I felt it was time for a deckbuilding article once again, so today I’m going to focus on saving all the poor, abandoned puppies mini-combos people are ignoring or have left by the wayside. Well, I suppose the process works fine for interactions that are totally new, but I prefer thinking about it as saving some poor creature left in the cold to die—gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling deep down inside (and no, I don’t mean the one you get after drinking schnapps).
Instead of going over these interactions with a lot of theoretical detail, I decided it might be more interesting for you to simply look over my shoulder and see the way I go through different steps. By the end of the article, you’ll hopefully know more about integrating synergies that might be abusable into their correct homes and will have seen a few interesting decklists to either try out or modify for yourself. Let’s get going, shall we?
Saving a Stray
If I have some idle time or have to wait somewhere without reading material, it generally leads to me trying to find something new and powerful to do in Magic. As such, there are always deck ideas, particular engines, or card interactions floating around in my head. Lately, the card that has kept me the busiest is one that doesn’t really look much like a Legacy card on its surface: Unburial Rites. A four- or even five-mana reanimation spell isn’t exactly aggressively costed in the context of Legacy—I’d even go so far as to call it unplayable at face value.
There is something special about the card though—you don’t need to have one in your hand to play it. Not only that, but rather than paying a premium for using it from the graveyard…it’s actually cheaper that way. That sounds like something that might have some potential given the right circumstances, doesn’t it?
What are those right circumstances? Well, a card that does something powerful from the graveyard as long as something else is there as well sounds all too much like an enabler that will turn something into a one-card combo. You see, if there is a single spell that allows you to get both Unburial Rites and a game-breaking fatty into your graveyard, that single spell has just transformed into a way to cast said fatty for 3W. Assuming our enabling spell costs four or less and is an instant, that’s a small price to pay for an Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, Iona, Shield of Emeria, or Sphinx of the Steel Wind, considering that the mana can be paid in installments.
The usual suspect for that kind of plan is Gifts Ungiven, and in Modern this is being done already—just fail to find anything but your Iona plus the Unburial Rites and you’ll be able to flashback once you untap after casting Gifts. In Legacy, curving four into four to get your fatty down is just too slow. By turn 5, you might just be dead already—especially if you spent turn 4 just casting Gifts—not to mention how hard it is to punch two four-drops through Daze. To do so efficiently, you need to have five mana out before starting, which takes time you generally won’t have.
Luckily, there is a cheaper enabler in Legacy: Intuition. It perfectly curves three into four and getting the fatty by turn 4 should often be enough, considering the kind of threat we’re talking about here. Intuition also manages to find both Unburial Rites and a target for it just fine. There still is a hitch in that plan, though—unlike Gifts Ungiven, there is no restriction on which cards Intuition can search for, so the only time you can reveal less than three cards is when your library has fewer cards left in it. That means that whatever you Intuition for, you’ll end up with the most important thing in your hand.
Gigapede to the rescue! By using Intuition for Gigapede, Rites, and your fatty, you always end up with Rites and the fatty where you want them—in the graveyard. If they choose to hand you Gigapede, all is well. If they give you anything else, you discard it to return Gigapede during your upkeep and end up in exactly the same spot anyway. Pretty sweet, huh?
Finding a Home
Now, that’s some strong synergy, but we still need a deck that can abuse it. Combinations, like cards, aren’t any good in a vacuum. They exist because there is a shell to abuse them in. To find that shell (or shells—just think of the many-headed beast that was Survival of the Fittest), the first thing we need to do is explore the limitations of the combination we are trying to exploit. Let’s collect some pros and cons for the Intuition/Unburial Rites interaction:
Pros:
– No warning: The moment your opponent learns of his impending doom will be during the end step of his turn, right before you’re reanimating.
– One-card combo: The only things you need to have access to are Intuition, 2U during your opponent’s end step, and 3W during your turn. That’s a pretty huge edge, as it makes setting up the win rather easy—just find mana and an Intuition.
Cons:
– Slow: For a combo kill, Intuition into Rites is pretty costly at three plus four mana. Seven mana is definitely not out of the question—Painter’s Servant and Grindstone plus the activation cost only a mana less—but the fact that you have to pay four mana at once means this is definitely on the slow side. Just think of Aluren, which needs only four mana but also all at once, and you’ll understand how much four mana really is.
– Comparatively low-impact: Iona is sweet and all, but there’s a reason that Reanimator becomes much weaker with every passing turn. Creatures, even ridiculously powerful ones, become easier to answer once the opponent has significant amounts of mana online.
– Dead pieces: All combos take up slots that don’t help you win the game until you’re going off, but this combo has disadvantages similar to those of Flash. Not only do you have cards that don’t do anything until you’re ready, but you also have cards you need in your library, not in your hand.
– Space-consuming: Considering that you only give yourself a single opportunity to do something with it, the whole package takes up quite a bit of room. Four Intuition, an Unburial Rites, a Gigapede, and a fatty means at least seven slots, and more if you want to tailor your fatties to your matchups.
