I'm going to update the OP eventually but for now go see this post for where the deck is at right now.
I swear, we can make the deck legal!!
What's Four Horsemen?
For those who don't know, Four Horsemen is a Legacy deck that uses the combination of Mesmeric Orb and Basalt Monolith to mill your own deck an arbitrary large number of times. In doing so you will mill three Narcomoeba into play, and Sharuum, Blasting Station plus Dread Return into your graveyard. You then return Sharuum to play and bring in the Blasting Station. From here keep milling yourself until you hit Emrakul and then repeat while sacing any future Narcomoeba to eventually kill the opponent.
The reason that the deck can't be legally played at any judged event is because you can't give an exact number of repetitions of your loop until you have the setup described above. As soon as you go through your deck and don't hit Emrakul before anything else your opponent will call a judge and you will receive a slow play warning. With this port of the deck to Modern, the hope is to try and find a way to mitigate this warning.
Untap Combos
Since we don' have access to Basalt Monolith in Modern we need to find different ways to emulate the card. All of these following cards create infinite tap-untaps when paired together with their respective counterparts.
Tidewater Minion: This is the only creature in Modern that can untap itself so it gets a special mention as our psuedo-Basalt Monolith, but with a mana cost of 5 it is very unlikely to ever get played.
Fatestitcher + Kiora's Follower: This is a reasonable combo since Fatestitcher will have haste which makes it a lot easier. The combo works with any combination of at least two untap creatures.
AnyUntapCreature + Second Wind: The Future Sight enchantment is a lot harder to remove and has haste. It can allow us to combo out in a single turn with 4 mana and a Fatestitcher in the graveyard which can lead to some explosive and unexpected turns.
Grand Architect + Pili-Pala: These are both mana abilities, meaning that they can't be responded to. Our combo will be safe until we have to stop flipping through our deck and find a way to win. It also opens the deck up into a Grand Architect based shell.
With this version of the deck it aims to play the maximum amount of untap effects in order to create some redundancy. The best effects cards we can use are Fatestitcher, Kiora's Follower, and Second Wind. Fatesticher is the most useful from the graveyard so we will want to try and loot it into there and then naturally draw one of the other 8 effects to get the combo started. Once the combo is online try and get some Narcomoeba into play and then sac it with Blasting Stations effect. You will eventually drain out the opponent this way.
There are far more creative was to win from here but this is the most straightforward. It is more of a shell that allows you to customize as you want.
With the Grand Architect build, the deck plays out the same as a Grand Architect deck that you may have seen before, but we will abuse the Artifact-Creature type of Skill Borrower to a play a different game of magic by using the top card of the library. The problem here is that you will need a 4 card board state in order to combo off. An untap engine of Grand Architect + Pili-Pala, then Mesmeric Orb, and Skill Borrower. The upside to this is that it can all be casted off of 1UUU as long as the Pili-Pala doesn't have summoning sickness. Once you have the combo out on the field you will also have infinite mana, flip through your library till you have enough mana, say 300. Then flip until you find a card with an activated ability that is a mana sink and go to town.
It is a super fragile combo, but I like it because it is totally uncounterable since it uses a mana abiliy. If someone tries to Bolt your Grand Architect then just restart the flipping until you recreate the stack the same and combo off as normal. If it is a card with Split Second then this gets a little bit trickier, but we can fix the top card of the library to draw the destroyed card next turn and combo off all over again. This makes the combo much harder to disrupt because it can psuedo-reset itself through the most brutal disruption in the game.
Another alternative is to play with Crown of Convergence instead as it creates a more stable combo with Skill Borrower since you can keep the top card still while using activated abilities. The problem with this change is that you now need to play a dead card unlike the orb which gets you closer to comboing on each passing turn. You will also have to swap out cards for things like Kiki-Jiki and Mogg Fanatic.
Decklists
These are the pelimanry lists as of now. The wincon for each is super flexible so try different things and see what gets success.
The deck has a cool idea, but is questionably legal in the format. Hopefully something can get printed to break it open, but until then it is going to take some work to get it any better.
I'm not sure what you're saying the issue with slow play is. You don't have to actually go through each iteration of the loop, you can just say "I'll repeat this until my entire library is in my graveyard." If your opponent wants you to go through each iteration, then as far as I can tell they have no grounds upon which to call you for slow play. I could be wrong here, but I play Ad Nauseam combo (in which you Ad Nauseam through your entire library) and have never had the issue described at a judged event.
Could you give a bit more info on how exactly the deck wins? I may just be dumb, but I don't see a way for you to sac more than 4 Narcomoebas to a Blasting Station. Wouldn't you have to start with Blasting Station in play as well, since in Modern we don't have Dread Return for a Sharuum?
TL;DR: Maybe I'm just being dumb and not getting it. Plox explain more.
