"If you want to make an omelette..."
Welcome to a deck tech for a deck that inspires so much joy for me. The fact that this combo actually works and can consistently (??? more on the deck's weakness later) win on turn 4-5 is absolutely hilarious. Sean from the Commander's Brew podcast had the following idea, as I'm sure many others did back when Atla Palani was first spoiled: if the only creatures in your deck are Eggs and an Eldrazi Titan (in our case,
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
), and you run non-creature sac outlets (i.e.
Goblin Bombardment
) then you can just continue to sacrifice your eggs until you hit Ulamog, then when Ulamog dies you shuffle your graveyard back into your library, and next time you crack an egg, you do it all over again. While an always returning Ulamog is cool, I think we can do a bit better...
Protean Hulk
and an unassuming card called
Irregular Cohort
are how we go from average, diner eggs to gourmet omelette. When you hit either of these off of your Atla trigger, you make 2 or more eggs instead of 1 (the fact that Protean Hulk literally has a bunch of eggs on its back is my favorite thing about this deck). So now, let's say you've got 2 eggs; you sacrifice 1 of them to continue the loop until hitting Ulamog, then sac Ulamog, shuffling your graveyard back in, and now you still have another egg left to continue the loop. Assuming your sac outlet is
Altar of Dementia
,
Goblin Bombardment
, or
Blasting Station
, you're well on your way to killing the table. But what if you're using a different sac outlet? Well, now we get to talk about a card that both solves this problem while complicating things:
Academy Rector
.
Like Protean Hulk, Academy Rector lets you go get something when she dies. That thing can be
Goblin Bombardment
,
Impact Tremors
, or
Rhythm of the Wild
, all of which are wincons if you're already doing the loop. BUT, as the deck currently exists, she also breaks the loop if you hit her before hitting Hulk or Cohort. Unfortunately, as far as I know (and I have scoured Scryfall), there's no Enchantment in Naya colors that Academy Rector can find that will let you continue the loop if you hit her. If we had access to , we could use
Animate Dead
, which would let us get back any egg we've already cracked during the loop. As it stands, our best option is
Underworld Breach
, which requires a density of cards in grave, mana to be open, and for us to be operating at sorcery speed. So, a far cry from what Animate Dead would provide us, but it's the best we've got. If we're using a sac outlet that isn't a wincon (say,
Spawning Pit
), we can use Rector to get
Goblin Bombardment
and try again next turn. Alternatively, we could get
Grasp of Fate
to set our opponent's back, or
Angelic Renewal
, which can either revive Atla or prevent the loop from being broken again (to do this, you have to stack the death triggers so that Atla's goes off first, and Angelic Renewal goes off second; if you do this, you can get back whatever egg you cracked if you hit Rector or Ulamog). So, Academy Rector is weird in that she lets you start the loop with whatever sac outlet you want, but her inclusion makes the chances of hitting Hulk/Cohort first 50%, instead of 66% if the only non-egg was Ulamog. Hopefully, though, with our top-deck tutor effects and
Scroll Rack
-type things, we can pull it off.
That's pretty much the deck, everything else is just interaction, ramp, draw, and tutors. The top-of-the-library tutors (Sylvan, Worldly, Enlightened, and the surprisingly effective
Congregation at Dawn
) are especially good because they can ensure you hit Protean Hulk first in the loop, which is ideal because you can go get Irregular Cohort, and potentially also
Mysterious Egg
and
Universal Automaton
for a total of 4 eggs, which is enough to make the combo deterministic. That's the funny thing about this combo, though; it's technically not infinite, you really do have to actually play the loop out until everyone is dead to see if you win, you can't just demonstrate the loop and say "I win" like a real infinite combo. For that reason, this is a very much a "party trick" kind of deck; your friends won't want to play against it after watching you do the thing one time.
KALDHEIM UPDATE:
Kaldheim gave us a couple new 2-cmc Changelings and
Maskwood Nexus
. I'm on the fence about this card, as using it will slow things down considerably, however it will allow us to start the combo with no worries of fizzling, since it makes our Ulamog and our Academy Rector into eggs.