– Graveyard-reliant: The graveyard is a zone that just about every well-built Legacy deck will be able to interact with, at least post sideboarding, and just about any form of graveyard hate shuts off the Intuition-Rites plan.
There are a few conclusions to draw from these elements. First and foremost, using Intuition-Rites as the backbone of a new combo deck likely won’t be worth it. The kill is slow and does something another deck (Reanimator) already does faster. Add to that the comparatively low power level of casting a fatty for four, and it becomes clear that building a fast combo deck won’t give us satisfactory results.
Second, whatever deck this sees play in should have some form of a secondary plan. Just getting a fatty down won’t be good enough some of the time, and if that’s the case then the deck has to have a reasonable alternate plan, because it clearly won’t have the speed to make the fatties totally dominant. This is reinforced by the fact that graveyard hate is likely to make Intuition-Rites even more difficult to successfully pull off.
Third, whichever direction we decide to go in, the deck needs to be able to either accelerate the combo firing or slow the opponent’s offense down significantly. If the only thing you do by turn 4 is get an Iona into play, there’s a good chance you’re just dead on the board to Zoo or Goblins anyway, especially considering you’ll generally need three to four more turns to actually kill them.
Fourth is the space issue. If the only thing Intuition does for us is to enable Rites, things can get ugly fast. If you go for Rites and it gets countered, your other Intuitions are cold. If you draw more than one Intuition it’s likely to be dead, especially considering the time frame the combo is relevant within. As such, it seems necessary to find something to do with Intuitions when Rites isn’t an option.
Finally, looking at the pros, the main advantage this has over other options lies in the fact that it is a one-card combo. As such, it is a perfect way to hybridize a quasi-combo kill into decks that don’t have access to that kind of a plan, or to enhance consistency in decks that already rely on Intuition to fulfill their tutoring needs, because you can now also win with just the Intuition.
That leaves us with essentially two directions to go in. Either an aggro-control deck that uses Intuition-Rites as an alternative combo finish to shore up its otherwise weak matchups, slowing the opponent down rather than accelerating, or a relatively fast combo deck that uses Intuition-Rites as a backup plan when the first kill proves too hard to set up.
Trial Homes
I’ll start with the latter, because there is a shell that is already prepared to do everything we want it to do: Show and Tell. Show and Tell decks already run Intuition and even provide a way in which our fatty isn’t dead when in hand. Dropping an Iona off of Show and Tell isn’t as backbreaking as dropping an Emrakul, admittedly, but it will often be enough. How about something like this:
Creatures (9)
- 1 Gigapede
- 1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind
- 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
- 1 Terastodon
- 4 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
- 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Lands (22)
Spells (29)
The fatty toolbox for Unburial Rites also serves as additional pieces to abuse Show and Tell here. The typical Progenituses are a big letdown compared to Emrakul already. Making them slightly weaker in order to have a better backup plan than Sneak Attack seems like a solid option.
The plan here is easy: just try to combine Show and Tell with a fatty as soon as possible. If you can’t find either piece, you don’t have to find a different two-card combo to enable. Instead, just use your tutor (Intuition) to get a fatty down all on its lonesome. The disruption package and the library manipulation should allow you to protect either plan reasonably well, while the fatty choice here is based on raw power. Obviously, each target will dominate a certain set of matchups—Iona against combo, Elesh Norn against Goblins or Dredge, etc.—but at the same time, each is powerful enough to provide significant value if it comes into play thanks to Show and Tell. The Terastodon may look weird on first sight, but one of the major weaknesses Show and Tell has is that Emrakul can be bounced by Jace. Allowing the Rites package to answer that seems useful, and Terastodon fills that role much better here than any other fatty, as it also offers a way to put eighteen power on the board and (usually) threaten lethal in one fell swoop, the same way Emrakul would.
Is this better than Hive Mind? Well, there are some definite advantages. You fill fewer slots with dead cards—only four fatties, the Gigapede, and Unburial Rites compared to Hive Mind and however many Pacts you decide to run—and you only need to find (and protect) a single card to be ready to win. The opponent getting to five mana (so that he can pay for most Pacts) isn’t a problem, and you don’t ever need to be able to cast a spell that costs more than four.
At the same time, you give up the ability to win in a single turn, which also means you don’t get to run Pact of Negation. In addition, Jace, the Mind Sculptor becomes a much more significant problem because it can answer every single line of attack the deck has. Deckbuilding is all about trade-offs.
Overall, this approach looks quite promising—I wouldn’t be surprised to see this pick up steam instead of the Show and Tell/Sneak Attack decks people have been playing so far. Sneak Attacking anything but an Emrakul is usually underwhelming to say the least, while the Intuition-Rites plan means every single fatty that hits the board will stay there to actually win the game, barring opposing interaction.
