Welcome back to another Bryan’s Brews!
Today, I’ll be sharing a sweet little brew that I came up with. If you’re like me and like drawing cards and doing a whole lot of nothing, this is the deck for you… Today’s deck draws ALL THE CARDS!
UB “REENACT THE INFINITE COMBO”
First and foremost, let’s talk about the speed of the Pioneer format. How fast can decks actually win? Well, in most cases, contending decks can reasonably expect to win by turn ~5ish. Some decks can win quicker (looking at you Lotus Field).
In this particular case, I brewed up a deck that can win on turn 3 but usually expects to win on turn ~4-6 on average. We use the power of Reenact the Crime and Enter the Infinite with some help from our looter friends to get the deck rolling.
Here is how our combo works in this deck to get us a turn 3 win:
Turn 1 – Land + Thoughtseize to take the interactive spell that slows us down
Turn 2 – Land + Rona or Jace
Turn 3 – Land + Mox Amber; Loot and pitch Enter the Infinite; Cast Reenact the Crime targeting Enter the Infinite; Draw your deck and cast 2 more Mox Ambers + Thassa’s Oracle with 1 card left in your library.
Alternatively, out of the sideboard, we can win on turn 4 very similarly. Instead of casting Reenact the Crime, we can play Archfiend of the Dross on turn 3, and then cast Metamorphic Alteration on one of our opponents creatures, turning it into a copy of Archfiend but with no oil counters on it. Then when we pass the turn back, their “Archfiend” will look for its trigger of removing an oil counter and they will lose the game.
Game one our combo says “we win the game”. Game two, the combo states “they lose the game”. I found this kind of funny and ironic.
At the RIW 1K event, I was able to turn 3 my last round opponent in game 2 on the draw. My opponent tapped out to play a 3 mana creature, passed the turn to me and I was able to find the Mox Amber with Rona on board and the rest of the combo in hand. That felt like a huge win for me and the deck that day.
The idea of playing a bunch of looters really appeals to a Blue mage like myself. Being able to utilize those looters to fuel your combo just makes this deck super fun and rewarding to play. I can hear you asking now: “How do we win on turn 3 with looters?” Well, in this case, 3 of our 4 looters are Legendary so we get to utilize the power of Mox Amber.
Let’s take a look at these cards and figure out how they fuel the deck:
4 Rona, Herald of Invasion
Rona and Jace are the best of the bunch. They are both Legendary creatures with bonuses that help with Mox Amber for 2 mana! It almost feels like cheating. Kaito being a Legendary Planeswalker also means that our Mox can tap for Black mana.
And lastly, we have Likeness Looter that isn’t exactly a Legendary but could become one with its copy ability and also loots, of course.
With that out of the way, let’s look at the Powerful spells we will be casting:
The goal here is to use our looters to power an Enter the Infinite into the graveyard and then cast Reenact the Crime.
The wording on Reenact states that it is looking for a non-land card that was put into the graveyard this turn. So we are looking to get Enter the Infinite and use Dig Through Time as a supplemental way to find our combo pieces.
Ok, cool. We’ve successfully cast Enter the Infinite. How do we actually win?
Well, the obvious ways anyone would win with almost every card of their deck in their hand. We cast Thassa’s Oracle or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries of course. After drawing the deck, we can use our remaining Mox Ambers to power out the mana required for the final Combo piece.
Now that we have the meat of the deck, let’s look at the potatoes. What helps us get to the end game?
With most of the deck taking up Combo pieces or ways to find combo pieces, I didn’t have a lot of room for much else.
My thought process was that I could play the standard 1 mana Black spells in Fatal Push for dealing with creatures and Thoughtseize for some hand disruption.
I see these spots as “flex” spots with lots of opportunities for customization with other CMC =1 spells competing for inclusion, including: Consider, Sleight of Hand, Opt, Duress, or any other spell you deem worthy of a spot in the deck. I prefer to hedge with interaction, but I can also see the upside in building toward a smoother, faster goldfish draw with extra card selection.
The last numbers I haven’t addressed yet are the Win Conditions: Oracles or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries.
I decided to only play 2 Thassa’s Oracles and 1 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries.
As much as I love Jace, I think Thassa’s Oracle is the more adult decision to make based on mana efficiency but it also helps us dig for combo pieces we are missing with those blue pips we have lying around. Jace is a good alternative threat when we have to switch to plan B…
Some of you may be wondering “Plan B? What is our Plan B?”
Well, it’s not great. We’re basically a glass cannon with limited interaction (Fatal Push & Thoughtseize to buy time) in game 1.
Our Plan B is to flip Rona and start swinging and maybe get to a point where we can use Wielder of Mysteries or Oracle to win the game if we can’t cross the finish line.
In the post-sideboard games, things start to get interesting…. I was looking at the side board and have gone through many iterations of what I thought would be a solid plan for a lot of popular decks. What I ultimately landed on was much more…… insane!!!
Not in a good way. As in, I am a mad man and I wanted to see how far I could push the boundaries of what my deck can do.
Initially, I wanted spells to help protect the combo or play a little more “fair” style of game. I was using cards like Tishana’s Tidebinder to protect against The Stone Brain.
Go Blank and Duress to help with UR Phoenix and UW Control.
Extinction Event and Ritual of Soot to help against the aggro decks.
What I decided to do instead was to just lean into the combo aspect of the deck a little heavier like a lunatic. Here is what I came up with:
Hear me out. My insanity with this sideboard came with a smidge of thought, albeit not with superior reasoning. In my head, the biggest Achilles’ Heel of the deck is graveyard hate.
Particularly in the form of Leyline of the Void and Rest In Peace. Enchantments are problematic for Dimir colors. With the deck sometimes able to just steal game 1, having the full juke out of the board is great because sometimes you can just invalidate hate cards and sometimes steal a second game.
I also decided against playing sweepers out of the sideboard because they end up sweeping up my Looter / combo pieces. My thought process was basically “I can still combo and be big against aggro decks AND still have something to do against midrange/control.”
I baked a secondary powerful combo into the 75 (Archfiend and Metamorphic Alteration in the sideboard) which allows me to remain a proactive combo deck while diversifying my combo suite to be less “soft” to Graveyard Hate.
With the Archfiend combo, we can nullify the graveyard hate by boarding out the Enter the Infinite combo. It also allows us to go big over the top of aggro decks and have huge threats.
Archfiend on its own feels really good against Phoenix and Rakdos. Having both combos vs either/both of these decks has proven to be invaluable.
Against the control decks, we have protective counterspells and hand disruption that we can board in to make our deck less 1-dimensional and better equipped to interact on the axis that matters – the stack!
Against midrange decks, we have all sorts of options. We can play both combos in limited numbers, we can play no combos with bigger threats, or we can play either combo with larger threats.
The full juke! What more could you want from a deck!? if it ever goes to Game 3, it’s impossible for the opponent to know “what we are doing?!?!?!” Seriously, who knows? I certainly don’t. I am sort of flying by the seam of my pants here.
Until next time, Stay Brewtiful.
