Introduction:
This is a very competitive combo deck based around Worldgorger Dragon. The whole deck is under $100 and if piloted properly performs extremely well against other budget decks. It’s capable of winning on turn 1, but more likely wins on turns 3+.
Main Goal:
Cast Anje as soon as possible,using her ability to loot through all the madness cards in our deck to find our combo pieces, cast Animate Dead targeting Worldgorger Dragon to generate infinite mana, then draw through our deck with Anje to cast Avacyn's Judgment with x=infinity.
Mulligans:
Mulligans are vital for this deck. Going down to 5 cards can happen, and it’s fine but try not to go down lower than 5 cards. You should be aggressively mulling to be able to cast Anje on turn 2 with a depletion land or fast mana spell, but keeping a good 2 or 3 land hand can be ok sometimes especially if you draw 2 tutors in your opener for example. Take full advantage of your mulls, on average i’ve personally gone to 6 with this deck, but it depends game to game
Early Game:
We want to cast Anje as fast as possible, optimally on turn 2 using something like Dark Ritual. We need her out early to start filtering through our deck to find our combo pieces. The faster you can win the better, as it gives your opponents less time to find answers, and the earlier the game is the less likely they are to have open mana for counterspells. Etc.
Mid Game:
It’s very important not to just pitch madness cards to Anje without considering the situation, this is where the true skill in playing the deck lies. Remember, with Anje, all of our madness cards basically have flash since we can play them whenever we discard. About half the madness cards in the deck are useless, but the other half are actually pretty good. For example: Dark Withering basically reads: Pay 1 Black, destroy target non-black creature and draw a card from Anje’s draw ability. It’s fairly common to hold 2-3 useful madness cards in hand and then use them as interaction or get rid of them later before you’re trying to combo off.
Late Game:
You don’t want things to stretch past turn 7 or 8. If you get to this point in the game, chances are your hand is close to empty and you’re out of resources. Your only hope here is hitting a tutor and finding a backup win con if Worldgorger is gone, and trying to slow down the game so you can live to find combo pieces/tutors.
Combos & Win cons:
Main combo:
Casting Animate Dead or Dance of the Dead targeting Worldgorger Dragon in the Graveyard results in a loop that generates you infinite mana and blinking all of your permanents infinitely.
The loop explained:
After you cast the enchantment, it will return Worldgorget to the battlefield. Worldgorger then ETBs and exiles all of your permanents, including Animate/Dance. This causes Worldgorger to die since it has no enchantment to keep it alive. After that, Worldgorger’s Leave the battlefield trigger happens, returning all of your permanents to the battlefield, including your lands and the Animate/Dance enchantment. You can then re-target Worldgorger in your GY with Animate/Dance to perform this loop again. With the Animate/Dance trigger on the stack you can actually tap all of your lands in response to the trigger each time the loop happens, which nets you infinite mana. If Anje Falkenrath is in play, she will infinitely leave and enter the battlefield, and since she has Haste, we can tap her once each time the loop happens to discard and draw until we find Avacyn's Judgment to kill the table with X=Infinity. To end the loop, just target a creature in your GY that isn’t Worldgorger.
Backup Combo:
Casting Heat Shimmer targeting any creature, then flashing in Dualcaster Mage to copy Heat shimmer will give us infinite hasty 2/2 dualcaster mage tokens. Here’s how it works: Cast heat shimmer on any legal target. Hold priority and flash in Dualcaster Mage. Have the new copy of Shimmer that Dualcaster mage created target Dualcaster mage. Let the copy of heat shimmer resolve, then use the ETB ability token of Dualcast that was just created to target the original Heat shimmer, which will create another token, etc. To end the loop, just target any other creature on the battlefield. Once we have infinite dualcasters, just go to combat and swing for lethal. This is also our only way to win if Worldgorger gets dealt with somehow.
Underworld Breach combos:
Underworld Breach is a really fun card. We usually have a bunch of junk in our graveyard, so in our deck it’s a better Yawgmoth's Will, especially since it doesn’t actually exile the card we cast. This means we can repeatedly cast Dark Ritual for example to generate mana. From there, we can cast Animate Dead or the Dualcaster combo to win the game from the graveyard. The beauty of the card is that it turns back on all of our interaction AND tutors that are in the GY, so if someone tries to counterspell Animate Dead, we can cast Red Elemental Blast from the GY to stop it. The basic idea is Cast U. Breach> repeatedly cast some ramp spells like Rite of Flame and Dark Ritual to float a bunch of mana, then use Duress effects to get rid of opponents' interaction, then cast our combo or tutor for the combo from the GY with protection for our spells like Pyroblast. One thing you want to be careful about is having enough junk in your graveyard to do the combo, I recommend counting your GY before you attempt to combo off since each cast will cost us 3 cards from the GY, and it adds up quickly.
