Card/Deck Tokens Combo

[Grillo_Parlante]

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this as a combo deck for cube. The basic strategy is to run out a bunch of tokens, than sacrifice them to instant kill an opponent using death trigger creatures.




I have a lot more flexibility with these slots than higher power variants (I think), as I can pick up rage thrower and iguanar, while losing blood artist. I believe a number of people already run noble?

Though maybe we should be thinking in terms of green as well, for the sifting abilities, and eldrazi spawn:




As a way to build into a combo turn.

Thoughts?

 

[Suicufnoc]

Hordeling Outburst, Goblin Bombardment, Blood Artist has been a thing in my cube many a time. Hissing Iguanar and friends are probably great support at lower power level. Sac outlets for low power:
Dimir House Guard
nantuko husk

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

house guard is nice too because it can transmute for noble.

Forgot about goblin bombardment.

How focused can the deck become though? Can it become pure combo, or is it best as a sort of pressure combo.

 

[ahadabans]

Outpost Siege

You won't be disappointed.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I think that as a pure combo deck it's not incredibly good, but it's one of the few combos that blends nicely into an aggro deck.

Oh, also...

 

[sigh]

Isn't the OG token combo kill:
?

In our cubes I see a lot of love for this white analog of the effect:


In my format at least I might try to skew WB more towards this super-go-wide strategy. White produces lots of HQ tokens, and black can do mean things with them. Also white anthems, as above. Another potential combo-kill in white would be:

Seems pretty combo-like to EOT secure the wastes for bunches, come around to your turn and give them +2 or +4 power and kill.

I doubt it would ever be a true ~combo~ deck, but it could have some sweet instakills. Its the sort of combo deck I'm more on board with for my format anyway (just speaking personally). Like my weird 5-color-ramp-burn-"5 card combo" deck, it was more just the pinnacle of a synergy deck. I think a truly supported double strike deck fits the bill for this line of thinking too.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Hot off the heels of the LSV Top 8 with Aristocrats we’ve seen even more extreme versions of Rites popping up. There seem to be 3 primary iterations of this build floating around.

1. Aristocrats: This is the LSV version, but with a few updates since the Pro Tour. The primary difference between these and the other iterations is Liliana, Heretical Healer and a higher dedication to board control. Jarvis Yu played this to a Top 32 finish at New York.
2. Displacer: The 4- and 5-color decks got that way because they wanted to cast Reflector Mage and then flicker it multiple times with Eldrazi Displacer. LSV and others ran this build recently, and Cheon has been annoying many people on stream with his nonsense.
3. Combo: This version has Brood Monitor and Eldrazi Displacer for the full-on combo, scrying through the deck with Catacomb Sifter and either racking up a kill with Zulaport Cutthroat or winning via an unassailable board state. It plays much like the 2nd build, but with fewer value creatures in order to make room for Brood Monitor. It is the least likely to play a fair game of Magic.

While the specifics differ, all of them share the same core goal of setting up a mana engine and then cycling through the deck with Elvish Visionary, Catacomb Sifter, and Collected Company. From there, they either flood the board and win with Nantuko Husk, use Reflector Mage plusEldrazi Displacer, flip an early Westvale Abbey, or combo with Brood Monitor.

Kind of more what I am looking for.

I recently slotted in rage thrower to see if I can give this deck more legs. It feels very close, with the chief problem being that higher CC payoff cards tend to gel awkwardly with low CC token makers.

 

[genericco]

I have a small experiment of this going.

phyrexian altar enables plays like looping gravecrawler.

in the same vein, I'm also trying out mitotic slime.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Since this is moving glacially, the actual standard combo is




Which creates an infinite loop of ETB and death triggers. This can than be exploited by the aforementioned death trigger cards, or perhaps by something like

 

[sigh]

I'm, like you, wondering how focused the deck can be. What stops it from just being the recursive agro deck with more of the death triggers than usual? Questions I've been asking myself on this topic:

• How would I incentivize both the drafting of a token deck and also a support structure for the combo aspect?
• What colors is this deck looking to be? Right now we are on 4? colors. In my mind this seems like unique space for WB, with splashes maybe.
• Does the deck have to go deep into combo territory to be a viable and distinct course, or can it be a hybrid swarm aggro/instakill sort of double edge thing? Would there even be a choice? Tokens generally mean attacking...
• Is there a way to reward stockpiling/not attacking? How to use tokens defensively?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I really don't think it requires too much work. Its going to be three colors, it just depends on the configuration and power level.

