I don't follow standard, so not sure if the card pool is there (I just got excited for this combo and ran into this thread), but I feel like this should be less dedicated combo and more part of a blue/red tempo shell that just happens to have a 2 card infinite/infinite combo where both halves are ok-ish by themselves. You get resistance to opposing removal by smashing your opponent's face in as hard and as fast as possible to try and force them to burn it all on other stuff to stay alive, until your 4 mana curve topper shows up as an infinite/infinite creature.
I kind of want to try brewing a U/R delver variant in modern with this and grafted wargear, but its probably not good enough there due to antisynergy with the delver/pyromancer spells theme...
But it looks like he (she?) is saying that he paid for Queen's cost with the mana that he got from tower by sacrificing queen which I am pretty sure you can't do.
I believe the answer is no, you can't do this. I believe you could, however, do this if there wasn't a tap cost for the queen. When you play an ability, you technically do the following in order:
1) Announce the ability
2) Move it to the stack
3) Chose modes and targets if appropriate
4) Determine the costs of the ability
5) You're allowed to activate mana abilities here
6) You pay the costs in any order
Generally, people usually make mana first, then play the ability because its cleaner, but you can legally sac something to a mana ability to get the mana to pay it by choosing to delay generating mana until the ability is on the stack. I believe this specific example would not work, however, because part of the cost for the ability is tapping the queen, which can't be done once it gets sacrificed.
This is approximately crystal ball, better in that it interacts well with delve, better in that it doesn't cost mana to use, and worse in that its tri color. I'm not sure how many people remember M11 draft, but crystal ball was very strong. This will be too.
EDIT: Quotes got messed up somehow, so just removing the quote blocks:
" "1. Why the hell are you curving Ascendancy into Intruder Alarm. You use them as either of your combo engines, not together. Also, if the mana cost is so hard I guess Zoo NEVER gets to all 3 colors on turn 3. If there is even the smallest potential of it getting played in Modern, someone will make the mana work."
Hey, you never mentioned what the supposed combo was, so I just assumed that you had some idea that worked with the two. Feel free to post this combo of yours."
Well, I'm thinking about possibly experimenting with it with sprout swarm. It can combo with either intruder alarm or jeskai ascendancy, and a mana dork + token making plan in general works with either card. It isn't clear if its good enough, but it is in that space where it might actually work. It is also possible it will work as a tool in control or some other combo deck like storm. In standard, Jeskai ascendancy has a possible infinite combo and some potential as a storm-style enabler, and its unclear if it will find a place or not. I love cards like that though, where you can't be sure one way or another and have to experiment and see how it works. My personal guess is that it is probably going to be able to make tier 2 decks in modern and standard that work well enough for FNM, but don't make it to the top tables at GPs. I could be wrong though, and I'm looking forward to finding out.
Also, if your deck needs it badly enough, Modern has the manabase between rainbow lands and fetch+shocks to support 3 or 4 color without too much in the way of issues. You need to be combo if you're doing that though, since all the rainbow land have drawbacks that hurt bad for the long game, and it does leave you weak to blood moon. I've been running 3 color storm for a while now though, you don't hit mana problems very often.
I kind of want to try experimenting with a modern 5 color token deck with mana dorks, this and sprout swarm to go infinite. Magical Christmas Land would be something like birds->ascendency->lingering souls/flashback/infinite sprout swarm. It would have a nice backup plan of just making tokens and beating face with them, but I don't know if it would be consistent enough for comboing or strong enough when it wasn't going infinite. Time to experiment!
Remember when the rock paper scissors was control vs aggro vs combo? Remember that thing that once was called 'combo'? Yeah I know there was accidentally some infinite number of tokens splinter something guy, but its been a few years
Pretty much every single combo deck was a design accident, us getting no new combo decks just means that the designers get better at their job. There's no way a designer nowadays would say something like "Let's print this card so you can win on the spot when it's combined with that card! Surely it will be healthy for all formats ever and bring us more sales!"
There is a 2 card combo kill in the current standard; Havoc Festival + Explosive Impact. You play havoc festival, untap, pass turn and kill them in their upkeep if they were at 23 or less when you played the festival. If they don't have instant speed burn it really only effectively costs you 1 life (since they would have to take you down to 1 to die from your own festival). Its just not good because the cards are too expensive; twin wouldn't be good either if both halves cost 6 mana, after all. I suspect this might have been an actual deck in development and purposely nerfed though, as I seem to recall it being mentioned that the mana cost on havoc festival got raised because someone kept abusing it in the FFL. I played this at a combined limited/standard local event since I don't have a real standard deck (I primarily played limited), and it worked better than I was expecting, although I definitely wouldn't call it good.
