Basically, we exile Narset using either Serum Powder, Gemstone Caverns, Spoils of the Vault, or Fury of the Horde. Then we use Pull from Eternity to put her into our graveyard. If we have a Gemstone Caverns, we can do this on the opponent's first upkeep.
We can also simply discard her using Faithless Looting for a turn 2 combo attempt, or not play a land turn one to discard her naturally and try to combo turn 3.
Once she's in the yard, we use Goryo's Vengeance to put her into play with haste. We may need to use Faithless Looting or Spoils of the Vault to get it. This will push us back in turns as well.
Once she's in play with haste, we attack. This exiles the top four cards of our library and we can play them for free. We now need to hit one of the following cards: Relentless Assault, Fury of the Horde, Waves of Aggression, Savage Beating, or Brilliant Ultimatum.
If we have two red cards in our hand and we hit a Spoils of the Vault, we can also Spoils for a Fury of the Horde.
Attack again, do it again.
That's the basic combo. If that won't get the job done for some reason, we should at some point be able to Pull from Eternity an Emrakul and Goryo's Vengeance him into play to attack repeatedly with both Nana and Emma. This will shuffle your graveyard back, so we have plenty of attacks left.
IF THAT WON'T GET THE JOB DONE (hypothetically, Angel's Grace or something Foggy like that), we use Research to put a Hive Mind into our deck, deck ourselves with Narset, and make them cast a bunch of Spoils of the Vault. Use a second Emrakul from the board just to keep shuffling the deck back, and keep making them cast Spoils of the Vault until they lose one way or the other.
Coming in from the sideboard, we can use Sunscour to exile Narset, while wiping any blocker problems from play. It's a more reliable turn 3 kill than the very unstable turn 1 kill we were just discussing.
Other options for exiling or discarding Narset while controlling the board:
Serum Powder never sees play because it's a dead card if it's in your hand, making your mulligans worse. For us, however, we want some of our cards exiled, so it just allows us to exile Narset for free before the game starts, and also see a ton of cards before the game even starts.
I'd like some help developing this. It's not as reliable as I'd like, but it's surprisingly skill intensive, really fun to play, and blazing fast.
Love it!!!!! This deck is right up my alley, so I would love to see where this could go!
My first thought is that reflecting pool isn't so good because it requires another land in play to even do anything (and that seems harder with the low land count. Also, it doesn't work if your only other land is an unlucky gemstone cavern). Also, how good is savage beating? It is only castable if you already have multiple attacks stacked up and if that is all you hit with narset, you might be in trouble. Finally, what about griselbrand? You can play this deck like the old griselbrand reanimator deck from awhile back. You have some of the same cards too i.e. faithless looting and fury of the horde.
Looks like a lot of fun but it seems pretty shaky to me. Maybe some fine tuning and testing would work out any kinks.
I could also see an issue where you can't find any spoils/goryo's so that exiled/gy Narset just sits there until you are able to find it. Maybe those serum powder will help dramatically with that but I'm a little skeptical.
LOL just realized Narset has hexproof! So much better!!! I will be working on this deck, hopefully can come up with something. I also just realized that you can cast savage beating right after the narset trigger while still in combat.
Where is the Enter the Infinite action in this deck? After you draw your whole deck, there are so many ways you can win. You can go Ad Nauseam combo style and win off Simian Spirit Guide and Lightning Storm. You can cast all your Fury of the Horde copies for free (4 combat phases) and then put something like Eldrazi Conscription on top of your deck to guarantee giant hits in your next combat phases.
Another awesome, but risky, idea is Biorhythm. As long as your opponent doesn't have the mana to just burn you out on the spot (Again, risk!), Bio can guarantee a 1 hit kill from Narset when she swings.
Definitely a lot of cool synergies in the card pool!
So basically this is a worse version of the Goryo's Vengance T1 Griselbrand combo? Don't get me wrong I dig it but honestly I'd rather do it with Griselbrand since he does it quicker and his draw ability allows more consistency... You know if this sort of thing can really be consistent that is...
This is an awesome concept, could you post a video of you goldfishing with the deck? The combo is a bit difficult to understand..
I'll just write it up here. I personally think that the whole Powder/Pull bit is way too cool and not nearly efficient enough for Modern, but here are the two ways this deck can work.
Mulligan: Powder exiles hand. Narset in hand.
Turn 0: Gemstone Cavern starts in play if you are on draw. Cast Pull from Eternity and bin Narset.
