Now we’re getting to the more challenging part, that being the resolution of a main-phase
Ad Nauseam
with very little mana open. Among black combo players in EDH, people often prefer playing Ad Naus pretty conservatively as an end-step draw-spell, which makes it essentially free card-draw to set up for your combo turn. Most decks are satisfied by building their decks around this sort of Ad Naus usage, and it is quite powerful in relation to the amount of deckbuilding sacrifices you’d have to make.
However, as the high-power tables get used to seeing 5+ mana open followed by the combo player passing turn without doing anything, everyone will be holding onto their counterspells which makes attempting to go off that much more difficult. By comparison, main-phase
Ad Nauseam
s give no early forecast on what’s about to happen, and at the same time eliminate the risk of passing turns to people who might be going off on their turns. And even if you don’t draw into enough fast mana and end up passing turn, sculpting into your perfect 7-card-grip often is more valuable than risking a turn cycle where you might get countered.
For the uninitiated, here’s a pretty usual game state in terms of your board and open mana post-
Ad Nauseam
, but with some unfriendly flips to force some elaboration on possible lines one can take:
Game state: Your turn 3. You’re up against 3 blue players, two of which have 1 blue mana open. You play
Wooded Foothills
getting
Savannah
as your land for the turn, and no-one presented counterspells to the
Mana Vault
that you topdecked. You proceed to cast
Ad Nauseam
, which also has no responses. You go down to 3 life with the following hand post-resolution:
Children of Korlis
,
Grand Abolisher
,
Marsh Flats
,
Verdant Catacombs
,
Gemstone Caverns
,
Snow-Covered Forest
,
Swamp
,
Overeager Apprentice
,
Gaea's Cradle
,
Arcane Signet
,
Imperial Seal
,
Elvish Spirit Guide
,
Cabal Ritual
,
Forest
,
Vampiric Tutor
,
Flooded Strand
,
Ancient Tomb
,
Exotic Orchard
,
Snow-Covered Plains
,
Crop Rotation
,
Skullclamp
,
Polluted Delta
,
Boseiju, Who Shelters All
,
Dark Confidant
,
Serra Ascendant
,
Cavern of Souls
,
Command Tower
,
Memnite
,
Smothering Tithe
,
Animate Dead
,
Corpse Knight
,
Exploration
,
Yawgmoth's Will
,
Scavenger Grounds
,
Regrowth
,
Abrupt Decay
,
Grim Monolith
Your graveyard consists of:
Windswept Heath
,
Wooded Foothills
,
Ad Nauseam
When it comes to your opponents, this might very well be a goldfish situation assuming everyone knew what they were doing. As no-one presented any counterspells to your
Ad Nauseam
nor to your
Mana Vault
, there are very few real interaction pieces that could disrupt us anymore.
Mental Misstep
is one of the only counterspells that could still potentially threaten us because of its unique restriction to 1-mana cards, but that is only if someone was willing to take the risk by letting our
Mana Vault
resolve. Assuming everyone knew what deck we’re on, I doubt they’d let
Ad Nauseam
resolve by itself, so those facts give us already tons of information. All this being said, if someone decides to
Silence
you on the opportune moment you’re screwed, but there’s no point playing around that anyway without blue, so you can ignore that case here.
Hand-wise, however, it might look like we’re in a jam. We only got a couple of rocks and a single proper ritual, that being
Cabal Ritual
with no obvious way to reach Threshold. We’ve got no real Moxen to really start mana production either save for
Elvish Spirit Guide
, and any dreams of combo assembly are distant with our hand as-is. What we essentially need is more cards or we’re getting nowhere other than fiddling with rituals to
Yawgmoth's Will
ourselves into pretty much nothing relevant.
Fortunately though, we do have a combo “extender” in
Scroll Rack
. Rack works like a second mass draw spell with cards like
Ad Nauseam
, and with this kind of hand, Racking for 20+ cards will almost always dig us into the rest of the fast mana that are still in the deck (unless we get super duper unlucky). Therefore, the main objective for this kind of hand is to:
- Produce enough mana to tutor, play and activate
Scroll Rack
(playing and activating costs 3 mana total, so plus tutoring costs)
- Retain enough life to resolve a black top-deck tutor and survive, seeing as we only have topdeck tutors that cost life (Total cost: + 2 life)
- Use whatever we can to draw our
Scroll Rack
from the top. We have
Skullclamp
as pretty much the only reasonable option to draw cards, so we need at least 2 more mana to cast and equip
Skullclamp
. We have
Arbor Elf
and
Memnite
, so no shortage of free bodies so far (Total cost: + 2 life)
With all of this in mind, there’s a couple of decision trees that can be navigated through for more mana-positive cards, mana fixing, and finally progress towards
Scroll Rack
:
Playing Exploration with the we have access to from
Elvish Spirit Guide
, then playing
Ancient Tomb
or
Gaea's Cradle
+
Memnite
to net an extra mana from a new land drop. As we don’t have any ways to gain life from 3 and no tutors that don’t cost any life,
Ancient Tomb
is out of the equation. So, with
Gaea's Cradle
and Memnite we’ve made
Exploration
to a green
Rite of Flame
to produce , which isn’t anything to scoff at.