This is also the only 2 card kill combo I've ever seen be limited viable, since half the combo is a common and they're from the same set. I got to use it a number of times, which was kind of cool.
Well, this is going to be good in limited. I would be surprised if it was good in standard, but the effect is splashy enough that its possible for a meta to show up where it has a place. I do like that it can work on defense as well; there are likely going to be limited board states where it helps stall against a superior force by threatening to pump your team post-block, while also providing alpha strike capability once you stablize. I like it.
I ran a deck in kamigawa era standard that relied on puzzle box + plagiarize + howling mine to permalock the opponent out of a draw step while drawing a ton of cards. It recycled the plagiarizes with reclaim, recycled everything with mneumonic nexus, and used evacuation as a wrath effect along with boomerang and eye of nowhere to bounce things I needed gone or to buy time. It played like a bad combo lockdown version of owling mine, but was good enough for local competition. Also, you haven't truly trolled someone until you end the game with all 60 of their cards in their deck while they get beaten down with a sakura tribe elder.
EDIT: The puzzle box was not important for keeping the lock in place, but it cleared stuff out bounced with evacuation/boomerang, cleared out cards in opponents hands to establish the lock, and let me sculpt my draws once the lock was established by spacing reclaims/plagiarizes on the bottom such that I would draw 1 per turn.
-A kamigawa era standard deck that looped plagiarize with reclaim, menumonic nexus, Teferi's Puzzle Box and Howling Mine. Wincon was beatdown by sakura tribe elder, or opponent quitting.
-Legacy Stax. T1 trinispheres are the best.
-R/G mass land destruction Radha EDH.
But the only deck I've dismantled for being too trolly was my melek EDH deck with mindmoil. Mindmoil ensures I would always see enough new top library cards to go off, but I would end up needing to track an ever-growing stack of spells, spell copies, and mindmoil triggers while I drew hundreds and hundreds of cards. Drawing 2000 cards in a game takes a long, long time; it makes eggs look fast by comparison.
I am pretty sure there are going to be tournaments at our LGS, and I am very much looking forward to them.
Also, I really, really want to draft a deck with 3-4x Advantageous Proclamation + card draw/removal + Reito Lantern, and just stall out the entire board as my win con. This will probably never happen due to those cards being uncommons, but I can dream.
Seriously though, the conspiracy cards look extremely strong. I am very much looking forward to playing with all of them, and I predict that they're going to be massively misevaluated by a lot of people at first (I am not sure which way; they look very strong to me, but I could be wrong).
The extra booster card is going to be interesting because there are a few balancing factors at work. First, it is generally advantageous for you to get to be the first person to pick from one extra pack, since you get an extra 1st pick while everyone else gets an extra 2nd-8th pick. However, you essentially have to give up your pick for the current pack by taking the card, and you have to pay for the pack, both of which will encourage people to not take the card and cause it to go later. At some point, someone will take it, and thereby end up getting an extra 1st pick out of their 5th pick or whatever.
I was looking at some of the weirder comp rules sections, and I was curious if this would work;
1) Brainstorm Progenitus to the top of your library
2) Start casting Exhume
3) Activate Chromatic Sphere for B, and draw a card. Due to rule 401.5, you draw the card face down with no characteristics until Exhume finishes being cast.
4) Activate Bog Witch discarding the face down card. Since it has no characteristics, it doesn't have the applied replacement effect.
5) Exhume finishes being cast, causing progenitus to turn face up and get its characteristics back, but it is already in the graveyard.
6) Return progenitus with exhume.
The thing I'm least certain about is step 4. Is there any rule that would cause the face down card with no characterstics to turn face up and get its characteristics back when it changes zones like that? Is there anything else that would make this not work?
Can the ability be used to try and cast a spell, and if it doesn't reveal the right number of cards, the gamestate is rewound?
No. Generally, you are only required to rewind the spell you're trying to cast if it turns out you can't pay for it, not the mana abilities you activated to try and do so. Rule 717 gives you the option to rewind mana abilities you activated while trying to cast the spell, but has this exception:
Players may not reverse actions that moved cards to a library, moved cards from a library to any zone other than the stack, or caused a library to be shuffled.
