Despite boasting reliability in winning not further than turn 6 when uncontested with a totally respectable turn 5 win rate, this deck loses to any counterspell, removal or aggressive strategy - that is, pretty much everything. Yet there is always a lot to learn in seeing where and how a combo deck could be built, and in taking it to its own limit. This is the limit for a
Paradox Engine
shell in the current Standard format (KLD-M19).
What the deck does
Exploiting
Paradox Engine
and mana artifacts, this deck chains draw spells together while netting up huge mana amounts until casting an humongous
Walking Ballista
. The main avenue for a turn 5 win sees a mana rock (the 3-mana artifacts) on turn 3 and
Paradox Engine
on turn 4. If you cannot find
Paradox Engine
before turn 5, as a fallback plan (apart from simply digging into your own library by means of your draw spell suite) searching for
Paradox Engine
via either
Inventors' Fair
or
Mastermind's Acquisition
on turn 5 lets you easily win on turn 6 (you can shuffle
Mastermind's Acquisition
back into the library with
Memory
in a later moment). Before casting
Memory
, be sure to cast all the draw spells you have access to with the intention of playing all the permanents you can from your your deck so as to increase the draw spell density of your deck once you cast
Memory
.
Options that didn't make the cut
Here are some notable build-arounds I barred off. As it stands, a build heavily skewed towards draw spells is better than: any version employing mana creatures; any artifact shell maxing out on the number of combo pieces; any version built around
Refurbish
; or any version heavily relying on black tutors. You can skip this part if you are not interested in the reasons why those other builds are bad.
A or even build sporting mana creatures is about a whole turn slower than what I propound - either resorting to big card draw spells (
Pull from Tomorrow
Overflowing Insight
Commit / Memory
) or permanent drawers (
Lifecrafter's Bestiary
Vizier of the Menagerie
Vanquisher's Banner
naming Druid) in order to keep casting spells. The added latency is mostly due to the fact that if you don't focus your build into giving haste to your mana creatures from the very start (jeopardizing such an already frail plan) your creatures cannot tap for mana immediately (that is, until you find and play your
Samut, Voice of Dissent
, which incidentally should also be your win condition allowing you to attack with your whole deck in the very combo turn); this means that all of the mana sources you need in order to kickstart the combo must be already deployed on the battlefield the turn before the one when you actually start the combo out - and, actually, before you can even start searching for your
Paradox Engine
when you didn't draw it naturally.
The issue with
Whir of Invention
is that it is very expensive, and on the whole it delays the combo start in a way too often unaffordable (namely, you cannot really win through it before turn 6). However, committing heavily to the artifact theme - enlisting cheap artifacts like
Sentinel Totem
,
Prophetic Prism
or
Metalspinner's Puzzleknot
- in order to be able to play
Whir of Invention
in a more reasonable time window is not a good plan: you wouldn't want to trim on the combo slots and neither on the land count because not even draw spells in this case would grant you enough card selection to make up for sporting less pieces of the kind you need! Also note that with a draw-heavy list you don't really need a clunky draw engine like
Oracle's Vault
, an occasional big draw spell like
Pull from Tomorrow
being more efficient and flexible overall and enough to keep the combo going.
Playing
Refurbish
in order to take advantage of the card selection only a graveyard focus could grant is a flawed prospect in that you would actually give up either to the amount of synergy the deck requires in order to go off consistently (that is, adopting a graveyard-based strategy), or to the advantage
Paradox Engine
has in being a 1-card combo when properly built around: even if you draw
Refurbish
you will still have to get a
Paradox Engine
either in graveyard or in hand. Additionally, like
Whir of Invention
, being an insurance against opposing answers is worthless since you really cannot win through them.
A black version gives access to
Mastermind's Acquisition
and
Diabolic Tutor
which would represent more virtual copies of
Paradox Engine
than any other build could ever offer. However, they make the fatal flaw
Whir of Invention
has extreme: it's impossible to win before turn 6 if you use them before starting the combo in order to find a piece you lack.