Next we’re going to do something that requires certain knowledge on what is in our particular list, and that is playing
Crop Rotation
with we’ve produced. There is still a
Phyrexian Tower
in the library, so we can fetch that and sacrifice
Arbor Elf
/
Memnite
to it for . This will fix our green mana to black, and also nets us mana unlike the
Arcane Signet
, which would cost mana instead. Our total mana is now in pool with
Savannah
open, and we’ve gone from 3 cards in graveyard to 6, so Threshold is now starting to look more than achievable.
From here on we can pretty easily play either
Imperial Seal
or
Vampiric Tutor
, go to 1 life, achieve Threshold and
Cabal Ritual
to get to in pool with
Savannah
still open. With one extra mana from
Grim Monolith
, all that’s left is to play
Skullclamp
, attach it to
Memnite
to draw Rack + one card, then Rack away pretty much everything that’s left in your hand save for
Yawgmoth's Will
. That means we’re racking away a total of 28 cards, which at this point is over half of our remaining library (50 cards after Clamping). We also still have one in our pool and an open
Savannah
, so let’s see what we get.
Scroll Rack
activation into:
Enlightened Tutor
,
Fellwar Stone
,
Chrome Mox
,
Cabal Therapist
,
Thoughtseize
,
Sol Ring
,
Necromancy
,
Deathrite Shaman
,
Mox Diamond
,
Overgrown Tomb
,
Squirrel Nest
,
Ranger-Captain of Eos
,
Praetor's Grasp
,
Sickening Dreams
,
Mana Crypt
,
Nature's Lore
,
Temple Garden
,
Godless Shrine
,
Noxious Revival
,
Veil of Summer
,
Tainted Pact
,
Earthcraft
,
Arid Mesa
,
Wishclaw Talisman
,
Mox Opal
,
Assassin's Trophy
,
Avacyn's Pilgrim
,
Krosan Wayfarer
.
There we go, the Christmas Land right there. Racking into
Mana Crypt
,
Sol Ring
,
Mox Diamond
,
Mox Opal
,
Chrome Mox
et al. allows for pure mana production straight into a total of 8 mana, which can be used to cast
Earthcraft
,
Krosan Wayfarer
, tap Wayfarer to
Earthcraft
, sac Wayfarer to put a land into play, play
Yawgmoth's Will
, do that all again, cast
Cabal Ritual
&
Memnite
for more mana… essentially you’ve got more than enough to just win the game on the spot with the Squirrelcraft combo. You’re still lacking an outlet (
Blasting Station
/
Corpse Knight
), but one can be fetched easily with
Tainted Pact
now that it’s the only piece you need. A
Sickening Dreams
kill is also possible here by just tutoring and casting
Angel's Grace
with
Wishclaw Talisman
and casting
Ad Nauseam
from the grave via Yawgwill to draw your whole deck, using the final rituals left to cast Dreams for well over 50 damage to the whole table.
Leonin Relic-Warder
+
Animate Dead
is not valid anymore due to using
Yawgmoth's Will
, so keep that in mind (unless you’re using Leonin in someone else’s graveyard, it can happen).
So in the end, we ended up winning from a pretty mediocre
Ad Nauseam
with white mana open at all times to Children of Korlis our way back to starting life if things look grim. Therefore, getting disrupted at the start by a
Mental Misstep
would not have been the worst thing, and in addition you can be glad due to all the protected wins you’ll be getting if people start using their counterspells only after you’ve resolved your
Ad Nauseam
. All in all, a line above average difficulty that was weak to interaction in multiple points. Luckily, however, there often is 1-2 mana open for protection post-Nauseam from played lands and the sort, as well as a ton more of actual flipped Moxen, rituals and protection to make reaching critical mass easier. Knowing the deck and what to tutor for in a given situation also helps getting these kinds of mediocre 20+ cards into actual gas and consequently wins, so goldfishing here is key.
Regarding the
Scroll Rack
activation, you could say that it’s pure luck with how much fast mana one can flip into at that point, and that is somewhat true. However, the more cards you see in a list that’s built to be this mana-positive, the less it’s about luck and more about making the odds in your favor. If you still can’t get enough mana to win despite seeing 50-80 cards in your deck, finding enough to crack that
Children of Korlis
is enough to bring you back to your golden age of high life totals and sculpt into the perfect 7 that wins you the game on your next turn.