at forcing through your combo because like I said above, you need to be absolutely sure that you’ll win going in because there’s no going back. Unmask’s status as a free spell can also be important if you just need to up the Storm count by a little bit by letting your pitch extra cards like Doomsday or Vampiric Tutor, especially in conjunction with Yawgmoth’s Will.
Gush
Gush is amazing here, and I would run four if it weren’t unrestricted (and if I weren’t just playing GroAtog, of course.) Gush lets you win the turn that you cast Doomsday for no mana. A stack taking into account the Gush in your hand usually looks like the standard Ancestral/Lotus/LED/Will/Tendrils stack, but with the important consideration that you place LED underneath the Ancestral. That way, you can draw both of them off of Gush, and after replaying one of your Islands to cast Ancestral, you can sacrifice the LED in response so that you have the BBB available for the Will that you are about to draw. Also, a random Gush can save you from dying to a Wasteland while you are trying to set up, which as I stated above is a very valid concern.
Brainstorm
Much like Chromatic Sphere, Brainstorm pulls double duty here. The primary use of Brainstorm is as a search card combined with fetchlands. The important added use is to allow you to start comboing after you cast Doomsday. If you don’t have at least two other cards in hand, make the standard stack, but if you still have at least two other cards in hand (in addition to Brainstorm) after casting Doomsday, you can create a stack like this, which reduces the amount of mana that you need to go off from 2BBB (Chromatic Sphere/Doomsday) or UUBBB (Brainstorm/Doomsday with fewer than 3 cards in hand) to only UBBB:
Yawgmoth’s Will
Black Lotus
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Ancestral Recall
Tendrils of Agony
Then, Brainstorm into Will/Lotus/LED, putting your two other cards in hand on top (your library is currently stacked as random/random/Ancestral/Tendrils) and do the LED/Lotus/Will/LED/Lotus thing. Recast your Brainstorm, drawing your two random cards and Ancestral. Keep the Ancestral (random/random/Tendrils on top), and cast it to finally draw your Tendrils of Agony, which if you also cast Doomsday this turn, will be for 20.
Dark Ritual/Cabal Ritual
By now, everyone’s started to realize that Dark Ritual belongs in just about every combo deck. As obvious as I know this sounds, these are primarily here to cast Doomsday. The reason that I point this out is because if you look at the way that the mana is set up, it is actually quite difficult to cast Doomsday without using one of these cards, since while you can use Chromatic Sphere in order to help facilitate a (most likely) turn 2 Doomsday, as I discussed earlier, it is better to try to conserve one so that you can use it to draw your Ancestral after your Doomsday.
The threshold ability of Cabal Ritual rarely works, because your graveyard is usually empty. More or less the only time that you will get the extra mana is when you Gush into LED/Will following a Doomsday.
Chain of Vapor
As everyone knows, Chain of Vapor is here to keep you from scooping to a resolved Trinisphere. It is also important to note though that Chain of Vapor is also useful as pseudo-Hurkyl’s Recall if you want to boost your Storm count by bouncing a few of your mana artifacts. This comes up fairly often when attempting to get a purely Storm-combo focused kill.
The Version that Didn’t Work
After we noticed how Doomsday could mimic the signature Long.dec play of Burning Wish/Will/LED, we tried pushing the deck towards that end.
4 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
2 Underground Sea
1 Tolarian Academy
5 Moxes
4 Chromatic Sphere
1 Black Lotus
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Sol Ring
1 Memory Jar
4 Dark Ritual
2 Cabal Ritual
4 Duress
4 Doomsday
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Necropotence
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Tinker
1 Timetwister
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Windfall
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Beacon of Destruction
There were only a few small changes from our final version from this proposed version. We cut the Unmasks for Tinker, Memory Jar, Wheel of Fortune, and Yawgmoth’s Bargain, cut the Gush for Windfall, and we changed the mana into a rainbow setup. On the surface, the tradeoff was defense for the ability to “just win,” which seems like it should be even. This turned out not to be the case in testing.