@ Kalynis it looks like with one of those deck lists it plays Gaea's blessing. You can get the deck to a point by milling yourself where there are the narcomebas in play and then blasting station in play, or it on top of your library and skill borrower in play.
you then sack the narcomebas and mill your self more until you hit blessing which shuffles everything back in.
You then mill yourself until you are back at the start of the loop and do it till they are dead. The problem being that you might always end up with blessing on top, meaning you never get to a point where you can blasting station them out, or you get the narcomebas out but never get station on top before you hit blessing. Thats why you get called for slow play.
Edit: the second list looks more consistent from a "looking at both lists for 15 seconds" point of view.
I'm confused as to some of the cards in these lists.
It seems to me that it would make more sense with just tappers, mesmeric orb, narcomeba, blasting station, and emrakul as the combo, with no need for all the other things added on.
it does seem like a cool deck, and I encourage you to try to make it work.
I'm confused as to some of the cards in these lists.
It seems to me that it would make more sense with just tappers, mesmeric orb, narcomeba, blasting station, and emrakul as the combo, with no need for all the other things added on.
it does seem like a cool deck, and I encourage you to try to make it work.
Skill borrower acts as an additional tapper when you don't have a second one or a blasting station when you don't have one. Gaea's blessing works the same way as emerakul in the deck but you have the ability to cast it should you ever need to.
For the second list why not include a copy of unburial rites if you are going to be making infinite colored mana? That way you could put an actual horseman into the deck, unless the Narcomoebas are the horsemen, in which case you need 4.
from the IPG: "It is also slow play if a player continues to execute a loop without being able to provide an exact number of iterations and the expected resulting game state."
The deck can't do that. Every time you go to win you get a warning, and after a few you get game losses rendering winning actually impossible. I wish it were possible because I think the combo is awesome.
EDIT1: The 2nd list is actually legal. Because you are generating mana.
EDIT2: Edit1 is factually incorrect.
Awesome looking list. I was a dreaded pilot of the 4 horsies back in the day, porting it to Modern (legally!) would be awesome.
But I'm not so certain its legal. Per the Procedure guide quoted above, I'm pretty certain even the 2nd list would get slow-play infractioned to death. Its been a few years since I've discussed the intricacies, but i'm pretty certain that simply generating mana (as you cannot predict how many iterations nor mana you need) would still be considered slow play. Simply generating mana does not impact the board state very much, its only slightly better than the basalt-engine in the legacy version. Maybe I'm wrong, I certainly hope so, but I don't think that just generating infinite mana, with no concrete ending, is not slow play.
Awesome list, still gonna sleeve it up to torture people in casual games.
I'm a huge fan of the decks torpf makes on this site, seriously if I knew the guy irl I would be brewing with him like every day.
That said, sleeving this up next week and might go to Fnm if we have enough people (Bannings hurt a lot of the ppl at my LGS).
You should ask about the one from this week then
To everyone who's thinking you can't play this deck, that's not true. You can play the deck BUT you are just going to get in trouble by about turn 5 lol.
These were the engines. Although they are more expensive than the creature options, they are also way harder to kill. None of the pieces except for Orb can be killed by Decay, and Tine/Metamorph aren't even creatures.
The rest of the list is a control shell designed to draw out the game and get your engine up. As you might imagine, this was a painfully slow deck to lose to and there's absolutely no way it wouldn't violate a slow play rule on its combo turn.
Thanks for the info, guys--I didn't catch that you had to mill yourself out multiple times. The deck does look like fun. I doubt there's a way to avoid the slow play issue, though, given that its a consequence of the mechanism through which you combo off.
I'll explain in more detail why these lists (and the original Four Horsemen list) doesn't work in tournaments.
First of all, the deck isn't illegal to play. However, the combo relies on you doing something which constitutes the Tournament Error of Slow Play. Unlike Game Play Errors, Tournament Errors get upgraded penalties the second time in a day you commit them rather than the third time. That means that, if you play this deck at a competitive REL tournament, you will get a Warning the first time you execute the combo, and a Game Loss the second time you execute the combo. At regular REL tournaments, the IPG doesn't apply, and you could likely get away with playing Four Horsemen. My local game store has a legacy tournament once a month (or maybe more?) at regular REL (such as FNM), so now I want to play this deck there. I would advice checking with your local judge before trying this, as I bet that the answer varies greatly by judge. The general philosophy of regular REL is good customer service, so judges are often encouraged to deviate from policy if they believe it will provide a better experience for the players.
Second, I want to warn people about the possibility of a disqualification for playing Four Horsemen. In the MIPG, a Tournament Error is defined as
Quote from MIPG »
Tournament errors are violations of the Magic Tournament Rules. If the judge believes that the error was intentional, he or she should consider Unsporting Conduct - Cheating.
If you play this deck and execute the combo, a judge should explain to you why this is a Tournament Error (as I'll do below). If you execute the combo a second time, it is completely safe to assume that you are intentionally committing Slow Play, and the judge should then consider the possibility of Cheating. At that point, it is up to them to decide if they think this counts as cheating. I do not believe that it is cheating, but I also disagree with policy as I believe the deck should be allowed.
