Locations
I present Toni Portolan's Temur Harmonizer
Temur Harmonizer | ECL Standard | Toni Portolan, Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed
- Creatures (8)
- 1 Wistfulness
- 3 Icetill Explorer
- 4 Mightform Harmonizer
- Instants (20)
- 1 Into the Flood Maw
- 1 Thunder Magic
- 2 Spell Snare
- 2 Spider-Sense
- 3 Burst Lightning
- 3 Sear
- 4 Consult the Star Charts
- 4 Full Bore
- Sorceries (5)
- 1 Analyze the Pollen
- 4 Stock Up
- Enchantments (2)
- 2 Earthbender Ascension
- Lands (25)
- 2 Forest
- 3 Island
- 3 Mountain
- 1 Willowrush Verge
- 2 Ba Sing Se
- 2 Steam Vents
- 2 Thornspire Verge
- 3 Escape Tunnel
- 3 Starting Town
- 4 Fabled Passage
Export Arena
Over the course of coverage, this deck was frequently labeled "Splinter Twin" ... Which isn't exactly right.
 |  |
Splinter Twin in its heyday was a truly special deck, for many reasons (and some of them just splitting hairs). Two-card combo decks have substantial limitations, like dealing "only" 20 damage (sometimes even less); or playing with cards that aren't very good outside of a specific combo.
 |  |
 |  |
Draco Explosion, for instance, only plays one Draco, but lots and Lots and LOTS of ways to try to get rid of Draco, as it's so miserable to draw.
Splinter Twin was a flexible card that could rack up all kinds of goofball value in its heyday. In my match to secure Top 16 in the tournament that put 'Twin on the map, I actually put a Splinter Twin on a Manic Vandal. I couldn't Preordain into my proper combo but the Manic Vandal sat there and blew up all my Caw-Blade opponent's Batterskulls and Spellskites to the point that they could never really make a move.
In a key Swiss match to stay alive during the middle of the day, I put Splinter Twin on a Consecrated Sphinx. This was cool because I was drawing not only hella cards, but Hella HELLA cards. More importantly, tapping my Sphinx in this way kept it from being forced to attack by Gideon Jura, which would have spelled doom instead of so much cardboard in hand I was discarding.
For its part, Deceiver Exarch was so tactically appropriate. You could always find something annoying to do with it. Like pick a fight on the opponent's end step, tapping their Blue mana so you could get a Jace in play the next turn. Or tapping a Squadron Hawk in response to it being pants'd up by a Sword of Such-and-Such.
These cards were both individually good - great together - and could do a limitless amount of damage (not just 20).
I am actively smitten by Standard Temur Harmonizer, but it's far different from Splinter Twin. If anything I see it as a slower, if much stranger, analogue to Premodern Dreadnought combo decks.
Plan A
This was something that certain members of the coverage team seemed a bit perplexed about. What turn can this deck win? How does it do so?
The answer (according to Our Hero's testing at least) is turn four. You play Mightform Harmonizer for its Warp cost...
... Then play Fabled Passage...
When Landfall triggers, target the Harmonizer. But hold priority! Sacrifice the Fabled Passage for Mountain, and cast Full Bore.
This will make Mightform Harmonizer a 28-power, hasty, trampling death machine FOR THIS TURN ONLY. Warp and all.
Missing the order on when you full Bore (4 to 7, double + double) can be embarrassing. I once made my Harmonizer only 19 power, and probably deserved to lose the game. Spoilers: I didn't.
How did I do this? I doubled 4 twice, 8 and then 16, then added 3 to 19... Which is so So SO not 20 and certainly not 28.
At this point you can probably figure out a couple of things.
First of all, this is not a two-card combo. It's a three-card combo. Three is so not two. And Escape Tunnel is so not Fabled Passage! At a minimum, the Mountain you search up is going to be tapped, so if you attempt the combo on turn four with an Escape Tunnel, your Mightform Harmonizer won't even get haste.
For another thing, you're capped at 28 damage naturally. 28 is more than 20, but sometimes your opponent will have blockers. And if you're a dummy (like I was that one time) you won't even get to 20. In any case, 19, 20, 28... None of these numbers is infinity.
But that's just Plan A.
Plan B
 |  |  |
The most seductive aspect of this deck is that you can just sit around playing Magic: The Gathering for lots and lots of turns. You can interact with your opponent in a number of different ways. And even though you're naturally a combo deck, your opponent can't really exploit you the way they can other Standard combo decks.
What do I mean by this?
Today most builds of Jeskai Control (or Jeskai Midrange) play 2-3 copies of Jeskai Revelation, and manage to make room for a Rest in Peace. Many Azorius Control decks run multiple copies of Kutzil's Flanker main deck. At a minimum, there are loads of Soul-Guide Lanterns in almost every kind of sideboard.
