The Tarkir: Dragonstorm set brought us a lot of new and exciting legendary creatures to build around. I've been building lower powered decks a lot more lately, even dropping game changers out of my lists. That doesn't mean I don't still think about all of the degenerate things I used to do with my EDH decks so today I'm going to take a moment to go over some of the nastier things you can do with the legends from this set.

Honorable Mentions

It's May 5, which just happens to be 5/5, so I thought it was fitting to share a spicy "Top 5" list with you today. Before I launch into my top 5, it's worth sharing some honorable mentions.

I wrote about Neriv, Heart of the Storm back in the beginning of April, and I can't get over how good Neriv is with Warstorm Surge. That Red enchantment lets your creatures deal damage equal to their power to any target. Play a Malignus, which has power equal to half the highest life total among your opponents, rounded up, or a Serra Avatar, which has a power equal to your life total, and you'll probably be sending someone to the showers. Neriv is in Mardu () so you have access to all the best tutors, making this line of play a real possibility.

Betor, Kin to All, is a powerful Abzan () Spirit Dragon with an end step trigger that rewards building an army with a high toughness. If you can get up to 40 toughness, you'll have each opponent lose half their life, rounded up. If you've got Wound Reflection in play you use it on the end step to have each opponent lose life equal to the life they've lost this turn. Just stack your triggers so Betor's goes first, and it's good night, Irene, for everybody but you.

If you truly want to inspire hatred from your tablemates, there's no better way than to play a tuned Kotis, the Fangkeeper deck. When he deals combat damage you get to exile the top X cards of their library where X is the amount of damage dealt. While he's just a 2/1, you can use Hatred to pay life and give Kotis a power boost equal to the life you paid. Paying 18 life to get all of the nonland spells out of the top 20 cards of an opponent's deck won't guarantee a win, but it's the kind of play that should put you in a great position. You just need to hope they're a good sport and don't scoop to rob you of your ill-gotten goods.

Top 5 Degenerate Tarkir Dragonstorm Brews

These cards and combos are all the kinds of plays that may be frowned upon in casual low powered play. If you brew your deck for degenerate, no hold barred EDH, you'll be able to play these in higher bracketed play and you should be able to win games or threaten a win if you do it right.

5. Sidisi, Regent of the Mire and Thornbite Staff

Sidisi, Regent of the Mire can tap to sacrifice a creature and return a creature with a mana value one higher than the sacrificed creature from the graveyard to the battlefield. Thornbite Staff is an equipment that notably will untap the equipped creature when another creature is put into a graveyard from play. That means every time you tap Sidisi to use his ability, you'll get to untap him so you can do it again.

You'll need to load up your graveyard for this combo to work, but if you run token generators, it should be easy to set up a turn where you can just cycle through creatures with various ETB or death triggers to do absolutely crazy things. The token generators will let you restart a chain of activations from 1, as a token will have a mana value of zero.

If that's not enough to get your creative juices flowing, there's more to come.

4. Narset, Jeskai Waymaster and Dramatic Scepter combo

Narset will let you discard your hand and draw cards equal to the number of spells you've cast this turn. The Scepter / Dramatic Reversal combo lets you untap your nonland permanents as many times as you like if you've got enough mana rocks in play. Making infinite mana is the usual play with this combo, but with Narset you'll simply load as many cast triggers as you want so you can draw that many cards on the end step.

Do you have an instant speed wincon in your deck? Draw everything but the last few cards and then kill the table during the cleanup step of your turn. Do you have a Laboratory Maniac or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries in play? Feel free to draw your whole deck and win! Just be aware that it's probably safer to draw fewer cards and then try to trigger the Lab Man win with all those cards in your hand than to be vulnerable to someone removing your wincon while you're about to go to your end step.

3. Ureni of the Unwritten and Deadeye Navigator combo

Ureni of the Unwritten will have you look at the top eight cards of your library when it enters the battlefield. You may put a Dragon into play from among them and the rest go onto the bottom of your library in a random order. There are lots of combos you can use with Ureni to win the game, provided you have the right Dragons in your deck.

The one I'd go with is probably Deadeye Navigator. When it has a soulbond with Peregrine Drake, Great Whale, or Palinchron, you'll be able to flicker one of those creatures and untap more lands than it cost to pay for the flicker. Once you've used this combo to make infinite mana, you can soulbond Deadeye Navigator with Ureni to play every Dragon in your deck. If you've got a Dragon that can deal direct damage, you can then flicker that Dragon to kill the table.

2. Teva, the Balanced Scale and Nim Deathmantle Combo

I've put Nim Deathmantle combo in more decks than I can possibly recount, and I've definitely won my share of games with it. This combo requires a sacrifice outlet and a way to make enough mana to pay for Deathmantle activations. You usually use Ashnod's Altar or Phyrexian Altar with a creature that can create creature tokens. You sacrifice the tokens to make mana, sacrifice the creature, then pay to have Nim Deathmantle bring the creature back so you can do it again.

The Nim Deathmantle combo will often be used to make lots of mana or lots of creature tokens. With Teval, the Balanced Scale in play you don't even need to make positive mana or extra token creatures. With each iteration of the loop Teval will make a 2/2 black Zombie Druid creature token as you'll be bringing a creature back out of the graveyard. Killing a table gets super easy if you mix in a permanent like Impact Tremors, but making an arbitrarily large army of Zombie Druids will certainly put pressure on your tablemates to find an answer before your next turn comes around.

While I personally love convoluted multi-card combos it's worth noting that you can also just play Phyrexian Altar and Gravecrawler. You won't be able to make extra mana but you can recast Gravecrawler out of the graveyard for 1 mana, sacrifice it to the Altar to make one black, and do it again, gaining a Zombie Druid each time Gravecrawler comes back into play.

1. Eshki, Temur's Roar and Food Chain combo

Hey guys - we broke Food Chain! It should come as no surprise that Food Chain can be used to kill a table with a card from Tarkir: Dragonstorm. This combo lets you exile a creature to add mana to your mana pool equal to one plus the exiled creature's power. Misthollow Griffin, Eternal Scourge and Squee, the Immortal can all be cast from exile, so you simply keep exiling and casting one of these combo pieces as many times as you like. All the extra mana can only be used to cast creature spells, but that isn't necessarily a dealbreaker.

Eshki, Temur's Roar will get a +1/+1 counter every time you cast one of these creatures, but none of them are more than 3 power. Any decent Eshki deck will have lots of creatures, so all you need is one big creature once Eshki has a higher power than any of your opponents' life totals. At that point you can cast that one big creature and Eshki will deal damage equal to her power to each opponent. It's a cheeky way to shortcut to an Eshki win, but it works.

Final Thoughts

Just because a deck runs a powerful combo does not make it a cEDH deck. These cards may only push your deck up into high power territory, but if your meta isn't used to combo wincons it might still feel like a lot for them to deal with.

You probably shouldn't be running some of the cards and combos in today's column if you mostly play in low powered pods. Mid-to-high power games is where you want to be if you're looking for degenerate ways to win games, and some of these ideas might be too much for anything but high power and fringe cEDH.

I don't think any of today's ideas really make it into today's cEDH, but the tippy top of our format is rare air. It takes a lot for a card to find a home in cEDH play these days. Nearly every set will have a card or two that get discussed in cEDH forums, but it's rare to see a new staple show up and find a home in tournament play.

I didn't have any decklists for this week's column, but I'm thinking of circling back and writing a column about Sidis, Regent of the Mire, and I know I have a spare Thornbite Staff I could put into the deck. Sidisi definitely feels like a fun puzzle to solve and I do love puzzles.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!