Now for why this is Slow Play. According to the MIPG, Slow Play is defined as
Quote from MIPG »
A player takes longer than is reasonably required to complete game actions. If a judge believes a player is intentionally playing slowly to take advantage of a time limit, the infraction is Unsporting Conduct - Stalling.
It is also slow play if a player continues to execute a loop without being able to provide an exact number of iterations and the expected resulting game state.
In the Four Horsemen deck (and in these variants which are legal in Modern), the combo works by milling yourself infinitely, occasionally shuffling your graveyard into your library when Emrakul (or in this case Gaea's Blessing) is milled. While milling yourself, you'll occasionally get a Narcomoeba onto the battlefield, which will let you untap Blasting Station and then activate it to put Narcomoeba back into your graveyard (and later library) and to deal one damage to your opponent.
The expected resulting game state you want is your opponent with zero life. However, it is possible (however unlikely) that, once you start the loop, the top card of your library will be Emrakul, you'll shuffle, the top card is again Emrakul, and this will continue forever. The fact that shuffling is supposed to randomize the cards in your library means that this is possible. That means that it is impossible to provide an exact number of iteration required to get your opponent to zero life. It is possible to compute an expected number of iterations it will take to get your opponent to zero life, but that is different from an exact number.† If you had a way to change the combo to be able to guarantee finishing within a certain number of iterations, this deck would work.
I will now suggest ways to make the deck "legal", regardless of format (legacy or modern).
If you have a way to sort your deck, you're good. Each time you shuffle, just sort your deck so that Emrakul is at the bottom, and mill everything. You know that, with N cards in your library, you'll mill N times, get 3 Narcomoebas, sacrifice them to deal 3 damage, and then the last mill of those N will shuffle your library. Then you can repeat, starting with sorting Emrakul to the bottom. Every N times you mill 1, you deal 3 damage. You know those numbers, so you can say how many iterations of the loop it will take.
The easiest way to sort your deck is by scrying. If you can generate a loop that lets you scry 1, that lets you scry each card in your deck to the bottom to learn the order, and to then keep going until you scry a certain card to the bottom. This takes N scrys to learn the order of your library, and then some specific number of scrys to get Emrakul on the bottom. In essence, you can take a shortcut by looking through your library and cutting wherever you want. Mystic Speculation lets you spend 3 mana to scry 3 on your turn (if it's in your hand). Scrying 3 can work the same as scrying 1, if you put what was the top on the bottom and the other two on top in the same order (or you can speed up the process, but whatever). Stormcaller of Keranos also lets you scry 1 at the cost of mana. If you're using the Grand Architect build, you mill yourself 1,000,000 times to get 1,000,000 mana. Then you spend some to cut Emrakul to the bottom. Then you mill to get Blasting Station into play. Then you mill to shuffle Emrakul back in. Then you spend some mana to cut Emrakul to the bottom, then you mill to deal 3 damage, and you repeat this and the previous step. This deck is weaker (because it requires more pieces in order to combo), but no longer causes Slow Play.
† Another example of a similar thing is how long it takes sorting algorithms to finish. A commonly-used algorithm is called quicksort. It is used because it's expected runtime is about c*n*log(n), where c is a constant (which depends on processor speed, among other things) and n is the number of things to sort. However, it's worst case runtime is c*n^2, which is considered too slow for large lists. Another algorithm is mergesort, which has a worst case and an expected runtime of c*n*log(n). People often use quicksort instead, because it's expected runtime has a smaller constant, so the algorithm is expected to take a bit less time, even though it is possible for it to take much more time. The Four Horsemen deck is more similar to something called bogosort, which is a silly algorithm. It can be described as shuffling the list of things until the list is in order. The expected runtime is c*n!, where n!=n*(n-1)*(n-2)*...*3*2*1. However, its worst case runtime is infinite, because you can't guarantee that it will finish within any specific amount of time.
Is it impossible to demonstrate the loop in order to get a shortcut from a judge? If so is it because you never know were the Emmy is, so the amount of cards milled is random each time? You would think that if your opponent can't stop, and the loop is infinite, but takes a lot of time, that you could just ask for a shortcut and get around slow play.
Eh, I'm still not sold on the no short cut. If you can demonstrate the infinity mill loop with Emrakul, I don't see an issue with a short cut. It becomes a question of how many times do I need to say I do this to win. 1000 times should do the trick, and if given the short cut you could name truly ridiculous numbers that will guarantee the win. If there is someone really good at math, about what number would you need to reach 99% or better kill rate. Get thh equation and it's solution down on paper, and show it to a judge to back you up? IDK i'm BSing here trying to find a way to be honest. Funny deck, reminds me of Eggs on Durdlely steroids.