For starters, we couldn’t defend the mana for the 1-3 turns that we needed to. Every land here is vulnerable to Wasteland, unlike the older setup where only four of the lands were. The spell swap is more subtle. We replaced five cards in the deck that cost zero mana with five cards that have an average casting cost of four mana. These cards were somewhat difficult to cast, but what was more important to notice was that once you started trying to kill with these cards, it became much more difficult to try to win with Doomsday. Since we needed to remove the Unmasks, we were forced to go off earlier. However, there just isn’t enough fast mana in the deck to allow you to five mana on a Memory Jar and then still be able to generate five more mana to cast Doomsday and Chromatic Sphere to kill with.
Matchups:
Control
I am lumping the control decks together, because there is really only one thing that matters here: the number of counters that they are playing. Because of the fact that Doomsday forces you to go all-in, you need to be absolutely sure that they do not have any counters if they figure out that it is better to fight over the kill card than to fight over Doomsday and give you another shot. Against control decks running only Mana Drain and Force of Will (which usually means 4 Color Control and most Control Slaver builds,) you have a strong advantage. You can match them one-for-one with your discard, which costs less mana than their counters. Furthermore, since Doomsday’s kill is centered around turn 2, you can often Unmask their Force of Will and then kill them before they get the second blue mana for Mana Drain up.
Against decks running around 12 counters or featuring Duress on top of their counters (namely Oath, Tog, and the occasional three-color Control Slaver build,) your advantage becomes much smaller. You can occasionally protect yourself from Duress with Brainstorm, but you also need to remember that this will then slow down your kill by a turn unless your have another Brainstorm or a Chromatic Sphere. Also, it becomes more important now to win the die roll, as you may be forced to go off on turn 2 to get around an opponent with Force of Will, Mana Drain, and Mana Leak in hand.
Against mono-Blue, it is extremely difficult to win. You can almost never hope to overwhelm them with Duress. You will either need a hand with multiple discard spells that can win turn 2 or one that has one discard spell that can win turn 1 in order to beat them.
Workshop Aggro
After we switched to the Tendrils kill, the matchup against Workshop aggro became a favorable one for us. You simply cannot Doomsday and pass the turn, since they will almost certainly be able to kill you. A sample hand where you break a Polluted Delta, take a hit from a Juggernaut, and then Doomsday will put you at only seven life, which is not enough to survive the Juggernaut and a possible Fire / Ice. Their only real weapon against you is Trinisphere, and they have many potential dead or weak cards such as Seal of Cleansing and Duplicant.
Workshop Prison
This matchup depends quite heavily on the way that the Prison deck is built. If the prison deck is not running Chalice of the Void or Sphere of Resistance and is running cards like Crucible of Worlds in their place, the matchup is quite winnable. You can hopefully lead with a discard spell that will nab Trinisphere (as you are much more likely to have a discard spell than they are to have a Trinisphere.) However, unlike DeathLong, Doomsday does not have as many tutors with which to find a solution to Trinisphere, should one hit (such as if your opponent goes first.) Remember though, that your opponent cannot simply mulligan down to a four-card hand of say, Workshop/Trinisphere/Thirst for Knowledge/Goblin Welder and expect to auto-win.
If your opponent is running Sphere of Resistance or Chalice of the Void, the matchup becomes quite unfavorable. While it is possible to go off while Sphere of Resistance is on the table, you will need a hand full of mana producers like Dark Ritual and Mana Vault as well as multiple lands, which not a reasonable possibility as you will simply need to take too much time drawing them that you will be totally out of the game. Chalice is the least powerful of these three cards, but is still quite strong. Chalice=0 is actually not a very strong play. If your opponent sets X=0, you will need only one additional mana when you attempt to go off. Here’s why:
1) Cast Doomsday for the following stack:
Ancestral Recall
Dark Ritual
Dark Ritual
Yawgmoth’s Will
Tendrils of Agony
2) Activate Chromatic Sphere for U to draw Ancestral Recall
3) Cast Ancestral, drawing both Dark Rituals and Yawgmoth’s Will
4) Play both Rituals and Will (leaving BB in poll)
5) Replay the Rituals and Chromatic Sphere
6) Activate Chromatic Sphere for B, drawing Tendrils
7) Cast Tendrils for around 20.