So unless there is a replacement effect that prevents the card draw from moving cards out of the libraries, you won't be able to rewind this ability.
I've considered something like this. I don't think Progenitus is strong enough though. T3 hardcast Progenitus is going to lose to a lot of modern decks if that's all you do, that's a T5 goldfish that can be counterspelled. T3 Emrakul is good enough almost always though. Ulamog is probably a better choice than Progenitus, since although it is slightly more vulnerable to removal, it is much harder to race due to being able to nail the biggest threat on cast and interaction with combo deck's land on turn 4. You're going to win almost as many games where you attack twice with Ulamog as when you attack twice with Progenitus anyway.
I've been wanting to test out fist as a third cheating method in the tin fins deck for added consistency. Looking at Jan van der Gets' deck, it looks like he had a similar idea, although some of the specifics are different than what I was planning (probably better, as I haven't done any testing. I was going to go with 2 Ulamogs to up the threat count to 10, run pentad prisms to enable T3 breaches, and run a higher breach count and lower goryo's vengeance count). I suspect that the tin fins approach is probably a stronger way to go.
T1: 1
T2: 3
T3: 11
T4: 2059
T5: 2^2059 + 2059
T6: Can no longer be represented by scientific notation. 2^(2^2059 + 2059) + 2^2059 + 2059
TN: 2^(T(N - 1)) + T(N - 1)
I like it because you can kill people that gain "infinite" life, unless they're on to you and choose a number represented in power tower notation or another method of representing numbers too big to be represented by scientific notation. People tend to choose numbers like "a billion" or "a googol", which are way too small to deal with this. A googolplex saves them for one additional turn, although at that point you have to prove that the damage you're doing is larger than their life total.
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I kind of want to try brewing a U/R delver variant in modern with this and grafted wargear, but its probably not good enough there due to antisynergy with the delver/pyromancer spells theme...
I believe the answer is no, you can't do this. I believe you could, however, do this if there wasn't a tap cost for the queen. When you play an ability, you technically do the following in order:
1) Announce the ability
2) Move it to the stack
3) Chose modes and targets if appropriate
4) Determine the costs of the ability
5) You're allowed to activate mana abilities here
6) You pay the costs in any order
Generally, people usually make mana first, then play the ability because its cleaner, but you can legally sac something to a mana ability to get the mana to pay it by choosing to delay generating mana until the ability is on the stack. I believe this specific example would not work, however, because part of the cost for the ability is tapping the queen, which can't be done once it gets sacrificed.
" "1. Why the hell are you curving Ascendancy into Intruder Alarm. You use them as either of your combo engines, not together. Also, if the mana cost is so hard I guess Zoo NEVER gets to all 3 colors on turn 3. If there is even the smallest potential of it getting played in Modern, someone will make the mana work."
Hey, you never mentioned what the supposed combo was, so I just assumed that you had some idea that worked with the two. Feel free to post this combo of yours."
Well, I'm thinking about possibly experimenting with it with sprout swarm. It can combo with either intruder alarm or jeskai ascendancy, and a mana dork + token making plan in general works with either card. It isn't clear if its good enough, but it is in that space where it might actually work. It is also possible it will work as a tool in control or some other combo deck like storm. In standard, Jeskai ascendancy has a possible infinite combo and some potential as a storm-style enabler, and its unclear if it will find a place or not. I love cards like that though, where you can't be sure one way or another and have to experiment and see how it works. My personal guess is that it is probably going to be able to make tier 2 decks in modern and standard that work well enough for FNM, but don't make it to the top tables at GPs. I could be wrong though, and I'm looking forward to finding out.
Also, if your deck needs it badly enough, Modern has the manabase between rainbow lands and fetch+shocks to support 3 or 4 color without too much in the way of issues. You need to be combo if you're doing that though, since all the rainbow land have drawbacks that hurt bad for the long game, and it does leave you weak to blood moon. I've been running 3 color storm for a while now though, you don't hit mana problems very often.
There is a 2 card combo kill in the current standard; Havoc Festival + Explosive Impact. You play havoc festival, untap, pass turn and kill them in their upkeep if they were at 23 or less when you played the festival. If they don't have instant speed burn it really only effectively costs you 1 life (since they would have to take you down to 1 to die from your own festival). Its just not good because the cards are too expensive; twin wouldn't be good either if both halves cost 6 mana, after all. I suspect this might have been an actual deck in development and purposely nerfed though, as I seem to recall it being mentioned that the mana cost on havoc festival got raised because someone kept abusing it in the FFL. I played this at a combined limited/standard local event since I don't have a real standard deck (I primarily played limited), and it worked better than I was expecting, although I definitely wouldn't call it good.