You just said it yourself, "should". Since it's impossible to be 100% it's been deemed by the DCI to be slow play. You can do the iterations manually but you run the risk of being called for slow play if you get unlucky in your reps.
Eh, I'm still not sold on the no short cut. If you can demonstrate the infinity mill loop with Emrakul, I don't see an issue with a short cut. It becomes a question of how many times do I need to say I do this to win. 1000 times should do the trick, and if given the short cut you could name truly ridiculous numbers that will guarantee the win. If there is someone really good at math, about what number would you need to reach 99% or better kill rate. Get thh equation and it's solution down on paper, and show it to a judge to back you up? IDK i'm BSing here trying to find a way to be honest. Funny deck, reminds me of Eggs on Durdlely steroids.
Yah the problem is that while you will probably win after 1000 rounds through milling, what if 999 of those times Emerakul was the second top card and you didn't mill any narcomebas? That's the reason why you can't say you are in an actual loop. Like someone earlier stated, if you can mill until you hit emerakul, then put him on the bottom of your deck, or on the 5th card down, or on the 10th card down every time after shuffling (don't know how you would do this) then its a loop, because you know where he is ever time.
I'm a huge fan of the decks torpf makes on this site, seriously if I knew the guy irl I would be brewing with him like every day.
That said, sleeving this up next week and might go to Fnm if we have enough people (Bannings hurt a lot of the ppl at my LGS).
Haha thanks! I try to do my best and have a lot of others that I try to work on in my spare time. Whenever I can get around to writing enough about them I'll post em here.
These were the engines. Although they are more expensive than the creature options, they are also way harder to kill. None of the pieces except for Orb can be killed by Decay, and Tine/Metamorph aren't even creatures.
The rest of the list is a control shell designed to draw out the game and get your engine up. As you might imagine, this was a painfully slow deck to lose to and there's absolutely no way it wouldn't violate a slow play rule on its combo turn.
Unbender Tine is a sweet card that I never saw on my many scourings of Gatherer and Magiccards.Info. Mind posting your list that you wait you have so I can compare it with some of what I have for ideas?
from the IPG: "It is also slow play if a player continues to execute a loop without being able to provide an exact number of iterations and the expected resulting game state."
The deck can't do that. Every time you go to win you get a warning, and after a few you get game losses rendering winning actually impossible. I wish it were possible because I think the combo is awesome.
EDIT1: The 2nd list is actually legal. Because you are generating mana.
EDIT2: Edit1 is factually incorrect.
I'll explain in more detail why these lists (and the original Four Horsemen list) doesn't work in tournaments.
First of all, the deck isn't illegal to play. However, the combo relies on you doing something which constitutes the Tournament Error of Slow Play. Unlike Game Play Errors, Tournament Errors get upgraded penalties the second time in a day you commit them rather than the third time. That means that, if you play this deck at a competitive REL tournament, you will get a Warning the first time you execute the combo, and a Game Loss the second time you execute the combo. At regular REL tournaments, the IPG doesn't apply, and you could likely get away with playing Four Horsemen. My local game store has a legacy tournament once a month (or maybe more?) at regular REL (such as FNM), so now I want to play this deck there. I would advice checking with your local judge before trying this, as I bet that the answer varies greatly by judge. The general philosophy of regular REL is good customer service, so judges are often encouraged to deviate from policy if they believe it will provide a better experience for the players.
Second, I want to warn people about the possibility of a disqualification for playing Four Horsemen. In the MIPG, a Tournament Error is defined as
Quote from MIPG »
Tournament errors are violations of the Magic Tournament Rules. If the judge believes that the error was intentional, he or she should consider Unsporting Conduct - Cheating.
If you play this deck and execute the combo, a judge should explain to you why this is a Tournament Error (as I'll do below). If you execute the combo a second time, it is completely safe to assume that you are intentionally committing Slow Play, and the judge should then consider the possibility of Cheating. At that point, it is up to them to decide if they think this counts as cheating. I do not believe that it is cheating, but I also disagree with policy as I believe the deck should be allowed.
Now for why this is Slow Play. According to the MIPG, Slow Play is defined as
Quote from MIPG »
A player takes longer than is reasonably required to complete game actions. If a judge believes a player is intentionally playing slowly to take advantage of a time limit, the infraction is Unsporting Conduct - Stalling.
It is also slow play if a player continues to execute a loop without being able to provide an exact number of iterations and the expected resulting game state.
In the Four Horsemen deck (and in these variants which are legal in Modern), the combo works by milling yourself infinitely, occasionally shuffling your graveyard into your library when Emrakul (or in this case Gaea's Blessing) is milled. While milling yourself, you'll occasionally get a Narcomoeba onto the battlefield, which will let you untap Blasting Station and then activate it to put Narcomoeba back into your graveyard (and later library) and to deal one damage to your opponent.