The difference here is that you also need a Black mana to get your combo started after casting Ancestral since you are casting Dark Rituals rather than the zero-casting cost Black Lotus and Lion’s Eye Diamond.
Therefore, the best play is to set X=1. This stops Ancestral Recall, Brainstorm, Chromatic Sphere, and Dark Ritual. The loss of Sphere and Ritual make it very hard to cast Doomsday, and the loss of Ancestral, Brainstorm, and Chromatic Sphere make it so that you can no longer go off, as you cannot continue drawing cards in order to keep the Storm count up. If your opponent sets X=1, your only chance is really just to luck out into a Will/Lotus/LED-type hand or a draw-7 fueled draw, as your Doomsday combo is crippled. Just about the only way that you can kill at this point is to have Gush in hand, 4 of your 5 Islands in play, and make the following Doomsday stack:
Black Lotus
Yawgmoth’s Will
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Demonic Tutor
Tendrils of Agony
Your Storm count would then be:
Doomsday
Gush
Lotus
Will
Gush
LED
DT
Tendrils
so you would still also need two other spells somehow in order to go off.
Combo
You have a slight advantage against combo because of your extra discard spells combined with the fact that you are about the same speed as most of them. However, the combo matchup is still mostly dependent on the die roll, especially if you are playing against a Goblin Charbelcher deck.
Fish
Fish is not a particularly difficult matchup. They have only a few useful cards against you, and only have Null Rod as a potential game-winner. It is safe to assume that Fish will not be able to cast a turn 1 Null Rod against you, so you have a great shot of taking it with a discard spell. Your discard is also very important because it lets you see their hand. Fish decks often run all sorts of little tricks in nonstandard numbers, so this lets you know whether they are playing cards like Stifle, Daze, Misdirection, and Annul, which it would drive you crazy trying to play around.
Sideboarding
You’ve probably noticed that I didn’t include sideboards with any of the decklists. There are two reasons for this. The first is that this deck leaked while we were working on it. We hadn’t gotten to figuring out a sideboard at this point, but we wanted to shelve the deck just to be safe. The other reason is that figuring out a sideboard for this deck is fairly tough. Since this deck doesn’t run any maindeck Wishes of either the Death or Burning variety, you have a lot of freedom in constructing a sideboard, which can be either liberating or maddening. Here’s what I’ve considered:
Energy Flux
You are going to probably have to lose an artifact or two to this in order to get it into play. That said, this may be your only hope against truly hateful Workshop decks.
Hurkyl’s Recall/Chain of Vapor
These would fit a similar role as Energy Flux. The difference with these is that while they wouldn’t be necessarily as crushingly powerful as Energy Flux, both of them could potentially be used on your own cards in order to facilitate the combo.
Back to Basics
Like I said above, there are only four lands in the deck that would not untap under this. This could potentially be a useful card against most of the control decks, as well as a possibility against Fish or Workshop decks.
Cranial Extraction/Extract
These might be a little too techy for their own good, but these give you an added chance of just randomly winning against other combo decks.
Defense Grid/Cabal Interrogator
Since you don’t have Xantid Swarm as an option, these are probably your best options against mono-Blue and its counters.
I would definitely recommend for people to play around with the sideboard and with a slot or two in the maindeck. There are probably numerous backups combos that you could run that would only require shifting a card or two around between either the maindeck or sideboard.
–JP Meyer
jpmeyer at gmail dot com
*I did (59/60 x 58/59 … 54/55 x 53/54), which simplifies to 53/60 to find the chance of your opponent not drawing Ancestral off of a Timetwister. I then raised that to the 50th power to simulate not drawing Ancestral in 50 consecutive Timetwisters and got a .2% chance of your opponent never drawing a Timetwister. If you include Force of Will into this, the chance that your opponent will draw neither becomes something like 1 x 10^-8 %, and even if my math is wrong, just by eyeballing it you can tell that it’s not a good idea.