Turn 1: Play land. Cast Goryo's Vengeance, returning Narset
Turn 1 Combat 1: Attack with Narset. Exile top 4 cards. Cast any spells that give you an additional combat phase.
Turn 1 Combat 2+: Repeat until opponent dead.
I don't think this is the best way to build the deck (Powder/Pull are bad cards), but it's one way to do it.
This is a pretty cool deck. I goldfished a bunch in Cockatrice and got slightly better results with 4 Griselbrand main over the Emrakul, the R&D and the two Ultimatums, although it is hard to tell if the changes really helped or small sample sizes are just inaccurate. It does seem to go off just as well with him as with Narset since you are running 4 Fury of the Horde anyway.
The main motivation for adding the Griselbrands is to more consistently get the creature part of the combo, particularly with hands containing Pull from Reality or Goryo's Vengeance along side a Spoils of the Vault. With 8 creatures to possibly hit we have a decent chance of exiling one on the way to whatever half of Pull or Goryo's we need to search up, allowing for an easy T3 win.
T1: Spoils naming the half of the combo we don't need, hopefully exiling a creature without killing us.
T2: End of opponent's turn Pull from Reality on our creature.
T3: Goryo's Vengeance to reanimate it with haste and do our thing.
Have you considered posting this in the Modern Combo section of the Storm Boards? They aren't especially active, especially in the Modern section, but there are some very good combo players there.
I really like the idea of including 4 Grisselbrand MB. If you get him out via Goryo's, you can draw 7 and pitch Narset for returning the next turn. He also just adds another later of consistency.
After doing some pretty rough statistics, it seems as though the bottleneck will occur at the point of needing Pull from reality when Narset is exiled or Goryo's Vengeance at any stage. Getting all of these to line up properly seems shaky at best, but the including of serum powder may be just enough to pull it together.
With 16 'Additional combat' cards, you'll have about a .75 probability of revealing one with each Narset attack. That yields an expected whiff after about 3 to 5 attacks.
Edit: Through the Breach deserves a place at the table.
Where is the Enter the Infinite action in this deck? After you draw your whole deck, there are so many ways you can win. You can go Ad Nauseam combo style and win off Simian Spirit Guide and Lightning Storm. You can cast all your Fury of the Horde copies for free (4 combat phases) and then put something like Eldrazi Conscription on top of your deck to guarantee giant hits in your next combat phases.
Another awesome, but risky, idea is Biorhythm. As long as your opponent doesn't have the mana to just burn you out on the spot (Again, risk!), Bio can guarantee a 1 hit kill from Narset when she swings.
Definitely a lot of cool synergies in the card pool!
It does say noncreature spells, not just instants or sorceries. No reason not to get some Omniscience action going there as well to play nicely with Enter the Infinite.
I totally understand that you're going for a bat***** crazy combo kill, but I could also see someone trying to wrap this in a Gifts package to avoid Pull. Much slower of course.
So let's start brainstorming through a list. I'm definitely staying away from the Pull/Powder plan because it's gimmicky, dependent on playing terrible cards, and super inconsistent. That means going back to the core of what makes this deck decent, which is the Goryo's Griselbrand shell.
That's 8 ways to get Narset out in the first few turns, and 8 ways to bin her. I'm doing a 2/2 split on Axe/Charm for metagame reasons. Axe is almost never dead in the first 2 turns in this metagame, and it's way more efficient than Charm. Charm remains versatile and strong, but you don't want too many card disadvantage looting effects in one deck. Its versatility is also severely diminished in a post DRS world.
Before we can figure out what creatures we want to use alongside Narset, we need to figure out what win conditions we want to use with her. Those two questions go hand-in-hand. For instance, if we decide to use a bunch of Fury of the Horde, then Griselbrand becomes a lot better. If we decide that Omniscience is the way to go, then that lines us up for Emrakul. We can also focus entirely on Narset and not even run Griselbrand/Emrakul at all! Another consideration is cards like Sins of the Past and Spelltwine, which let us recur stuff that is already discarded to Looting/Charm/Axe.
The only card that works both in our hand and on top of our library. Doesn't win us the game outright in one cast, but gives us more digging power to get closer to the win.
I want to be running Guide anyway because it's one of the more broken cards in this deck. That makes EtI off Narset an instant win, as long as Storm isn't in your graveyard. Playing 4 EtI and 1 Storm for a win package seems better than playing 10-12+ copies of extra combat phase cards.
