A few months ago I wrote an article that was about breaking
Locket of Yesterdays. That deck revolved around decking your opponent with
Compulsive Research and Careful Consideration while taking extra turns with
Walk the Aeons. That deck can be found here: http://www.cardshark.com/content/view_article.asp?article_id=4026
With Time Spiral Block complete, I am revisiting this deck because I believe
that now it can be more powerful.
Let's start with the core part of the set: Locket of Yesterdays. We need to include
4 of these babies in our deck because without them we could not go anywhere.
They are our ball and chain for this article.
The way I would like to abuse the Locket this go around is with a card that
strikes me as insanely powerful in this deck: Sprout Swarm. When you have 2
Sprout Swarms in your graveyard and 2 Locket of Yesterdays in play you can make
infinite numbers of saprolings because the cost of Sprout Swarm is reduced to G
and with the convoke ability you can tap the token you make to make another
token.
Here are our problems so far:
1- We need to get 2 Sprout Swarm into our graveyard and a third one into our
hand.
2- We need 2 Locket of Yesterdays in play.
To solve these problems I believe we need to look at Blue as our second color.
Blue is also a great color to have in a combo deck. Drawing a lot of cards is
what needs to be done to get our puzzle pieces. Compulsive Research, Careful
Consideration, and Whispers of the Muse will be the most effective in this
deck, because after a few in the graveyard and a Locket or two in play,
Compulsive Research will cost U, Careful Consideration UU, and Whispers of the
Muse with Buyback U. This brings our deck to the following so far:
4 Locket of Yesterdays
4 Sprout Swarm
4 Compulsive Research
4 Careful Consideration
4 Whispers of the Muse
We have 16-18 slots left to work with.
The next card I would like to add to this deck is: Utopia Mycon.
At this point either the wheels are turning in your head or you are sitting
there asking yourself: ´´What is he thinking?´´ Either way I hope I've gotten
you interested.
Utopia Mycon allows you to sacrifice a Saproling to add one mana of any color
to your mana pool. Why would you want to do this you may ask, since Sprout
Swarm is an instant and when you go infinite at the end of your opponent's turn
you can just untap and attack. This is very true, but by adding in the Utopia
Mycon you have just given yourself more ways to win. Without additional win
conditions, your opponent could play Teferi's Moat to stop you from attacking.
Or they could just cast Sulfurous Blast or some other instant speed mass
removal spell.
What would you want to do with infinite mana? Here are some options:
1- Demonfire
2- Consume Spirit
Those options both force you to target your opponent and can be stopped with
Circles of Protection, Ivory Mask, Angel's Grace and various other cards.
Because of this I will not use either one of those options.
You could go the storm route and use Grapeshot or Ignite Memories. I like both
of these options but the card that caught my attention is Bitter Ordeal.
Bitter Ordeal allows you to remove cards from your opponent's deck at a rate of
one card per permanent put into a graveyard. Every time you sacrifice a token
to Utopia Mycon, the token goes to the graveyard before it's removed from the
game, so it will trigger the Gravestorm ability of Bitter Ordeal. Here is what
we have for a decklist so far:
4 Locket of Yesterdays
4 Sprout Swarm
4 Compulsive Research
4 Careful Consideration
4 Whispers of the Muse
4 Bitter Ordeal
4 Utopia Mycon
4 Bitter Ordeals may seem like an overkill but Hide/Seek is a little too
popular right now so I feel it's safer adding in 4. We still have 8-10 slots
left to complete our deck. Counterspells will fill out the remaining slots to
protect our combo. In this deck, Spellburst gets very powerful. Remand is also
a nice early counterspell and lets you draw a card. For the last two slots you
can go with almost any counterspell. I chose Mana Leak to add another cheap
early counterspell. Here is the final decklist:
4 Locket of Yesterdays
4 Sprout Swarm
4 Compulsive Research
4 Careful Consideration
4 Whispers of the Muse
4 Bitter Ordeal
4 Utopia Mycon
4 Remand
4 Spellburst
2 Mana Leak
4 Forests
18 Islands
I only added 4 Forests because when you start to combo out you only need one.
Your creature tokens are green and can be tapped as part of the convoke cost
for Sprout Swarm. You will notice I did not add in any Black Mana sources. This
is because when you have the combo and sacrifice a token to Utopia Mycon you
can get black mana. Here is a sample game:
Turn one: Forest, Utopia Mycon
Turn two: Island, Locket of Yesterdays, Sprout Swarm (Convoking Utopia Mycon)
Turn three: Island, Compulsive Research (Discard Sprout Swarm and Island)
Turn four: Island, Compulsive Research (Discard Island), Locket of Yesterdays,
Sprout Swarm (Going Infinite), Bitter Ordeal
While the above situation may be disrupted easily, it shows that the combo can
go off as early as turn 4. And of course the combo would require a perfect draw
to win that early. With the countermagic in the deck the deck should safely go
off between turns 6-10 consistently.
I hope you have enjoyed my look at the new deck to beat in type 2. Please
comment on the deck in the forums and please leave a rating. Hundreds of people
read these articles but very few tell us how we are doing so please rate me!
Billy Moreau
[email protected]