Fatestitcher/Kiora's Follower (x2) + Illusionist's Bracers +
Chalice of Life
- This is the win condition of the deck. This combo will allow you to cause infinite life-loss for the opponent. This combo can be accomplished as early as turn 4:
Turn 1 - Land
Turn 2 - Land, Kiora's Follower
Turn 3 - Land, Fatestitcher
Turn 4 - Land, Illusionist's Bracers, Equip Bracers to Fatestitcher, tap and target Kiora's Follower and a Land. Use Kiora's Follower to untap Fatestitcher. This will allow you to untap all of your lands. Play
Chalice of Life
. Do the same targeting sequence as before, but this time target
Chalice of Life
instead of the land. This will allow you to tap and untap
Chalice of Life
as many times as we need.
I felt the best shell for this deck would be a control deck, allowing me to protect my pieces while they are assembled, and draw cards religiously enough to get to the pieces.
Non-Permanent Spells:
The best control cards for this style of deck are counterspells, and control spells that cantrip.
Remand - Fantastic card. Allows us to dig further into our deck while countering a spell for a turn.
Mana Leak - The other counterspell in the deck, and is very efficient for the cost.
Repeal - Bouncing permanents (even our own if necessary) and drawing a card.
Into the Roil - Same as Repeal, but can more easily handle larger permanents.
Simic Charm - Protects our permanents, acting almost like another counterspell, and bounces problem creatures.
Permanents:
We wanted permanents that either untap other permanents, or can simply tap to activate.
Fatestitcher - This is our main target for equipping
illusionist bracers
. Eventho the combo will win the game outright, we can still win the game if we can untap
Chalice of Life
enough times. This can also untap any of our other non-land permanents to start other combos if we need it. Fatestitcher is also great, because we can start the combo even if our opponent is able to wrath our board, thanks to its Unearth ability.
Illusionist's Bracers - This is what will be equipped to Fatestitcher to create an infinite untapping combo. After it is equipped, it will allow us to target two creatures or artifacts with Fatestitcher's ability. We target another Fatestitcher or Kiora's Follower with one, and another permanent with the other. The other permanent is hopefully
Chalice of Life
.
Chalice of Life
- This is our third piece of the puzzle. Once we have the combo piece necessary, we can tap and untap
Chalice of Life
and infinite amount of times, killing our opponent with life-loss.
Merfolk Looter
- If we target this with the combo, and we have at least one card in our hand, we can cycle through our deck indefinitely until we find the card we need to win. This can also allow us to get Fatestitcher into our graveyard, allowing us to use its Unearth ability.
Kiora's Follower - If we target this card with the combo, it will allow us to untap all of our permanents as many times as we want. Since this creature can also untap
Chalice of Life
, it can replace the Fatestitcher in the combo. It works in the exact same way as Fatestitcher in regards to our combo.
Sideboard:
The main cards that will stop us in our tracks are cards like
Stoney Silence
and Leyline of Sanctity. Obviously, we need to have as many answers to enchantments as we can get, so Naturalize and
Back to Nature
are the best answers for both. The latter can also help us immensely against Bogles, which is rampant at my LGS.
Other cards that may give us problems are removal and aggressive creatures. AEtherize will act as our "Wrath effect", helping us survive against any decks that want to attack every turn. It will only delay the attack, but that may be all we need. This card will help against Affinity, Bogles, Infect, etc.
If we anticipate our opponent is going to be using more spot removal, we need more countermagic to stop them. I went through a lot of different cards to figure out which counterspells would work best alongside Remand and Mana Leak, and I believe that Dissipate and Dispel are the best choices. In my current meta, having spells in the graveyard is almost as good as having them in your hand. If we can remove them from the game instead, we would be in much better position. Dissipate also works great against some control decks, so having an additional counterspell to take them on.
Just remember that since it's a combo deck, it may not be the most consistent deck, but this one is surely going to be a blast to play. We interact with our opponent through control, and we draw cards to keep things rolling, so we're never stuck, not doing anything. I know there are cards out there that would be better for the deck (lands, Cryptic Command), but for the sake of keeping this budget, we will see how this deck performs without them.
Thanks in advance for all the response and feedback.