The expected resulting game state you want is your opponent with zero life. However, it is possible (however unlikely) that, once you start the loop, the top card of your library will be Emrakul, you'll shuffle, the top card is again Emrakul, and this will continue forever. The fact that shuffling is supposed to randomize the cards in your library means that this is possible. That means that it is impossible to provide an exact number of iteration required to get your opponent to zero life. It is possible to compute an expected number of iterations it will take to get your opponent to zero life, but that is different from an exact number.† If you had a way to change the combo to be able to guarantee finishing within a certain number of iterations, this deck would work.
I will now suggest ways to make the deck "legal", regardless of format (legacy or modern).
If you have a way to sort your deck, you're good. Each time you shuffle, just sort your deck so that Emrakul is at the bottom, and mill everything. You know that, with N cards in your library, you'll mill N times, get 3 Narcomoebas, sacrifice them to deal 3 damage, and then the last mill of those N will shuffle your library. Then you can repeat, starting with sorting Emrakul to the bottom. Every N times you mill 1, you deal 3 damage. You know those numbers, so you can say how many iterations of the loop it will take.
The easiest way to sort your deck is by scrying. If you can generate a loop that lets you scry 1, that lets you scry each card in your deck to the bottom to learn the order, and to then keep going until you scry a certain card to the bottom. This takes N scrys to learn the order of your library, and then some specific number of scrys to get Emrakul on the bottom. In essence, you can take a shortcut by looking through your library and cutting wherever you want. Mystic Speculation lets you spend 3 mana to scry 3 on your turn (if it's in your hand). Scrying 3 can work the same as scrying 1, if you put what was the top on the bottom and the other two on top in the same order (or you can speed up the process, but whatever). Stormcaller of Keranos also lets you scry 1 at the cost of mana. If you're using the Grand Architect build, you mill yourself 1,000,000 times to get 1,000,000 mana. Then you spend some to cut Emrakul to the bottom. Then you mill to get Blasting Station into play. Then you mill to shuffle Emrakul back in. Then you spend some mana to cut Emrakul to the bottom, then you mill to deal 3 damage, and you repeat this and the previous step. This deck is weaker (because it requires more pieces in order to combo), but no longer causes Slow Play.
† Another example of a similar thing is how long it takes sorting algorithms to finish. A commonly-used algorithm is called quicksort. It is used because it's expected runtime is about c*n*log(n), where c is a constant (which depends on processor speed, among other things) and n is the number of things to sort. However, it's worst case runtime is c*n^2, which is considered too slow for large lists. Another algorithm is mergesort, which has a worst case and an expected runtime of c*n*log(n). People often use quicksort instead, because it's expected runtime has a smaller constant, so the algorithm is expected to take a bit less time, even though it is possible for it to take much more time. The Four Horsemen deck is more similar to something called bogosort, which is a silly algorithm. It can be described as shuffling the list of things until the list is in order. The expected runtime is c*n!, where n!=n*(n-1)*(n-2)*...*3*2*1. However, its worst case runtime is infinite, because you can't guarantee that it will finish within any specific amount of time.
Eh, I'm still not sold on the no short cut. If you can demonstrate the infinity mill loop with Emrakul, I don't see an issue with a short cut. It becomes a question of how many times do I need to say I do this to win. 1000 times should do the trick, and if given the short cut you could name truly ridiculous numbers that will guarantee the win. If there is someone really good at math, about what number would you need to reach 99% or better kill rate. Get thh equation and it's solution down on paper, and show it to a judge to back you up? IDK i'm BSing here trying to find a way to be honest. Funny deck, reminds me of Eggs on Durdlely steroids.
Guys I know it's slow play and what slow play is. I don't get why you are arguing if it isn't and telling me it is. Did you not read the first line in the OP? I also explained why you can't play it too in the first spoiler...
If you have Blasting Station out before you begin the self-mill, you should be fine.
With Blasting Station out, mill your library, putting at least one Narcomoeba into play and Emrakul's trigger on the stack
Respond to the trigger by activating Blasting Station, hitting your opponent for one and saccing your Narcomoeba
Resolve Emrakul, shuffling your Narcomoeba back into your library
Repeat
If your Emrakul gets milled before your Narcomoeba, you can continue milling in response to the graveyard shuffle trigger. Thus, no matter the order of the cards in your deck, each iteration of the loop changes the game state by dealing one damage to your opponent. You can (in theory) take a shortcut by saying "I execute this loop until you are dead."
The issue with the Legacy deck is the Dread Return/Sharuum/Blasting Station combo, since they all need to hit the yard before Emrakul. If Dread return were an instant or had flash (say thanks to Quicken or Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir), it would be playable.
I swear, we can make the deck legal!!
What's Four Horsemen?
The reason that the deck can't be legally played at any judged event is because you can't give an exact number of repetitions of your loop until you have the setup described above. As soon as you go through your deck and don't hit Emrakul before anything else your opponent will call a judge and you will receive a slow play warning. With this port of the deck to Modern, the hope is to try and find a way to mitigate this warning.