Parts of the deck:
The deck consists of 6 main parts: Lands, Fast mana, Tutors. Draw/filter, Madness and of course Combo Pieces.
Lands:
You want to be running anything low in price that comes in untapped and taps for red or black specifically. Since it’s vital to get Anje out as soon as possible we need to ensure our lands are as fast as possible and create colored mana for Dark Ritual and Rite of Flame. For this reason, we are running a lot of basic Swamps and Mountains.
Peat Bog and Sandstone Needle: These are the only lands we are running that enter tapped. The reason they are included is playing them turn 1 usually allows us to play Anje turn 2 as they are basically a ritual effect. Also, since a lot of the time we won’t actually be casting much on our other turns, they give us the most mana when we need it: our combo turn.
Command Tower, Shadowblood Ridge, Graven Cairns, and Foreboding Ruins: Not much to say here, they fix our mana. Ridge and Cairns we usually can’t use until turn 2 but that’s fine as you shouldn’t be keeping 1 land hands.
Geier Reach Sanitarium:
Important as it helps us loot through our deck, and gives us something to sink our mana into since we don’t cast much on a lot of turns and have mana open.
Sunscorched Desert:
Alternate outlet in case Avacyn's Judgment is gone. You’ll get infinite ETBs from this when the Worldgorger combo is going off.
Fast mana:
Not too much to say here, Jeweled Amulet, Skirk Prospector and Blood Pet are really only useful turn 1 or the turn before you combo off as delayed ramp spells. The rest you play to get Anje out fast, combo off, or resurrect later with Underworld Breach.
Tutors:
Entomb is the best tutor in the deck. Not only does it find us Worldgorger at instant speed, it also puts it in the grave for us so we don't even need a discard outlet for it. Is absolutely worth the 17% of the $100 budget that it is.
Scheming Symmetry is basically Vamp tutor for us since it’s very easy to draw the card we tutor for immediately with Anje.
Mausoleum Secrets Very useful card. You’ll usually use this to find Animate Dead, Shadow of the Grave, chain tutors with Entomb, find interaction like Duress, or rarely find Dark Ritual on an opponent’s end step if you can win that turn with the Dark Ritual.
Wishclaw Talisman Extremely good as it finds us anything for 3 mana. Try to make a deal with opponents so they give it back to you, but don’t rely on it.
Interaction:
Bolt Bend Deflecting Swat for 1 mana when Worldgorger is out. Very useful and flexible card,
Duress. Inquisition of Kozilek, and Collective Brutality:
All do the same thing, and do it well. They not only get rid of a counterspell/removal spell from an opponent, they also tell us if they have any other answers and if it’s safe to combo off.
Mogg Salvage:
Because Cursed Totem, this is a flex spot depending on your meta.
Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast:
Red counterspells, stop those pesky blue players from countering Animate dead.
Draw/Filter:
Shadow of the Grave: Secret MVP of the deck. It’s common to loot through 10+ madness cards in a turn, and this lets you do all of that again. It’s because of this card you want to save up some madness cards for one big turn of cycling. It’s also fairly common to tutor for this card over combo pieces as it lets us draw a bunch of cards and potentially draw interaction/counterspells for us to combo off more safely.
Merchant of the Vale: Another Secret MVP, amazing card. He just sits in exile, and if you can't have anje on the board when you combo off, you can generate infinite mana with the loop and either use the last etb of animate dead to resurrect him or cast him from exile. From there you can loot through your deck to find Avacyn’s Judgement as long as you have at least 1 card in hand.
Faithless Looting: Pitch those basics you’re inevitably going to get stuck in your hand and find better stuff. Great since it works twice for very cheap.
Combo Pieces:
The combos are explained above, I’ll list just the pieces below.
Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead + Worldgorger Dragon: Our main win con
Dualcaster Mage+Heat Shimmer: Our Backup wincon, also how we can get around Rest in Peace for example or other GY hate.
Underworld Breach Amazing since it can bring a win out of nowhere as long as you have good stuff in the GY,or just serve as a value piece for ramp/interaction when you’re comboing off.
Madness:
Useful madness:
You’ll know these when you see them. These are cards you’ll want to discard with Anje and cast. A few examples are Biting Rain, Call to the Netherworld, Psychotic Episode, Muck Drubb, and Violent Eruption
Less Useful madness:
While many of these cards look terrible on paper, they can actually save us sometimes. For example, take Weirded Vampire. It really doesn’t do much for us, but if the turn comes back to us and we have 3 extra mana, we should definitely cast and discard it with anje on our opponent’s end step. Since it gives us a blocker. Another example is Grave Scrabbler, which we can cast and return another madness creature back to our hand to let us loot again.
