Turbo Living End in Modern

By: Dom Harvey

Now that the Modern PTQ season is over, it’s a great time to explore some more decks that I can’t be tempted to waste a PTQ shot on for another 8 months now! Let’s set the stage first:

With the release of Alara Reborn, players quickly found ways to exploit cascade by using mechanics with wonky costs such as suspend and split cards to bypass cascade’s CMC restriction. At its most ‘fair’ this involved Shardless Agent into Ancestral Vision or Bloodbraid Elf into Boom // Bust, but this quickly moves into unfair territory once you carry this idea to its logical extreme. If you’re willing to contort your spell base so that only one card is on or below the CMC threshold, you can guarantee that a cascade spell will hit that card every time and so build your deck accordingly. In Standard, this meant the delightful Seismic Swans deck:

In Extended, you could live every Timmy’s fantasy:

And there’s always that guy who loves playing Restore Balance:

Fans of 5th-pick draft commons have had it good in Modern and its predecessors since 2010, when Living End arrived on the scene. Since then it’s been the subject of occasional PTQ/GP Top 8s and frequent mockery, both of which it deserves. This year it appeared on Magic’s largest stage in the hands of Michael Hetrick, who booked a 8-0 start at Pro Tour Valencia before falling back into the pack on Day 2:

Hypergenesis was much more explosive than Living End and was capable of much more busted starts, but in trading Emrakul for Deadshot Minotaur you gain a certain consistency. The conceptual beauty of Living End is that your cyclers both put themselves where they need to be for Living End and get you one card closer to a cascade spell. This helps the deck tremendously against discard and in any kind of long game. Want to match the control deck land drop for land drop? Seeing at least one extra card a turn lets you do that. Need to find a sideboard card to answer their hate? You may be drawing to two or three outs, but you have many more streets to hit them on.

(And of course, there are the games where Plan A is called off and you start hardcasting Valley Rannets, or you resolve a small or ‘desperation’ Living End and get to relive Alara Limited. The fact that Living End has a failure rate – that manifests itself in hilarious ways – is a knock against the deck from a pilot’s point of view, but speaks well to its contribution to the format).

One big problem with the deck is that, in a format of ruthless and quick combo decks, Living End usually makes a cursory effort of winning around turn 4, and doesn’t close out the game immediately. If you only bring back two creatures with Living End, a removal spell and any respectable blocker is enough to put the game back in their corner; and if you take time to power up your Living End, they have more chances to advance their own game plan. What if we traded in that staying power for racing stripes?

This is a no-frills list built with the sole aim of resolving a big Living End as soon as possible. The most common way to stock your graveyard quickly outside of Street Wraith is:

T1: 1-mana Cycler
T2: 1-mana Cycler x2
T3: Living End

Hetrick’s list is better at this than most as he has Architects of Will alongside the Jund-tinted cyclers, but Glassdust Hulk gives us the full 16 ‘1-drops’ and Faerie Macabre pitches for free too. Hetrick has only 8 cascade effects, and Demonic Dread spends a lot of time complaining that it has nobody to play with. This list has 8 unconditional cascaders, rising to 10 when Dread is relevant. All this is possible thanks to Mana Confluence, which allows us to play 16 rainbow lands and only have a few gaps to fill with fastlands/painlands.

With this manabase we can take our pick of sideboard cards as long as they fit the 3 CMC constraint. Ingot Chewer and now Wispmare are additional 1-mana ‘cyclers’ and efficient answers to hate cards (though beware of tension between Ingot Chewer and Architects/Hulk) and Shriekmaw is a more heavy-duty answer to creatures, Ricochet Trap is the go-to card against counterspells (Hetrick’s Sin Collectors complement these well, but with a rainbow manabase we get to upgrade to Vendilion Clique), and Beast Within is an all-purpose answer that lets you tax their mana. Timely Reinforcements is a possible safety valve against aggro decks. The 4th Living End belongs somewhere in the 75 as you don’t want to cascade or draw into them all when the game goes long against blue decks. The 3rd Demonic Dread in the board might be right too, as using it as a 3-mana Wrath is perfectly fine in some matchups.

As for possible resistance, you will face down countermagic at some point. Traditional Living End tries to pick fights with cards like Fulminator Mage or Beast Within that threaten to mess up the opponent’s mana. We can’t mimic that approach – we could sideboard Fulminator Mage, but most of the blue decks can also switch plans quickly with Snapcaster and Lightning Bolt, which happens to be great against our City of Brass/Mana Confluence deck; drawing out the game just plays into their hands. Instead, we have attack when their shields are down. They have to live in constant fear of Violent Outburst: you often get more time than you ‘should’ because they can’t afford to tap out as long as you have 3 mana open. You can exploit this with the help of Simian Spirit Guide: if you cycle mainphase when you have two land and play the land that you ‘topdecked’, most opponents will assume they have a turn of safety. Even if they know the premise of your deck, they often won’t be watching out for Simian Spirit Guide; and if they are, they may assume that it’s unlikely you have Outburst *and* Guide right here. In any case, EOT Outburst into a second cascader on your turn is the best way to fight through countermagic. The sideboard gives us Ricochet Trap, an efficient way to force through a spell that has random but useful applications against Snapcaster Mage.

Discard is much less of a concern than it is for most combo decks. Old favourites like Hive Mind and Enduring Ideal get written off, whatever their other strengths, because it’s so hard for them to beat a naked Thoughtseize. By contrast, this deck is as homogeneous as it gets for a combo deck – you have only have cyclers and cascaders. They’re gunning for your cascaders, but they have maybe 6 discard spells that they have to draw naturally while you have ten cascaders and can tear through your deck to find them. Discard is a worry when it’s stripping away your answer to a hate card, but beyond that it’s refreshingly easy to fight through.

Graveyard hate is in short supply at the moment – there’s no established ‘graveyard deck’, and there are so many bases to cover in Modern that you can’t waste sideboard slots on fringe decks. That means you rarely see full-on hate like Rest in Peace, which requires an answer; instead, the most you’ll face is Scavenging Ooze and Relic of Progenitus (and formerly Deathrite Shaman though, as Hetrick pointed out, the presence of DRS wasn’t all that bad as it forced graveyard-based decks out of the format and so reduced the need for dedicated hate). Most decks running Ooze either will often have non-green lands in play when they cast it, so you’re looking at two or maybe three activations on one turn. Rather than cycle every turn and let them use Ooze to full effect, it’s best to sandbag cyclers and fill your graveyard in one turn – you may only get to Living End for a few creatures, but that’s often enough. Alternatively, you can burn a cascade spell as a Wrath of God, and then cycle to your heart’s content. If you’re on the play, you can also just resolve a Living End before they get to untap with Ooze.

Relic of Progenitus is a little harder. If possible, bait a Relic activation with a ‘small’ Living End, and then with Living End still on the stack you can bin cyclers (typically the free cyclers in Street Wraith and Faerie Macabre) and proceed as normal; and, as above, you can sometimes just power through it with back-to-back cascade spells. If you want other cards in your graveyard to feed to the tap ability, deliberately ticking down Gemstone Mine can do the trick.

The deck is a blast to play – ‘drawing’ tons of cards, a splashy combo finish, and the occasional bizarre game that degenerates into primitive combat. It has a lot of raw power – you get to cast a thermonuclear Martial Coup on the third turn in most games – and can easily steal games even in ‘bad’ matchups. I highly recommend giving it a try.