We've had people attempt to draft decks like this over here, but the issue is consistancy. Combo decks want a lot of consistancy tools, and our formats tend to be light on those.

 

[sigh]

Seems like one easy step of doubling up on the correct cards, then. I'm not sure what three colors it would be, so I can't speak well to specifics.

ThE easy mode route in my mind is to just double up on the three pieces of the standard combo. Or include something like from beyond to search pieces out.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Seems like we're having trouble with this being better than beating down. What other infinite combos are there that involve these parts but aren't actually a kill without something like blood artist?

I can think of persist creature, sac outlet and meleria, but that beats down pretty well. The deck in modern transitioned to a midrange deck that happened to have a combo in it, and I feel that's the natural line for a deck like this.

Why are you after the instant kill? We've known about the gravecrawer deck for years, and tokens are a good way to layer it in with other themes, but what inspired you about eldrazi displacer and this below curve 6 mana uncommon?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

We've had a couple people specific individual try to go into a similar deck on a few occasions. In the older cubes, it would usually start with an early pick gravecrawler as a combo piece, which was terrible because gravecrawler can't block. In the penny cube, its typically something like a first pick fallen angel. The problem with those types of decks is that they have huge consistency issues, since you're running higher CC cards alongside low cc aggro cards. If you draw them in the right order, this can result to developing a board state that can either pressure or defend, building up to a critical mass that kills an opponent out of nowhere. However, if you draw the cards in the wrong order, you can end up with an aggro deck running too many lands etc. etc.

Of course, that shouldn't be surprising, since combo decks are build around gathering a critical mass of effects, and without consistency tools they tend to fall apart.

Yes, I am aware of the existence of aristocrats style aggro decks; this just seems like a deeper expression of that deck that only would need very small additions to become possible.

I cited displacer just as an example: surely, given the vast breadth of printed cards, there are multitudes of ways to turn small disposable tokens into a critical mass gameplan capable of instant killing an opponent.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I guess I'm wondering what the precise difference between fallen angel and the whole eldrazi displacer combo is, draft wise. Like is it the arbitrary ammount of damage that's drawing you to it? What's the difference between this and overrun? Or say, Secure the Wastes + Blasting Station?

Also: Is fallen ideal better? you mention some curve concerns.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Its more taking the existing aggro strategy and providing the means to go deeper with it, whatever the context of that might be. Overrun or goblin bushwhacker are a bit pedestrian.

The fallen angel interactions he is going for are more splinter twinish, but he is definitely trying more to create combo boardstates, and is falling just short. The token archetype in general just seems ripe to go just a bit deeper with the way the decks play, though the exact direction can zig zag around a bit.

Fallen angel specifically doesn't matter: its just the card he is most attracted towards. Either way, he has an issue of assembling the pieces, whatever those might be that he's selected.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

The aggro version of the deck is pretty well documented as people have said elsewhere. So the question is can you have a mid-range/controllish version or pure combo? I think combo is difficult, particularly if you're only thinking about using tokens. Something that can push through a bit of damage (as killing from 20 is difficult) and then 'burning' them out with the combo would work.

I don't think the high casting cost sac effects are a problem if you're encouraging a mid-range/combo build.

You can work it across most colours if you wanted to (white is clearly good too), you need ways to generate bodies (better to think of it this way than just tokens) and ways to sacrifice and death triggers. Clearly the more creatures you can make the better. Some examples

2 bodies



3 bodies




4+ bodies



sacrifice triggers and win conditions



on theme consistency



Extra creatures or recursion



I think this is actually where some of the interesting combo elements lie.

Also, if you are using eldrazi displacer and brood monitor, there is also:



Clones are generally useful to copy ETB creature generators or blood artists. Blink effects are useful for similar reasons.

Usual caveat about power levels may vary.

I'd say, just throw a bunch of this stuff together, which ties in with your other themes and see what happens.

 

[marwatt]

For combo tokens you can just throw in (Mass) polymorph.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

Is probably good here too for instant speed end of turn shenanigans, with lots of creatures/tokens in play.

 

[Laz]

Burn at the Stake?

