Over the past month or so, loads of people have posted their sweet draft decks on various social media. Most of them are just trying to show off how sweet their deck was (cough…lame…) but occasionally you see some decks that simply must be shared.
In Kaladesh, the coolest decks almost always had Panharmonicon in them.
Draw two cards with your Cloudblazer? Pish posh, try drawing four cards. Or getting two artifacts from your Glint-Nest Crane. Don’t even get started on what happens if you have a Gearhulk.
Eventually your opponent concedes, not because you’re insurmountably ahead in material, which you are, but because they are too jealous of how much fun you’re having. That’s when you really rub it in by flashing them the smuggest grin you can. Maybe throw in a “Did I do that?” for good measure.
Well some people are dreamers. If doubling your triggers is fun in Draft, it has to be even more fun in Standard, right? We can’t Collected Company into two Reflector Mages anymore, so let’s build our own. Pilgrim’s Eye turns into a reasonable card before you sacrifice it to Distended Mindbender or Elder Deep-Fiend. And as for Thought-Knot Seer, I don’t even want to think about what that feels like.
But the piece de resistance is clearly Eldrazi Displacer. How is there only one in the deck? Even without Panharmonicon on the battlefield, it supercharges your entire deck, looping Cloudblazer or Glint-Nest Crane to find a Panharmonicon, at which point things just get silly. If you have Drowner of Hope, things get infinite, since you will get four Eldrazi Scion tokens and you can use three to continue the loop.
Of course this deck has an infinite loop! It just had to. It’s basically a Commander deck in Standard, except without the six-hour games that induce Monopoly-level rage and end friendships. So it’s even better.
This is Magic as the game was intended. All value, all the time. Under that lens, the infinite combo seems tawdry. When you’re having fun, you don’t want it to end, so why kill your opponent when you can draw more cards and gain more life? If you want to play this deck, you need to embrace your inner glutton, which is appropriate for today as you stare at that leftover Halloween candy, trying in vain to resist it.
And look on the bright side: there’ll probably be a cure for diabetes in 30 years anyway. Give in to the temptation.
Creatures (24)
- 3 Pilgrim's Eye
- 1 Drowner of Hope
- 1 Linvala, the Preserver
- 3 Reflector Mage
- 1 Eldrazi Displacer
- 3 Thought-Knot Seer
- 1 Elder Deep-Fiend
- 1 Distended Mindbender
- 3 Noxious Gearhulk
- 2 Cloudblazer
- 4 Glint-Nest Crane
- 1 Restoration Gearsmith
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (25)
Spells (10)
