Good news, everyone! I have invented a device to infinitely pelt dinosaurs with squirrels!
This is a janky and extremely budget casual deck built purely around a 4-piece combo of Barrage of Expendables or Blazing Hellhound, Pentad Prism or Gemstone Array, Scurry Oak, and Urban Daggertooth to infinitely recur Proliferate, because anything less would be too straight forward.
I haven't actually checked if this has been done before but it would be utterly unsurprising if that were the case.
Before you get too excited, it's a pleasant surprise if it achieves escape velocity by turn 12. It's not fast, and has limited reactive interaction, mostly relying on blocking and sometimes chump blocking to survive until it can go off.
The Combo
The combo is simple:
- Get out Urban Daggertooth, Scurry Oak, Barrage of Expendables or Blazing Hellhound, and Pentad Prism or Gemstone Array.
- Prime the pumps by giving both Scurry Oak and Urban Daggertooth a +1/+1 counter.
- This deck uses Captured by Lagacs and Unbounded Potential to do that, which incidentally also take care of setting up proliferate and the sac target.
- Neoform can also setup whatever it tutors out of the deck.
- Scurry Oak can also set itself up if you put out the Daggertooth after it.
- Pay R and a squirrel to Barrage of Expendables or Blazing Hellhound.
- Ping Urban Daggertooth, proliferating the counters on it, Scurry Oak, and Pentad Prism/Gemstone Array.
- Get another squirrel off Scurry Oak.
- Go to step 3.
- Hope no one bolts the Daggertooth in the mean time since, while they'll have an arbitrarily high toughness they'll also be receiving 1 damage for each +1/+1 counter. Alternatively, just make them indestructible.
While building up to that, you'll be getting incremental pay offs that make your existing board grow stronger, so you'll have some amount of survivability. Just hope that no one's playing a normal deck with interaction or wraths.
Setting it up is, as one might expect, a somewhat durdly task.
- Sometimes you'll have many of the pieces and just have to wait for a rock or enchantment.
- Sometimes you'll have to Neoform a Squirrel into other things. At least now we know the true origin story of Mikaeus and why he's so nutty. As it happens, he also can bootstrap the counters for us.
- Sometimes you'll have to get out a card drawer of some sort to draw cards. This deck has a land, a 2-drop, and a 3-drop to for that, the latter 2 which are Neoformable.
- Sometimes you'll have to Neoform the Hellhound out because you didn't get a Barrage.
- Neoform is typically the key way to smooth things over.
- Sometimes you'll just have to believe in the spleen of the cards.
Win Con
So that's all well and good, but you're basically spinning your wheels if you get just that out. How about actually winning?
- The above combo will leave you with 2 arbitrarily large critters, which can be a threats in their own right...
- The combo + a charged rock (Pentad Prism or Gemstone Array) + something else...
- Persistent Specimen will allow you to build an arbitrarily sized squirrel army by sometimes subbing in for a squirrel then returning to the battlefield.
- Ion Storm or Lesser Masticore will allow you to use the charge counters on the second Pentad Prism to burn faces.
- Shapers of Nature or Zameck Guildmage to draw your deck until you find the last piece on the bottom because that's always where it hides, munching on the 10mm sockets.
- The combo + Scurry Oak (requires a +1/+1 counter) will also allow you to build an arbitrarily sized squirrel army.
- The combo + Nested Shambler (requires a +1/+1 counter) will allow you to pop the Nested Shambler for that arbitrarily sized squirrel army.
- Indestructible Urban Daggertooth + 4 rocks + Ion Storm is one of my favorite ways to win, albeit the least likely to occur.
- 3 rocks fuel the 1 activation of the Ion Storm's ability to ping the Daggertooth, which of course proliferates to give back the charge counters you just spent.
- That 4th rock then also gains a charge counter.
- Repeat until all your rocks have an arbitrary number of charge counters, then zap people's faces.
- If the Urban Daggertooth has a +1/+1 counter, then you don't technically indestructible. You’ll have to wait until all that marked damage is cleared to use all the counters though. Best bet is to charge them up at the end of someone’s turn then zap at the upkeep of the next player’s turn.