Untap Combos
Tidewater Minion: This is the only creature in Modern that can untap itself so it gets a special mention as our psuedo-Basalt Monolith, but with a mana cost of 5 it is very unlikely to ever get played.
Fatestitcher + Kiora's Follower: This is a reasonable combo since Fatestitcher will have haste which makes it a lot easier. The combo works with any combination of at least two untap creatures.
Any Untap Creature + Second Wind: The Future Sight enchantment is a lot harder to remove and has haste. It can allow us to combo out in a single turn with 4 mana and a Fatestitcher in the graveyard which can lead to some explosive and unexpected turns.
Grand Architect + Pili-Pala: These are both mana abilities, meaning that they can't be responded to. Our combo will be safe until we have to stop flipping through our deck and find a way to win. It also opens the deck up into a Grand Architect based shell.
Palladium Myr + Voltaic Construct: Another more fragile untap engine, but an untapping engine none the less.
Other notable cards: Ith, High Arcanist, Civilized Scholar + Havengul Lich, Intruder Alarm, Jeskai Ascendancy.
Ways of Play
There are far more creative was to win from here but this is the most straightforward. It is more of a shell that allows you to customize as you want.
It is a super fragile combo, but I like it because it is totally uncounterable since it uses a mana abiliy. If someone tries to Bolt your Grand Architect then just restart the flipping until you recreate the stack the same and combo off as normal. If it is a card with Split Second then this gets a little bit trickier, but we can fix the top card of the library to draw the destroyed card next turn and combo off all over again. This makes the combo much harder to disrupt because it can psuedo-reset itself through the most brutal disruption in the game.
Another alternative is to play with Crown of Convergence instead as it creates a more stable combo with Skill Borrower since you can keep the top card still while using activated abilities. The problem with this change is that you now need to play a dead card unlike the orb which gets you closer to comboing on each passing turn. You will also have to swap out cards for things like Kiki-Jiki and Mogg Fanatic.
Decklists
These are the pelimanry lists as of now. The wincon for each is super flexible so try different things and see what gets success.
4 Fatestitcher
2 Kiora's Follower
4 Second Wind
Combo Pieces
4 Skill Borrower
3 Narcomoeba
1 Blasting Station
4 Mesmeric Orb
1 Gaea's Blessing
Looting & Protection
4 Serum Visions
4 Faithless Looting
3 Izzet Charm
3 Lightning Bolt
2 Mana Leak
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Misty Rainforest
3 Wooded Foothills
2 Steam Vents
1 Breeding Pool
1 Stomping Ground
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Cascade Bluffs
3 Island
1 Forest
1 Mountain
4 Skill Borrower
4 Grand Architect
4 Pili-Pala
3 Mesmeric Orb
1 Crown of Convergence
2 Narcomoeba
1 Blasting Station
1 Gaea's Blessing
4 Judge's Familiar
2 Spellskite
1 Batterskull
1 Golem Artisan
Instants and Sorceries
4 Serum Visions
4 Mana Leak
2 Fabricate
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Flooded Strand
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Breeding Pool
1 Academy Ruins
11 Island
The deck has a cool idea, but is questionably legal in the format. Hopefully something can get printed to break it open, but until then it is going to take some work to get it any better.
MTGO/MTGA: Tyclone
My Primers ~ GWx Vizier Company ~ Knightfall ~ RG Eldrazi ~ Green's Sun's Zenith
More Brews ~ Modern Four Horsemen ~ Gitrog Dredge
MTGO/MTGA: Tyclone
My Primers ~ GWx Vizier Company ~ Knightfall ~ RG Eldrazi ~ Green's Sun's Zenith
More Brews ~ Modern Four Horsemen ~ Gitrog Dredge
Could you give a bit more info on how exactly the deck wins? I may just be dumb, but I don't see a way for you to sac more than 4 Narcomoebas to a Blasting Station. Wouldn't you have to start with Blasting Station in play as well, since in Modern we don't have Dread Return for a Sharuum?
TL;DR: Maybe I'm just being dumb and not getting it. Plox explain more.
you then sack the narcomebas and mill your self more until you hit blessing which shuffles everything back in.
You then mill yourself until you are back at the start of the loop and do it till they are dead. The problem being that you might always end up with blessing on top, meaning you never get to a point where you can blasting station them out, or you get the narcomebas out but never get station on top before you hit blessing. Thats why you get called for slow play.
Edit: the second list looks more consistent from a "looking at both lists for 15 seconds" point of view.
It seems to me that it would make more sense with just tappers, mesmeric orb, narcomeba, blasting station, and emrakul as the combo, with no need for all the other things added on.
it does seem like a cool deck, and I encourage you to try to make it work.
Skill borrower acts as an additional tapper when you don't have a second one or a blasting station when you don't have one. Gaea's blessing works the same way as emerakul in the deck but you have the ability to cast it should you ever need to.
