There are many powerful cards in Magic, and many of those cards are almost exclusively powerful as combo enablers. Many combo players may find themselves frequently returning to such cards, using them in only slightly different ways with different cards to combo with them each time.

Magic 2014’s prerelease is less than a week away, and the full card image gallery is now available. I perused it, hoping to find a few goodies to build new combos around. However, perhaps because it’s a core set, there wasn’t a lot going on, and I found myself returning to the old standby combo pieces in order to create the types of interactions I was looking for. However, that can be turned into a good thing: We can put all these standby cards into a single deck along with a bunch of new M14 cards and call it a day.

Hooked-On Strionics

Before we go into the standby-enabled combos, I’d be remiss to not mention the elephant-in-the-room Johnny card of the set. Strionic Resonator asks a big question and challenges us to find uses for it. Any card can go infinite, at least in the context of standby combo cards, but the question is whether the Resonator has the chops to power combos all its own. Doubling up on a Worldspine Wurm’s trigger would be nice and all, but let’s see what else we can do with our hyperstrionic powers.

Imprint Turnabout onto your Spellbinder, equip it to a creature, and hit an opponent. The Spellbinder will trigger; copy the trigger with the Resonator. The copy will resolve, allowing you to cast a copy of Turnabout for free. Untap Strionic Resonator, and repeat. If you have an artifact as the mana source for paying for the Resonator, it will untap repeatedly from the Turnabouts, and if your total artifact mana is 3 or more, you have infinite mana (during the combat damage step, thought, so make sure to have an instant-speed use!). If you happen to have other artifacts with reusable tap abilities, such as Magic 2014’s copy of Millstone—staying on-theme—you can potentially win the game that way. If you have the new Staff of the Mind Magus—again staying on-theme—you can generate infinite life from all of your Turnabout castings.

Well, I’m sure there are other ways to make the Strionic Resonator go infinite, but I’m just happy to have found one. I think I’ll also just enjoy playing with it and seeing how many random, unexpected triggers I want to copy.

M14 . . . Stand By

I don’t think I’ve ever gone infinite with Golgari Brownscale before, but every combo player should be intimately familiar with Aluren. Used in ancient Extended decks and the occasional Legacy deck (curse you, Imperial Recruiter and your price tag!), Aluren can do extraordinarily powerful things—even noninfinite stuff—such as in my Edric, Spymaster of Trest Commander deck.

With the new Dark Prophecy, though, we’re going to gain infinite life and mill our library—perhaps multiple times—with the innocuous original-Ravnica Golgari card.

With any (manaless) sacrifice outlet, we can sacrifice the Brownscale for whatever the outlet’s effect is. Dark Prophecy will trigger, and as it resolves, we’ll lose 1 life and replace the draw with dredging the Brownscale. The Lizard will return to our hand with its death-denying superpower, and it will trigger, causing us to gain 2 life—more than making up for the Prophecy’s drain on our total. Aluren allows us to recast the Brownscale for free, which we can do, and we then repeat by sacrificing the Lizard to our sac outlet again. If the outlet is, say, Viscera Seer, we can dredge while preserving a card or cards we want to keep in our library. With Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, for example, we can kill our opponents’ teams, and with Phyrexian Altar, we just plain make infinite mana.

And don’t forget the power of a fully dredged deck. Or, if you’d rather go infinite, unbounded by the size of our library, just include an Eldrazi or Incarnation or the like.

Xathrid Necromancer, a new M14 card, and Rotlung Reanimator, an old Onslaught combo enabler, are virtually identical. The Necromancer likes Humans better while the Reanimator likes Clerics. Other than that, the Necromancer requires that the Humans be creatures you control, and it summons them tapped, as they crawl out from their own graves, but those aren’t huge differences for our purposes—we just won’t be able to use Ogre Battledriver to immediately attack with all the new Zombies we’ll be making.