Why?
Because the right kind of graveyard hate can completely cut off an opposing Superior Spider-Man deck. Some versions of the new Elementals deck can just never beat one of those main deck Rest in Peaces. Their decks have cardboard. The cardboard has text you can technically read. But the payoffs of these decks will often be clunky, slow, or unrealistic to achieve. In the case of Kutzil's Flanker, you might get the hapless opponent to spend a bunch of mana on cards like Awaken the Honored Dead, and another 4 mana on Superior Spider-Man... Only to respond with 3 mana that steals their turn and maybe a ton of cards' worth of value.
In another part of the metagame, poor Badgermole Cub is desperately trying to put out the fire all over its fur. Temur itself plays a ton of cards that interact with specifically Badgermole Cub on one or two mana. Spell Snare can answer the Cub on the draw, as can Thunder Magic and Burst Lightning. For Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed, basically everyone had cards that could interact with Badgermole Cub on turn two, so Badgermole Cub decks did much worse on the whole than they did just one week earlier.
On balance the creatures in Temur Harmonizer all have four or more toughness. What deals with 4 toughness? Sear, sure. But even there sometimes they have five or more toughness thanks to Full Bore.
Point being most of the removal in the format that interacts with 4 toughness is sorcery speed (Iroh's Demonstration, Day of Judgment, Ultima)... Meaning in most cases it's too slow to stop a Harmonizer-driven combo kill. This can potentially change, but removal wasn't set up appropriately for the Pro Tour, and the online universe hasn't caught up yet, either.
|  |
 |  |
The ability to play a mid-range game gives rise to additional pocket combos. None of them are actually better than Mightform Harmonizer + Full Bore, but in the right matchups, they might certainly look unbeatable.
Plan C I
 |  |
What really made me fall in love with Temur Harmonizer was the fact that the deck ran so much card advantage. Like AS MUCH card advantage as an Azorius Control deck!
This is the aspect of the deck that reminds me of Dreadnought in Premodern.
 |  |
OF COURSE you can win by putting Phyrexian Dreadnought next to Stifle on turn two. If your opponent stops you from killing them but DOESN'T have the kill themselves, they now have to play the next ten turns before they figure out what they're going to do, when.
The problem is that you only got to this point, having to figure out how to win with your 2+ card combo deck on turn x because your opponent probably stopped you from killing them early on. The fault points of Temur Harmonizer and Premodern Dreadnought are the same. You have to commit two (or more) cards to a win, and your opponent can answer it with one card. One Sear / one Swords to Plowshares. One Into the Flood Maw / one Naturalize. Same / same.
So, that is what's cool about Temur. You have access to lots and Lots and LOTS of cards. You realize that the opponent can really only max out on seven interactive cards when they pass the turn, and even then, they might not be able to cast them all. So, your objective is to amass so much cardboard materiel that seven cards is not enough to stop you. In Premodern that is the feature / bug text on Portent.
The delayed draw on this cantrip actually helps you to stockpile a card past your seven-card hand.
You use Gush and Flash of Insight to make a perfect hand. You will Will WILL resolve your combo!
Same / same in Standard Temur Harmonizer. Icetill Explorer can play a pretty good Explosive Vegetation (for the cost of an Explosive Vegetation). You can use Stock Up and especially the instant speed Consult the Star Charts that lets you have at least nine cards on your own turn to pick a fight with.
The cool thing about Temur is that you don't have to do the same old Harmonizer + Full Bore + Fabled Passage combo to win on turn 20. In fact you might not have enough basic lands in your deck to accomplish that late in the game. Instead, it's about finding a path and lacing your cards together for a win, if not the specific proscribed win.
For example...
| | |
You can play an Escape Tunnel to start, and actually make your 2-power Explorer impossible to block! Then go from there! You have two Harmonizers in play. What can you do with them? Is it right to play them for four, or save mana if you're not going to try to win with Full Bore? Might the last two points from Burst Lightning complete your opponent's 20 life points?
I can tell you that playing Temur Harmonizer is challenging and rewarding like no other Standard deck. It's powerful, but potentially punishing. Yes, you have "I win" draws... But far fewer than you might wish for. Instead, you have to get to figure out how to re-play one copy of Wistfulness with no reanimation cards, get around the trigger on Kona, Patchwork Beastie with both Cavern of Souls and a protection enchantment in play, and choose very specifically which land(s) get Earthbent.
Then they "get bent." Fun? Kind of. Rewarding though, for sure. I hate to say this is the Magic: The Gathering equivalent of eating your vegetables, but we all know what spinach does for Popeye.
LOVE
MIKE