For the second list why not include a copy of unburial rites if you are going to be making infinite colored mana? That way you could put an actual horseman into the deck, unless the Narcomoebas are the horsemen, in which case you need 4.
The deck can't do that. Every time you go to win you get a warning, and after a few you get game losses rendering winning actually impossible. I wish it were possible because I think the combo is awesome.
EDIT1: The 2nd list is actually legal. Because you are generating mana.
EDIT2: Edit1 is factually incorrect.
Modern: MartyrProc (Control/Prison) Check out my Primer!
Commander: Karador
Pauper: Ub Reanimator
Legacy: Young Frankenstein/Dredge/The Spanish Inquisition
Casual: 5Color Zendikar Combo
MartyrProc
Daily Digest
MartyrProc. List citation is incorrect.
tWoo Brew off
twitter: @Dave_Cordeiro
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBizarroDavid
But I'm not so certain its legal. Per the Procedure guide quoted above, I'm pretty certain even the 2nd list would get slow-play infractioned to death. Its been a few years since I've discussed the intricacies, but i'm pretty certain that simply generating mana (as you cannot predict how many iterations nor mana you need) would still be considered slow play. Simply generating mana does not impact the board state very much, its only slightly better than the basalt-engine in the legacy version. Maybe I'm wrong, I certainly hope so, but I don't think that just generating infinite mana, with no concrete ending, is not slow play.
Awesome list, still gonna sleeve it up to torture people in casual games.
That said, sleeving this up next week and might go to Fnm if we have enough people (Bannings hurt a lot of the ppl at my LGS).
U Tron
GW Bogles
RG Loam
UR Blue Breach
RBU Grixis Goryo
BRU Grixis Delver
GBR Jund
GBW Junk
Active Legacy Decks
BR Reanimator
Modern: MartyrProc (Control/Prison) Check out my Primer!
Commander: Karador
Pauper: Ub Reanimator
Legacy: Young Frankenstein/Dredge/The Spanish Inquisition
Casual: 5Color Zendikar Combo
MartyrProc
Daily Digest
MartyrProc. List citation is incorrect.
tWoo Brew off
twitter: @Dave_Cordeiro
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBizarroDavid
You should ask about the one from this week then
To everyone who's thinking you can't play this deck, that's not true. You can play the deck BUT you are just going to get in trouble by about turn 5 lol.
Unbender Tine
Phyrexian Metamorph
Mesmeric Orb
Fatestitcher
These were the engines. Although they are more expensive than the creature options, they are also way harder to kill. None of the pieces except for Orb can be killed by Decay, and Tine/Metamorph aren't even creatures.
The rest of the list is a control shell designed to draw out the game and get your engine up. As you might imagine, this was a painfully slow deck to lose to and there's absolutely no way it wouldn't violate a slow play rule on its combo turn.
First of all, the deck isn't illegal to play. However, the combo relies on you doing something which constitutes the Tournament Error of Slow Play. Unlike Game Play Errors, Tournament Errors get upgraded penalties the second time in a day you commit them rather than the third time. That means that, if you play this deck at a competitive REL tournament, you will get a Warning the first time you execute the combo, and a Game Loss the second time you execute the combo. At regular REL tournaments, the IPG doesn't apply, and you could likely get away with playing Four Horsemen. My local game store has a legacy tournament once a month (or maybe more?) at regular REL (such as FNM), so now I want to play this deck there. I would advice checking with your local judge before trying this, as I bet that the answer varies greatly by judge. The general philosophy of regular REL is good customer service, so judges are often encouraged to deviate from policy if they believe it will provide a better experience for the players.
Second, I want to warn people about the possibility of a disqualification for playing Four Horsemen. In the MIPG, a Tournament Error is defined as
If you play this deck and execute the combo, a judge should explain to you why this is a Tournament Error (as I'll do below). If you execute the combo a second time, it is completely safe to assume that you are intentionally committing Slow Play, and the judge should then consider the possibility of Cheating. At that point, it is up to them to decide if they think this counts as cheating. I do not believe that it is cheating, but I also disagree with policy as I believe the deck should be allowed.
Now for why this is Slow Play. According to the MIPG, Slow Play is defined as
In the Four Horsemen deck (and in these variants which are legal in Modern), the combo works by milling yourself infinitely, occasionally shuffling your graveyard into your library when Emrakul (or in this case Gaea's Blessing) is milled. While milling yourself, you'll occasionally get a Narcomoeba onto the battlefield, which will let you untap Blasting Station and then activate it to put Narcomoeba back into your graveyard (and later library) and to deal one damage to your opponent.
The expected resulting game state you want is your opponent with zero life. However, it is possible (however unlikely) that, once you start the loop, the top card of your library will be Emrakul, you'll shuffle, the top card is again Emrakul, and this will continue forever. The fact that shuffling is supposed to randomize the cards in your library means that this is possible. That means that it is impossible to provide an exact number of iteration required to get your opponent to zero life. It is possible to compute an expected number of iterations it will take to get your opponent to zero life, but that is different from an exact number.† If you had a way to change the combo to be able to guarantee finishing within a certain number of iterations, this deck would work.