Anyway, New Phyrexia’s Xenograft—or the ol’ Conspiracy—can make all our creatures Humans . . . even our Zombies. Say we have . . . any creature. We sac it to the Phyrexian Altar for mana, and the Necromancer will give us a Zombie. Since it’s also a Human (thanks, Xenograft!), we can sacrifice it, tapped or untapped, to make another mana, which will give us another Zombie. As with above, we can use different sac outlets for effects other than mana.

The new Dragon Egg caught my attention, not for its innate combo potential, but just because I liked it. I guess I just have a thing for any kind of evolution, transformation, or level-up effect. Anyway, I just see this card and want infinite Dragon tokens. So let’s do it!

Unfortunately, I have to call on two standbys. We already discussed Aluren, but Enduring Renewal is another powerful combo card. It was on the Time Spiral time-shifted sheet, and Wizards of the Coast was a bit worried about the Standard combo decks that might come from it, but none did. Nonetheless, it can be a very useful card. If you start reading it at the beginning, it’s pretty depressing. However, the upside is at the end, and it’s big. “Whenever a creature is put into your graveyard from the battlefield, return it to your hand.” That’s right: infinite creature supply!

And since Aluren lets us cast Dragon Egg for free, we can sacrifice it and recast it any number of times, making a Dragon token each time. It’s not hard when you call on the ol’ standbys!

Enter Scourge of Valkas. While this combo would work with Ogre Battledriver, Scourge of Valkas is on the Dragon theme and lets us just hit for infinite damage, taking out any pesky Platinum Angels and Platinum Emperions along the way. Note that I did skip over the sacrifice outlet. Assuming we used Phyrexian Altar again, that’s infinite red mana for all our firebreathers!

"Five-Color Infinite M14"

• Creatures (27)
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 2 Citanul Woodreaders
• 3 Civic Wayfinder
• 3 Dragon Egg
• 4 Academy Rector
• 4 Baleful Strix
• 4 Golgari Brownscale
• 4 Xathrid Necromancer
• 1 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth

• Spells (9)
• 1 Enduring Renewal
• 1 Dark Prophecy
• 1 Xenograft
• 3 Aluren
• 3 Phyrexian Altar

• Lands (24)
• 1 Forest
• 1 Island
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Azorius Guildgate
• 1 Boros Guildgate
• 1 Dimir Guildgate
• 1 Izzet Guildgate
• 1 Orzhov Guildgate
• 1 Simic Guildgate
• 2 Gruul Guildgate
• 2 Rakdos Guildgate
• 2 Selesnya Guildgate
• 3 Maze's End
• 4 Golgari Guildgate

Buy This Deck

Well, I had a couple other combos, but they were even more complicated than the ones we’ve already covered, and they would have just muddled up the deck even more. As it stands, I had to cut some of the win conditions, such as the Scourge of Valkas and whatever it is you’d do with a fully dredged graveyard from Golgari Brownscale.

But making infinite life or infinite mana can both be very good, and infinite is a nice amount of life to have when trying to win with Maze's End, which I also included in the already-five-color mana base. Kozilek, Butcher of Truth primarily functions as the graveyard reshuffler for the Brownscale combo. However, it’s a good additional win condition. Incidentally, Golgari Brownscale also happens to work quite well with Enduring Renewal, as the Renewal’s trigger will in turn trigger the Brownscale’s gain-2-life superpower.

I also filled the deck with utility Humans for incidental, noncombo value with Xathrid Necromancer. Baleful Strix isn’t a Human, but it’s such great value for staving off decks that are trying to be aggressive, and it’s free with Aluren.

Close

Anyway, this article is more about the combos than the deck, but I hope you at least got some amusement from that amalgamated monstrosity. It looks fun at least! Go ahead and treat each little installment as a Pocket Combo, and try one out in a deck of your own. And if you love combos but hadn’t heard of Aluren or Enduring Renewal, you’re welcome!

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com