With just these cards so far, we are only at 30 cards, which leaves a good 8 more slots for other stuff. I'm not sure what those other things might be but my guess is that we need at least 2-4 more win conditions off of Narset and a little more interaction (e.g. Thoughtseize, Swan Song, Spell Pierce, etc.). That would give us the trappings of a pretty outrageous, and not totally terrible, shell.
Looks like a solid idea to adopt the Goryo deck that's already established. I must say that Spelltwine and Sins of the Past is a much better idea than running 12 cards that essetially do the same thing. It can also copy the Enter the Infinite that we might have dumped at the beginning of the game.
My only gripe with this build is that Through the Breach often times feels too slow in getting Narset out.
We might want maybe 2 more copies of cards that give us another attack step as 4 seems like we might whiff too easily. We might want a Research to get something off the board in case someone does play Angel's Grace and decides to mulligan until they get one (Hive Mind and a Pact seems good). The Research can also get other win conditions if that's how you roll and maybe Thoughtseize as it does double duty in getting rid of Narset in hand. Swan Song also seems great as Narset has first strike and can beat the bird if it blocks.
Statistically, you need 16 cards that can be used off the Narset trigger in order to hit one around 72% of the time. Bumping it up to 20 increases the probability to roughly an 80% chance of success.
This would mean you need to have some large number of cards that are either broken and can win the game (ETI into Lightning Storm/Omniscience), or they need to help you keep going (Through the breach, Fury of the Horde, weird lines such as Faithless looting away a grissledaddy and then Goryo's Vengeance him back).
In short, any sort of build that capitalizes on an active Narset will need roughly that many cards to keep from whiffing.
More ideas: Tooth and Nail, Gifts/Rites, Empty the Warrens, Time stretch
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kt, your 30 cards doesn't seem to include Narset or Griselbrand, so the other 8 might just end up them. I will try this list out a bit and see how it feels.
Edit: Is Plunge into Darkness a possibility in the exile version? It gives us another way (that doesn't accidentally kill us) to dig to our key card and potentially exile a guy on the way.
Thank you very much, kt. I'll be testing this and I'll post my final list as soon as possible. I'd like to keep the Brilliant Ultimatum in the deck to keep the percentage of hits higher. We can ride Brilliant Ultimatums to Fury of the Hordes to the Enter the Infinite. My only issue is that I'd like to see more red in the deck so I can trust Fury of the Horde a little more.
Honestly, I'm for it. It would speed up the deck a full turn in quite a few situations. The only thing is that I need so many Relentless Assaults in this build that I don't have space. I think that kt is right. I should bomb the deck out and use the extra space for more consistency. This will put Simian Spirit Guide in the deck as a combo piece for Enter the Infinite, a red card for Fury of the Horde, and simply as the accelerator it can be.
I'm going to take the advice that the two of you have given me just about card for card.
While I have you here, jchampangneaux123456 brought up a good point about Reflecting Pool. Should it stay in, or is the fact that it screws up about one in fifteen hands for me a good enough reason to cut it?
I like the version with serum powder thats what makes this deck different from regular griselbrand glasscannon. I think the inclusion of spirit guide would be great to speeds a turn 1-2 combo. I will make some tests at magic online after khans release so It will be more easy to give a real feedback. But One card that I really will try to play is Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker. Thats basic a gg card if you play it turn 1 or 2. Your opponent won't have a answer if you just vindicate every land he plays. And after two vindicates you just ultimate nicol.
Basically, we exile Narset using either Serum Powder, Gemstone Caverns, Spoils of the Vault, or Fury of the Horde. Then we use Pull from Eternity to put her into our graveyard. If we have a Gemstone Caverns, we can do this on the opponent's first upkeep.
We can also simply discard her using Faithless Looting for a turn 2 combo attempt, or not play a land turn one to discard her naturally and try to combo turn 3.
Once she's in the yard, we use Goryo's Vengeance to put her into play with haste. We may need to use Faithless Looting or Spoils of the Vault to get it. This will push us back in turns as well.
Once she's in play with haste, we attack. This exiles the top four cards of our library and we can play them for free. We now need to hit one of the following cards: Relentless Assault, Fury of the Horde, Waves of Aggression, Savage Beating, or Brilliant Ultimatum.
If we have two red cards in our hand and we hit a Spoils of the Vault, we can also Spoils for a Fury of the Horde.