I will now suggest ways to make the deck "legal", regardless of format (legacy or modern).
If you have a way to sort your deck, you're good. Each time you shuffle, just sort your deck so that Emrakul is at the bottom, and mill everything. You know that, with N cards in your library, you'll mill N times, get 3 Narcomoebas, sacrifice them to deal 3 damage, and then the last mill of those N will shuffle your library. Then you can repeat, starting with sorting Emrakul to the bottom. Every N times you mill 1, you deal 3 damage. You know those numbers, so you can say how many iterations of the loop it will take.
The easiest way to sort your deck is by scrying. If you can generate a loop that lets you scry 1, that lets you scry each card in your deck to the bottom to learn the order, and to then keep going until you scry a certain card to the bottom. This takes N scrys to learn the order of your library, and then some specific number of scrys to get Emrakul on the bottom. In essence, you can take a shortcut by looking through your library and cutting wherever you want. Mystic Speculation lets you spend 3 mana to scry 3 on your turn (if it's in your hand). Scrying 3 can work the same as scrying 1, if you put what was the top on the bottom and the other two on top in the same order (or you can speed up the process, but whatever). Stormcaller of Keranos also lets you scry 1 at the cost of mana. If you're using the Grand Architect build, you mill yourself 1,000,000 times to get 1,000,000 mana. Then you spend some to cut Emrakul to the bottom. Then you mill to get Blasting Station into play. Then you mill to shuffle Emrakul back in. Then you spend some mana to cut Emrakul to the bottom, then you mill to deal 3 damage, and you repeat this and the previous step. This deck is weaker (because it requires more pieces in order to combo), but no longer causes Slow Play.
† Another example of a similar thing is how long it takes sorting algorithms to finish. A commonly-used algorithm is called quicksort. It is used because it's expected runtime is about c*n*log(n), where c is a constant (which depends on processor speed, among other things) and n is the number of things to sort. However, it's worst case runtime is c*n^2, which is considered too slow for large lists. Another algorithm is mergesort, which has a worst case and an expected runtime of c*n*log(n). People often use quicksort instead, because it's expected runtime has a smaller constant, so the algorithm is expected to take a bit less time, even though it is possible for it to take much more time. The Four Horsemen deck is more similar to something called bogosort, which is a silly algorithm. It can be described as shuffling the list of things until the list is in order. The expected runtime is c*n!, where n!=n*(n-1)*(n-2)*...*3*2*1. However, its worst case runtime is infinite, because you can't guarantee that it will finish within any specific amount of time.
Modern: MartyrProc (Control/Prison) Check out my Primer!
Commander: Karador
Pauper: Ub Reanimator
Legacy: Young Frankenstein/Dredge/The Spanish Inquisition
Casual: 5Color Zendikar Combo
MartyrProc
Daily Digest
MartyrProc. List citation is incorrect.
tWoo Brew off
twitter: @Dave_Cordeiro
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBizarroDavid
Cheeri0sXWU
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Cheeri0sXWU
Reid Duke's Level One
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Yah the problem is that while you will probably win after 1000 rounds through milling, what if 999 of those times Emerakul was the second top card and you didn't mill any narcomebas? That's the reason why you can't say you are in an actual loop. Like someone earlier stated, if you can mill until you hit emerakul, then put him on the bottom of your deck, or on the 5th card down, or on the 10th card down every time after shuffling (don't know how you would do this) then its a loop, because you know where he is ever time.
Unbender Tine is a sweet card that I never saw on my many scourings of Gatherer and Magiccards.Info. Mind posting your list that you wait you have so I can compare it with some of what I have for ideas?
Guys I know it's slow play and what slow play is. I don't get why you are arguing if it isn't and telling me it is. Did you not read the first line in the OP? I also explained why you can't play it too in the first spoiler...
MTGO/MTGA: Tyclone
My Primers ~ GWx Vizier Company ~ Knightfall ~ RG Eldrazi ~ Green's Sun's Zenith
More Brews ~ Modern Four Horsemen ~ Gitrog Dredge
If your Emrakul gets milled before your Narcomoeba, you can continue milling in response to the graveyard shuffle trigger. Thus, no matter the order of the cards in your deck, each iteration of the loop changes the game state by dealing one damage to your opponent. You can (in theory) take a shortcut by saying "I execute this loop until you are dead."
The issue with the Legacy deck is the Dread Return/Sharuum/Blasting Station combo, since they all need to hit the yard before Emrakul. If Dread return were an instant or had flash (say thanks to Quicken or Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir), it would be playable.
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Modern
UR Storm RU
UBRG Dredge GRBU
Standard
UR Thermo-Thing RU