Eh, eh, eh? Deep enough?

There used to be a Janky standard combo deck that used that alongside Battle Hymn to burn people out.

Or just you know... demon worship.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Thats an interesting point about clones, as a way to create list redundancy.

Sidisi and chord seems like really good calls too. Tutors are so tricky in cube, but I supposes just including a critical mass of comby engine pieces that manage to not feel too narrow works as well. Thats a bit part of why I think this has potential, since achieving critical mass of blood artist effects, sac outlets, and token makers is so easy.

Has anyone played with diabolic intent? Opinions?

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I've not played Diabolic Intent, I think it's probably a little narrow, I don't think Demonic Tutor is a problem.

Best clone for this?

+

Here's a version of the deck from my cube that I just drafted, perhaps not quite as combo as you might be looking for, but has a few options

Orzhov Rally from CubeTutor.com

 

[safra]

I have played Intent extensively in Constructed. It is good there and if you think DT is too strong it will not solve your problem; good card is good. (i mostly sacrificed Veteran Explorers and e-wits to it, for context, and often tutored up additional nonbasics or silver bullets)

If you want to incentivise sacrifice combo, it's perfect, since the effect is worth sacrificing a creature for in low-tutor-count environments.

I would urge you to play DT first and switch to Intent only if you would otherwise cut DT.

 

[Dom Harvey]

 

[xyz]

http://www.starcitygames.com/article/30183_Making-Sacrifices-In-Standard.html


Let's do some ROUGH math here.... To deal 20 damage you need: 1 Aristocrat, 2-4 Artists, and 5-10 pieces of Fodder (depending on how many artists you have in play). Theoretically, you should minimize the sum of Artists and Fodder needed by having more Artists and fewer pieces of Fodder (for instance, 4x5), but in practice, Fodder usually comes in packages of 2-3... so really the math there reads 2-4 Artists and 2-4 Fodder cards. Let us look deeper by taking a tally of your cube. I will ignore Aristocrats because there are plenty and you only need one. For simplicity, I will only look in BR, since that's where the theme seems to be concentrated. According to my counts you have 11 points of Artists in 8 cards (Fallen Angel, Rage Thrower, and Tymaret, the Murder King are each two points of damage per Fodder....I also did not include Nantuko Husk and friends who don't have evasion). So we have roughly 2.75 damage per 2 Artist cards. For the Fodder, I will only count token makers; each creature does not count for 1 point or we require too many cards for the combo . By my counts you have about 20 points of Fodder in 8 cards (some of the math is fuzzy with cards like Mogg War Marshal and Young Pyromancer). So that's roughly 7.5 damage per 3 Fodder cards. 2.75 * 7.5 is just over 20. Seems like a reasonable expectation. So right now we have a ~5-6 card combo (a few Aristocrats are also Artists and some Artists can eventually be used as Fodder depending on the on the Aristocrat, but let's just short cut here). How hard is it to assemble that? In a 7-9 turn game (after all we're the combo version, not the aggro version), we'll draw ~15 cards. Of those, we need ~5-6 lands. So about ~60% of our spells need to be combo cards? I guess the other 1/3 can be used to interact / dig for the combo pieces. If we extrapolate to 23 cards, we need ~14 combo pieces. Discounting ~2 Aristocrats (14 * 1/6), we need 12ish Artist cards + Fodder cards... out of the 16 total in the cube. Is this feasible? Perhaps we need a higher density of combo pieces? Who knows, I'm tired of doing BS math .

Perhaps we can make the combo more compact? A 4-5 card combo instead of a 5-6 card combo. Aristocrats don't get more efficient card slot wise (we only need 1 after all) unless they are on an Artist, and already have a lot of the good combined ones. Artists don't really get more efficient; we already have a lot of the 2 damage ones. We're left with finding more efficient Fodder. Cards like Reassembling Skeleton, Pawn of Ulamog, Sifter of Skulls, or Spawning Pit might be able to push you to 7.5 damage in 2 Fodder cards. Power level concerns yadda yadda ... but try them?

Warning: most this math is a little cautiously over estimated. And you won't always need to combo for all 20 damage. Your environment is probably fine. But if you want more combo potential, I definitely recommend adding more combo friendly cards. The four I listed push the combo envelope so much better than a Hordeling Outburst.