So far, that’s the best idea for a combo deck integrating Intuition-Rites that I’ve been able to come up with, but at least it looks pretty strong from where I’m standing. So with the combo angle covered, let’s approach the other way this could be used: aggro-control. True to my play preferences, that’s obviously where I’ve spent the most thought. While I haven’t found anything definite, there are a few lists that seem like they could hold promise.
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (27)
Spells (28)
One of the first decks I thought of when looking for ways to use the Intuition-Rites package was this old baby of mine. We already tested replacing the Treasure Hunt draw engine with Intuition and Loam, but the deck didn’t get any significant edges out of it—making yourself vulnerable to graveyard hate didn’t seem worth it. With Rites into Iona as an option, the idea seemed worth revisiting. In this deck, the plan serves a totally different function from what it does in the Show and Tell deck.
CAB-Jace’s maindeck is already configured to crush creature-based decks, but it is very weak to combo. You don’t have much countermagic and no clock to speak of, so trying to beat combos that can actually fight through a single counter with CAB-Jace has always been a problem. Something that worked surprisingly well against ANT was a sideboarded Hide/Seek (in the Cunning Wish build, obviously). You’re still a blue deck, so they don’t want to just go off Belcher-style, and you usually make it to turn 3. “End step Cunning Wish, untap, remove your Tendrils and you’re dead” was a very powerful way to profit from this but sadly didn’t work against anything else. Intuition into Iona, on the other hand, generally wins against just about every combo deck, which is the reason there is only Iona as a maindeck target, and having the threat available, especially as you don’t have to telegraph it, changes that matchup significantly.
I brought this version to our biweekly tournament, so I have a little experience with it. In that metagame, the Iona plan was pretty bad. There wasn’t much combo and against control, aggro, and midrange, having Treasure Hunts (and more Mazes) instead of the Intuition plan is better. Even with the above list, it’s usually safer to just lock them out with Intuition instead of relying on some fatty. The Loam plan isn’t much weaker than the Hunts though, and Iona/Unburial Rites/Gigapede might make for a solid sideboard package in that kind of list.
Speaking of Loam and sideboard packages, Lands might be able to pick up this trick for exactly the same reason. The deck is incredibly weak to combo and already runs Intuition—it even has acceleration in Mox Diamond and Exploration to make turn 2 Intuition a real possibility. Giving Lands the ability to drop an Iona into play seems like an interesting option to shore up the deck’s weaknesses.
To continue with Loam decks that already use Intuition, this seems like it might be quite good:
Creatures (15)
- 1 Gigapede
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
- 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Lands (23)
Spells (22)
Lists similar to this one have existed for years—essentially Bant midrange decks that set up an overwhelming endgame with Intuition for Loam/Wasteland or Loam/Cephalid Coliseum. This type of deck now has its very own version of Natural Order into Progenitus! One of the nicer things about this approach is that your dead cards aren’t all that dead. Loam actually allows you to mill your “combo” into the graveyard, which is neat, and Gigapede is a reasonable finisher for a deck like this. In long games, Loam even makes it possible to hardcast Iona and Elesh Norn. Now that’s a backup plan with some novelty value!
As for totally original combo-control decks enabled by Intuition-Rites, I’ve been thinking, obviously. I haven’t found anything that has stood up to preliminary testing, but here’s a failed attempt I thought might be utterly ridiculous when I put it together in my head:
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (22)
Spells (33)
The basic idea here was to have a control deck that would use Intuition-Rites to create a combo win, while integrating Accumulated Knowledges so that Intuition could serve as a draw engine when winning wasn’t an option, yet. By searching up Knowledges against slower decks, Intuition allows you to win through overwhelming card advantage like a typical control-deck when necessary, while using Intuition-Rites plus a minimum of disruption to lock out combo and aggro decks by turn 4 gives you a totally different angle of attack. Sounds good, right?
Well, it turns out that the result isn’t something ridiculous that plays both control and combo well, but some sad bastard that can’t do either proficiently. The deck was a failure against aggro. The Rites plan really isn’t fast enough to consistently go off before you’re dead, and you don’t have room to integrate sufficient control elements if you want to keep the ability to dig for your Intuitions and have backup targets for it. So I scrapped the deck—one example of the space issue cropping up. If your meta is all combo and control, this might still be good, though.
Keep Seeking
These excursions only scratched the surface of what Intuition-Rites might be able to do. There are at least a dozen other approaches I’ve thought of, but none of them are any more tested than what I’ve shown you above. Anyway, those examples should be enough to illustrate the wide field of shells that need to be considered when trying to get any new interaction to work. Hopefully, all of this makes it easier for you to get a grip the new things Wizards unleashes upon us every few months.
The most important thing to remember from the process is really to focus not on how good or bad the interaction itself is, but how it relates to other strategies of a similar type. Simple analysis will eliminate a significant number of approaches while also finding existing strategies that might be modified to house the interaction. Once that’s done, the rest is blissful tinkering.
That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed finally getting to see some brews again! Until next time, remember that you have to find the box in order to think outside of it.
Carsten Kötter