This is also the only 2 card kill combo I've ever seen be limited viable, since half the combo is a common and they're from the same set. I got to use it a number of times, which was kind of cool.
EDIT: The puzzle box was not important for keeping the lock in place, but it cleared stuff out bounced with evacuation/boomerang, cleared out cards in opponents hands to establish the lock, and let me sculpt my draws once the lock was established by spacing reclaims/plagiarizes on the bottom such that I would draw 1 per turn.
-A kamigawa era standard deck that looped plagiarize with reclaim, menumonic nexus, Teferi's Puzzle Box and Howling Mine. Wincon was beatdown by sakura tribe elder, or opponent quitting.
-Legacy Stax. T1 trinispheres are the best.
-R/G mass land destruction Radha EDH.
But the only deck I've dismantled for being too trolly was my melek EDH deck with mindmoil. Mindmoil ensures I would always see enough new top library cards to go off, but I would end up needing to track an ever-growing stack of spells, spell copies, and mindmoil triggers while I drew hundreds and hundreds of cards. Drawing 2000 cards in a game takes a long, long time; it makes eggs look fast by comparison.
Also, I really, really want to draft a deck with 3-4x Advantageous Proclamation + card draw/removal + Reito Lantern, and just stall out the entire board as my win con. This will probably never happen due to those cards being uncommons, but I can dream.
Seriously though, the conspiracy cards look extremely strong. I am very much looking forward to playing with all of them, and I predict that they're going to be massively misevaluated by a lot of people at first (I am not sure which way; they look very strong to me, but I could be wrong).
The extra booster card is going to be interesting because there are a few balancing factors at work. First, it is generally advantageous for you to get to be the first person to pick from one extra pack, since you get an extra 1st pick while everyone else gets an extra 2nd-8th pick. However, you essentially have to give up your pick for the current pack by taking the card, and you have to pay for the pack, both of which will encourage people to not take the card and cause it to go later. At some point, someone will take it, and thereby end up getting an extra 1st pick out of their 5th pick or whatever.
1) Brainstorm Progenitus to the top of your library
2) Start casting Exhume
3) Activate Chromatic Sphere for B, and draw a card. Due to rule 401.5, you draw the card face down with no characteristics until Exhume finishes being cast.
4) Activate Bog Witch discarding the face down card. Since it has no characteristics, it doesn't have the applied replacement effect.
5) Exhume finishes being cast, causing progenitus to turn face up and get its characteristics back, but it is already in the graveyard.
6) Return progenitus with exhume.
The thing I'm least certain about is step 4. Is there any rule that would cause the face down card with no characterstics to turn face up and get its characteristics back when it changes zones like that? Is there anything else that would make this not work?
No. Generally, you are only required to rewind the spell you're trying to cast if it turns out you can't pay for it, not the mana abilities you activated to try and do so. Rule 717 gives you the option to rewind mana abilities you activated while trying to cast the spell, but has this exception:
Players may not reverse actions that moved cards to a library, moved cards from a library to any zone other than the stack, or caused a library to be shuffled.
So unless there is a replacement effect that prevents the card draw from moving cards out of the libraries, you won't be able to rewind this ability.
I've been wanting to test out fist as a third cheating method in the tin fins deck for added consistency. Looking at Jan van der Gets' deck, it looks like he had a similar idea, although some of the specifics are different than what I was planning (probably better, as I haven't done any testing. I was going to go with 2 Ulamogs to up the threat count to 10, run pentad prisms to enable T3 breaches, and run a higher breach count and lower goryo's vengeance count). I suspect that the tin fins approach is probably a stronger way to go.
T1: 1
T2: 3
T3: 11
T4: 2059
T5: 2^2059 + 2059
T6: Can no longer be represented by scientific notation. 2^(2^2059 + 2059) + 2^2059 + 2059
TN: 2^(T(N - 1)) + T(N - 1)
I like it because you can kill people that gain "infinite" life, unless they're on to you and choose a number represented in power tower notation or another method of representing numbers too big to be represented by scientific notation. People tend to choose numbers like "a billion" or "a googol", which are way too small to deal with this. A googolplex saves them for one additional turn, although at that point you have to prove that the damage you're doing is larger than their life total.