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Examining Emry, Lurker Of The Loch In Pioneer

Throne of Eldraine’s artifact-loving combo enabler looks set to make waves in Pioneer! Ben Friedman has brews on tap and a warning: if you’re trying to play fair in Pioneer, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

People are playing far too fair in Pioneer. The goal of the format at its inception is for brewers to break it. Get your deck banned, and then move on to the next one. Treat it like Modern. If they ban Krark-Clan Ironworks, move on to Faithless Looting. If they ban Blazing Shoal, try Rite of Flame. If they ban Splinter Twin, get on board with Summer Bloom.

Any deck that’s trying to Jund this format is not going to get cards banned. If we had Khans of Tarkir fetchlands to go with our Deathrite Shamans, sure, you could make a case for playing regular Sultai Midrange, but we have Treasure Cruise. We have Jeskai Ascendancy. We have Saheeli Rai and Felidar Guardian. We have Aetherworks Marvel. We have Emrakul, the Promised End. Let’s not just play fair, at least not for now.

Wizards of the Coast has even made it clear that they intend to be very proactive and diligent with their ban philosophy of this format. They want you to break it and they want to ban cards as a result. If they didn’t want to offer you the chance to break something, they would have started with a hefty banned list already. The fact that they’re willing to give clearly broken cards a second shot at life speaks volumes.

Let me channel my inner Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. The good people at WotC are giving you the opportunity to crush the opening MCQs of Pioneer! Are you going to take it? Are you bold enough to take it?

I’d like to give it a shot.

The most inspirational recently printed broken card in Magic is Emry, Lurker of the Loch. Sure, Oko, Thief of Crowns is obscenely overpowered and Once Upon a Time kind of seems like something straight out of Yu-Gi-Oh! but Emry is doing something particularly unique and synergy-laden. It’s a bit more conducive to crafting an unfair, bannable combo deck. When it comes to the fusion cuisine that is Pioneer brewing, I like to look back at previous Standard formats and seek out decks that are or were moderately unfair, and then add new pieces to take them to the next level. Emry fits that bill perfectly.

There are a number of directions to go with Emry, especially considering she both fills the graveyard and has incredible synergy with artifacts.

One could leverage her mill-four to make Dig Through Time an easier sell. One could use it in conjunction with Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy to find and re-cast powerful artifacts, or turbo-transform the small Planeswalker.

One could use her in conjunction with Jeskai Ascendancy, as we’ve seen in Modern already. Urza Ascendancy is already a powerful deck there.

I’d like to propose two busted decks of recent times, Gate to the Afterlife and Kethis, the Hidden Hand. Let’s add Emry and see what we get.


Phyrexian Revoker is for enemy copies of Oko, Thief of Crowns, which can otherwise really put a dent in the Gate to the Afterlife by turning it into an Elk. It also incidentally helps protect us from opposing combo decks like Kethis Combo and shuts down Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy effectively. This, on top of being incredible hate for Aetherworks Marvel and Saheeli Rai, two of the most prevalent combo pieces of the format.

I’m already convincing myself that it deserves the maindeck slot over Hope of Ghirapur and Mausoleum Wanderer! Of course, if other people end up playing lots of copies of Revoker, we’ll have to go back to Fanatical Firebrand. I decided to cut the 1/1 because it’s weak against Gilded Goose, and I’m concerned that the Goose will be a big part of the coming format. The same goes for Deathrite Shaman.

Dig Through Time is a neat puzzle of a card, as it lacks synergy with Gate to the Afterlife’s six-creature requirement, but it works well at finding a Gate, given a well-stocked graveyard. It could end up being worse than it looks, but any milled lands are going to be a big help for getting this insanely strong effect online.

It will be interesting to sort out which pieces go where in these decks and fine-tuning them will be a fun brainteaser of sorts. There’s also a Simic version of the deck. Let’s see where that one takes us.


This deck does a great job slamming Oko or Gate to the Afterlife on the second turn but lacks the “oomph” to really shut the door.

Incidentally, there’s also a small soft-lock here with Emry looping a Hope of Ghirapur to prevent opponents from casting noncreature spells at sorcery speed. Any combo deck light on instant-speed removal can just get locked out, which is kind of neat.