Attack again, do it again.
That's the basic combo. If that won't get the job done for some reason, we should at some point be able to Pull from Eternity an Emrakul and Goryo's Vengeance him into play to attack repeatedly with both Nana and Emma. This will shuffle your graveyard back, so we have plenty of attacks left.
IF THAT WON'T GET THE JOB DONE (hypothetically, Angel's Grace or something Foggy like that), we use Research to put a Hive Mind into our deck, deck ourselves with Narset, and make them cast a bunch of Spoils of the Vault. Use a second Emrakul from the board just to keep shuffling the deck back, and keep making them cast Spoils of the Vault until they lose one way or the other.
Coming in from the sideboard, we can use Sunscour to exile Narset, while wiping any blocker problems from play. It's a more reliable turn 3 kill than the very unstable turn 1 kill we were just discussing.
Other options for exiling or discarding Narset while controlling the board:
Serum Powder never sees play because it's a dead card if it's in your hand, making your mulligans worse. For us, however, we want some of our cards exiled, so it just allows us to exile Narset for free before the game starts, and also see a ton of cards before the game even starts.
I'd like some help developing this. It's not as reliable as I'd like, but it's surprisingly skill intensive, really fun to play, and blazing fast.
My first thought is that reflecting pool isn't so good because it requires another land in play to even do anything (and that seems harder with the low land count. Also, it doesn't work if your only other land is an unlucky gemstone cavern). Also, how good is savage beating? It is only castable if you already have multiple attacks stacked up and if that is all you hit with narset, you might be in trouble. Finally, what about griselbrand? You can play this deck like the old griselbrand reanimator deck from awhile back. You have some of the same cards too i.e. faithless looting and fury of the horde.
How does your deck play? Have you tryed it vs the good decks? How does it play out?
I could also see an issue where you can't find any spoils/goryo's so that exiled/gy Narset just sits there until you are able to find it. Maybe those serum powder will help dramatically with that but I'm a little skeptical.
Keep on testing it and let us know how it goes!
Another awesome, but risky, idea is Biorhythm. As long as your opponent doesn't have the mana to just burn you out on the spot (Again, risk!), Bio can guarantee a 1 hit kill from Narset when she swings.
Definitely a lot of cool synergies in the card pool!
Thanks to Rivenor for the signature and XenoNinja for the Avi!
Quotes:
I'll just write it up here. I personally think that the whole Powder/Pull bit is way too cool and not nearly efficient enough for Modern, but here are the two ways this deck can work.
Mulligan: Powder exiles hand. Narset in hand.
Turn 0: Gemstone Cavern starts in play if you are on draw. Cast Pull from Eternity and bin Narset.
Turn 1: Play land. Cast Goryo's Vengeance, returning Narset
Turn 1 Combat 1: Attack with Narset. Exile top 4 cards. Cast any spells that give you an additional combat phase.
Turn 1 Combat 2+: Repeat until opponent dead.
I don't think this is the best way to build the deck (Powder/Pull are bad cards), but it's one way to do it.
The main motivation for adding the Griselbrands is to more consistently get the creature part of the combo, particularly with hands containing Pull from Reality or Goryo's Vengeance along side a Spoils of the Vault. With 8 creatures to possibly hit we have a decent chance of exiling one on the way to whatever half of Pull or Goryo's we need to search up, allowing for an easy T3 win.
T1: Spoils naming the half of the combo we don't need, hopefully exiling a creature without killing us.
T2: End of opponent's turn Pull from Reality on our creature.
T3: Goryo's Vengeance to reanimate it with haste and do our thing.
Have you considered posting this in the Modern Combo section of the Storm Boards? They aren't especially active, especially in the Modern section, but there are some very good combo players there.
I'm going to play test this on cockatrice.
You have no idea the metled mindstate my brain is in.
This is everything I ever wanted out of a Modern combo deck.
Literally everything.
Modern: Top Control -- UWx Titan -- Loam Pox -- Footsteps Hulk
Legacy: Doomsday -- Death and Taxes -- UR Stasis -- Sylvan Plug
Pauper: UB Teachings -- UR Nivix Control
After doing some pretty rough statistics, it seems as though the bottleneck will occur at the point of needing Pull from reality when Narset is exiled or Goryo's Vengeance at any stage. Getting all of these to line up properly seems shaky at best, but the including of serum powder may be just enough to pull it together.
