A Token Named Gold

Posted on April 29, 2014

In today’s experiment, we adopt the king’s curse and start turning everything to gold.

Commander Gold

King Macar, the Gold-Cursed is the one who caught my eye for this week’s article. I wanted to figure out the best way to use him—with best being defined less by winning and more by being kinda silly. I’m going to focus more on Pocket Combos today than on a particular decklist, and a lot of the multi-card interactions will be of multiple colors.

For those of you who want to build around King Macar in a mono-black Commander deck, here is an interesting synergy:

With those three, you’ll be able to untap the King on each player’s turn in order to exile creatures and put tokens named Gold onto the battlefield. Of course, you’ll need a way to tap your King as well, so here are a few more options:

Two-Card Combo

Now, Aura of Dominion is something I already knew I’d want for King Macar. It’s kind of like saying, “: Trigger enchanted creature’s inspired ability.” In King Macar’s case, that reads, “: You may exile target creature. If you do, put a colorless artifact token named Gold onto the battlefield. It has “Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.””

And since the Gold tokens can be sacrificed for mana, these effects present a two-card combo for exiling all our opponents’ creatures. Now, that’s a pretty sweet combo, and if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, you can just stop reading here. Take these gems, and slot them into your U/B Commander deck. It all goes downhill from here.

Infinite Elementals

I’ll start by adding Elemental Mastery. While poking around Gatherer and looking for ways to do the types of things I wanted to do with King Macar, I came across this interaction:

Sure, we can exile our opponents’ creatures, but unless we can actually win the game from that point—or we just treat it as a one-shot effect, like a two-card Plague Wind—no one will want to play with us anymore as we let the board stagnate into oblivion while no one can play creatures.

Add in Elemental Mastery, and we can enact this plan:

Tap King Macar, the Gold-Cursed for two 1/1 Elemental creature tokens.

Pay and tap an Elemental to untap King Macar.

Use King Macar’s inspired trigger to exile the tapped Elemental and generate a Gold.

We’re now back where we started, but down 1 mana and up one Elemental and one Gold.

Repeat Steps 1 through 3, sacrificing Gold tokens to pay for Aura activations.

End with as many Elementals as required.

At this point, sure, we can have exiled all our opponents’ creatures, but we also have infinite Elementals with which to actually win the game. If you’re looking for a Pocket Combo for your Grixis-colored deck, consider this one.

Unfortunately for me, making infinite Elementals isn’t what I was looking to do with the King.

Hoard of Treasure

What I really want to do is make infinite Gold. I’m less interested in exiling creatures and more interesting in having a huge pile of treasure. I mean, the real dream has to be fulfilling the King Midas fantasy by exiling all of our own permanents and turning them into Gold, leaving us with just a lonely King Macar, the Gold-Cursed . . . right? Hello? Anyone?

Anyway, let’s see if we can start just by generating an arbitrarily large amount of Gold.

Let’s see . . . With only those six cards, we can do this:

Pay and tap King Macar, the Gold-Cursed to activate Aura of Dominion’s ability.

Untap King Macar, and trigger his inspired ability targeting Misthollow Griffin.

Resolve the ability, and create four Gold tokens (doubled twice with Doubling Season and Parallel Lives).

Sacrifice two of the Gold tokens for , and cast Misthollow Griffin (with the cost reduction from Heartless Summoning).

We’re now back where we started, but down 1 mana and up two Gold.

Repeat Steps 1 through 4, sacrificing a Gold token for each Aura activation.

In that way, we’ll be keeping an extra Gold with each iteration. It took us a hefty six cards, but we can now have as much Gold as we want! Oh, and each Gold token represents 1 mana, so it’s as though we have a personal Upwelling (that’s susceptible to Creeping Corrosion).

Here, we only have five cards. Let’s see what we can do with those.

Pay and tap King Macar, the Gold-Cursed to activate Aura of Dominion’s ability.

Untap King Macar, and trigger his inspired ability targeting an opponent’s creature.

Resolve the ability, and create four Gold tokens (doubled twice with Doubling Season and Parallel Lives).

Sacrifice two Gold tokens for , and spend it on Ant Queen’s activated ability.

We’re now back where we started, but down 1 mana and up two Gold and four Insects.

Repeat Steps 1 through 4, sacrificing a Gold token for each Aura activation and exiling the Insects for Step 2.

In that way, we net a Gold and three Insects each time and aren’t restricted by the number of creatures on the battlefield. We can have as much Gold as we want!

Again, an arbitrarily large amount of Gold means an arbitrarily large amount of mana, so as long as we brought enough Gold tokens and named a high enough number, we should be set for the rest of the game—again, barring an Akroma's Vengeance or similar effect.

However, if you really want to be rewarded for your massive hoard of gold, try this guy—

—and just imagine him sitting atop that massive pile. Oh, and you might want to bring some of this to drop him on top of:

Image from The Chocolate Cult

The King Midas Fantasy

Finally, let’s see if we can’t live the dream of controlling nothing but a board of King Macar, the Gold-Cursed and a bunch of Gold tokens. May as well turn all our opponents’ stuff into Gold in this case. If they don’t want to concede to our amazing artwork of a board state, we can spend our Gold mana on stuff to kill them over the next few turns.

Once we’ve made an arbitrarily large pile of Gold with the above combos, we can use these cards to finish off the big plan.

Mycosynth Lattice will make all permanents artifacts. Karn, Silver Golem will let us spend from amid our endless reservoir of mana to turn one such artifact permanent into a creature. From there, we can use King Macar, the Gold-Cursed with its Aura of Dominion to exile that artifact creature permanent. This includes enchantments, Planeswalkers, natural artifacts, and so on, from either our control or an opponent’s. Lands turned into creatures will be put into their owners’ graveyards for being 0/0.

When all that’s left on the battlefield are King Macar, the Lattice, Karn, and the Aura, make sure the Lattice is a creature. Activate the Aura, and target Karn with the inspired trigger. In response, activate the Aura again, and target the Lattice with the inspired trigger. In response, activate Karn to turn the Aura into a creature. When that ability resolves, Aura of Dominion will become unattached from King Macar by a state-based action for being a creature, and immediately afterward, it will be put into our graveyard by another state-based action for being an Aura that’s not attached to anything. We can then let the two inspired triggers resolve, taking away our last two non-Gold, non-Macar permanents.

Alternatively, just use Infernal Tribute to sacrifice everything you don’t want (everything that’s not King Macar, the Gold-Cursed or Gold), ending with Infernal Tribute itself.