If you run out a Hope of Ghirapur on the first turn, you can immediately follow it up with Emry and then attack and sacrifice the Hope. If your opponent was relying on casting a spell on their second turn, and they don’t have a way to kill your Emry at instant speed, they might just get looped out.

But if we blend these together and make a Temur Gift deck, we might be able to leverage the power of the Combat Celebrant insta-kill with the joy of eight Llanowar Elves enabling us to slam that early Oko or Gate.


It’s unclear if the manabase should be reworked to include more red sources, as we’re hoping to rarely cast Combat Celebrant. Should we move in on more red cards, it can easily be changed to accommodate that shift with more Stomping Grounds or Spirebluff Canals.

Now, grafting a powerful combo onto a strong midrange deck has always been one of the hallmarks of busted Magic. We may end up finding that the smartest choice for Pioneer is just smashing together the most consistent Oko deck with any over-the-top combo threat, as we’ve done here.

We may also find that we can get even more obscenely bannable by going all-in on turboing out our busted cards, with stuff like Mox Amber enabling truly comical games.

Enter Emry Kethis

Emry does a lot for Kethis Combo. It allows recursion of important artifacts, mills you to get all your combo pieces right where you need them, and even allows for the execution of the combo.

Here’s how it all fits together.

With Kethis, the Hidden Hand on the battlefield, you need two copies of Emry, Lurker of the Loch and two copies of Mox Amber available to you. You can use Kethis, exiling other legendary cards, and cast Mox Amber, Emry (which mills four), another Mox Amber which makes you sacrifice the first one, and a second Emry (if it’s in your graveyard, mills another four).

This gets convoluted, but eventually you find even more redundant copies of Mox Amber to start to generate mana with each loop, and you then cast a Jace, Wielder of Mysteries to win the game as you’ve milled out. Unlike the Standard version of the deck, though, you don’t have a ton of free mana to work with, as you need to cast your Emry copies with each of your Mox Ambers, so until you’re casting more Moxes than Emrys with each loop, you’re not actually generating mana. Thus it’s important to rely on an actual win condition in the form of big Jace to close the game out once you’ve milled your whole deck.

Compare this to the Core Set 2020 Standard version, where it’s easy to loop through multiple copies of Oath of Kaya or Ashiok, Dream Render and smash the opponent that way. Teferi, Time Raveler keeps you safe from interference, though there are certainly valid replacements.


To be absolutely clear, this will be the hardest Pioneer deck to piece together based on the options available, the many deckbuilding restrictions, and the balance of enablers, payoffs, recursion, protection, and redundancy. The mana is no easy feat either. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is an excellent addition to our manabase that grants us extra density of legendary fuel for Kethis, and Oath of Nissa is simply the green Ponder here, but the conflicting requirements make this a complex four-color manabase to properly navigate.

Thanks to Jacob Nagro for taking the first stab at a list, though options include adding the Diligent Excavator combo piece; Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle; Tamiyo, Collector of Tales; Ashiok, Dream Render; and Kamahl’s Druidic Vow.

Big questions to answer include whether Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is really worth it in a list with so few spells (just Revival in this one), and whether there is enough consistency in the pure Emry combo to get rid of the Diligent Excavator half.

But we do get to lock down the opponent with Teferi, Emry, and Hope of Ghirapur, which is a beautiful side combo for opponents to worry about. Teferi stops instant-speed tricks and Emry recurs Hope every turn to stop all noncreature spells. Impressive!

Should we choose to add more planeswalkers, it also means that Heart of Kiran gets better, especially with Emry to recur it if it gets killed.

And of course, Oko is always on the periphery, causing trouble. Is it possible to blend him into the list? That’s a question one should always be asking, now that this pesky planeswalker is dominating so many formats so well.

There are literally dozens of different shells for Emry, Lurker of the Loch in Pioneer. We haven’t even touched on Paradox Engine or Jeskai Ascendancy, and each of those has several subdivisions based on particular card choices.

It’s going to be a wild winter in the world of Pioneer. Get ready to break it three times over by the time next year’s Players Tour rolls around.