With 16 'Additional combat' cards, you'll have about a .75 probability of revealing one with each Narset attack. That yields an expected whiff after about 3 to 5 attacks.
Edit: Through the Breach deserves a place at the table.
Standard: Mono Red #GetSwol
Elsewhere: Random Brews All Day, Erreday
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It does say noncreature spells, not just instants or sorceries. No reason not to get some Omniscience action going there as well to play nicely with Enter the Infinite.
I totally understand that you're going for a bat***** crazy combo kill, but I could also see someone trying to wrap this in a Gifts package to avoid Pull. Much slower of course.
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4 Goryo's Vengeance
4 Through the Breach
4 Faithless Looting
2 Lightning Axe
2 Izzet Charm
That's 8 ways to get Narset out in the first few turns, and 8 ways to bin her. I'm doing a 2/2 split on Axe/Charm for metagame reasons. Axe is almost never dead in the first 2 turns in this metagame, and it's way more efficient than Charm. Charm remains versatile and strong, but you don't want too many card disadvantage looting effects in one deck. Its versatility is also severely diminished in a post DRS world.
Before we can figure out what creatures we want to use alongside Narset, we need to figure out what win conditions we want to use with her. Those two questions go hand-in-hand. For instance, if we decide to use a bunch of Fury of the Horde, then Griselbrand becomes a lot better. If we decide that Omniscience is the way to go, then that lines us up for Emrakul. We can also focus entirely on Narset and not even run Griselbrand/Emrakul at all! Another consideration is cards like Sins of the Past and Spelltwine, which let us recur stuff that is already discarded to Looting/Charm/Axe.
Based on this, here is what I think we want:
4 Fury of the Horde
The only card that works both in our hand and on top of our library. Doesn't win us the game outright in one cast, but gives us more digging power to get closer to the win.
4 Enter the Infinite
1 Lightning Storm
4 Simian Spirit Guide
1 Pact of Negation
I want to be running Guide anyway because it's one of the more broken cards in this deck. That makes EtI off Narset an instant win, as long as Storm isn't in your graveyard. Playing 4 EtI and 1 Storm for a win package seems better than playing 10-12+ copies of extra combat phase cards.
With just these cards so far, we are only at 30 cards, which leaves a good 8 more slots for other stuff. I'm not sure what those other things might be but my guess is that we need at least 2-4 more win conditions off of Narset and a little more interaction (e.g. Thoughtseize, Swan Song, Spell Pierce, etc.). That would give us the trappings of a pretty outrageous, and not totally terrible, shell.
My only gripe with this build is that Through the Breach often times feels too slow in getting Narset out.
We might want maybe 2 more copies of cards that give us another attack step as 4 seems like we might whiff too easily. We might want a Research to get something off the board in case someone does play Angel's Grace and decides to mulligan until they get one (Hive Mind and a Pact seems good). The Research can also get other win conditions if that's how you roll and maybe Thoughtseize as it does double duty in getting rid of Narset in hand. Swan Song also seems great as Narset has first strike and can beat the bird if it blocks.
With Through the Breach, I'd play Emrakul.
Modern: Top Control -- UWx Titan -- Loam Pox -- Footsteps Hulk
Legacy: Doomsday -- Death and Taxes -- UR Stasis -- Sylvan Plug
Pauper: UB Teachings -- UR Nivix Control
This would mean you need to have some large number of cards that are either broken and can win the game (ETI into Lightning Storm/Omniscience), or they need to help you keep going (Through the breach, Fury of the Horde, weird lines such as Faithless looting away a grissledaddy and then Goryo's Vengeance him back).
In short, any sort of build that capitalizes on an active Narset will need roughly that many cards to keep from whiffing.
More ideas: Tooth and Nail, Gifts/Rites, Empty the Warrens, Time stretch
Standard: Mono Red #GetSwol
Elsewhere: Random Brews All Day, Erreday
~
Edit: Is Plunge into Darkness a possibility in the exile version? It gives us another way (that doesn't accidentally kill us) to dig to our key card and potentially exile a guy on the way.
Thank you so much for the feedback!
I'm going to take the advice that the two of you have given me just about card for card.
While I have you here, jchampangneaux123456 brought up a good point about Reflecting Pool. Should it stay in, or is the fact that it screws up about one in fifteen hands for me a good enough reason to cut it?
I guess this is a random first post but, what about Disrupting Shoal for protection, and as another way to move Narset into exile?