Some remarks on the maindeck choices
You could think that adding
Reason / Believe
could give you more explosives draws, being able to easily sneak into the curve at multiple point before the combo starts and setting you up undeniably well. However, due to the card-hungry nature of the deck it is frequent that merely scrying ends up being irrelevant because of you needing actual cards to start the combo with - which is even more important if you still have to build your
Pyramid of the Pantheon
up, or if you play
Chart a Course
. The
Believe
half is too mana expensive in the first part of the combo when you are striving to amass mana in order to cast your big draw spells and on top of that it works against
Memory
in that it exiles itself - which is extremely relevant in a deck that strives to draw the whole deck mostly by chaining puny draw spells; in other words,
Reason / Believe
lacks the capability of actually drawing cards in an efficient enough and not so counterproductive way. I'm really sorry for not being able to play
Opt
:
Chart a Course
takes its slots because, while being able to see roughly the same amount of cards, you always have redoundant pieces to discard and always happy to have the more real cards you can get.
There could be a concern that
Pyramid of the Pantheon
could be better than a proper mana rock (like
Hierophant's Chalice
); so let's break down the card. The advantages of
Pyramid of the Pantheon
are several: when played on turn 1 it provides card advantage as it counts as multiple mana rocks while also allowing you to easily start the combo with as low as 3 lands in total, all that while giving you the possibility of casting more draw spells that you ever could otherwise before turn 5 in order to propel you towards
Paradox Engine
in case you didn't have it; and if you rely on
Cultivator's Caravan
and
Manalith
alone as your raibow rocks you end up turning a 1-card combo (
Paradox Engine
) into what actually resembles a 2- or more card combo (in that you need a minumum of 2 rainbow rocks for your combo to function - you could certainly play Prismatic Prism alongside
Hierophant's Chalice
, but then you would give up to the powerful effect early draw spells grant this deck (they digs towards
Paradox Engine
early and are chained together during the combo: this deck really needs a minimum of synergy). All such elements make
Pyramid of the Pantheon
a card that increases a lot the consistency of the deck if played turn 1. However, be warned that it is very difficult to play with
Pyramid of the Pantheon
without a proper set of support rules. You cannot win on turn 5 with
Pyramid of the Pantheon
(i.e. relying on its mana to turn the corner, that is to get to the point where neither mana nor cards are a concern) if you miss your turn 2 activation: you cannot start activating
Pyramid of the Pantheon
on turn 3, or you'll miss your turn 4
Paradox Engine
(on the back of a turn 3 mana rock) and you'll be still unable to cast
Paradox Engine
on turn 5 and win on that very turn. A corollary of such observation is that if you cannot play
Pyramid of the Pantheon
on turn 1 (followed up by a second land), your next window to play
Pyramid of the Pantheon
will be as late as during the combo itself (it would be meaningless at best to cast it at any point before that); in that case, assuming you have as low as a single mana rock already deployed, you'll need to chain cheap spells with at least one 1-mana spell in the mix in order to get
Pyramid of the Pantheon
online - while if you have spare mana rocks in hand it is better to deploy them all before anything else unless you need them as covering the role of cheap spells for getting brick counters. So, when you have to play
Pyramid of the Pantheon
at the combo start, you'll need a lot of pieces in order to get it to 3 brick counters and win straight away - which makes
Pyramid of the Pantheon
pretty a narrow card.
Gilded Lotus
is a win more, as it needs a turn-3 mana rock anyway to take you anywhere in a timely manner. There's no point in playing it.
Beyond that, the deck simply plays the best of the best as for the elements it needs. I would not tamper with the ratios between the different elements of the deck: assuming you'll mulligan any hand containing less than 2 lands, such configuration returns the best chances of getting all the pieces you need on turn 5 at the latest.
If we didn't play
Commit / Memory
,
Cut / Ribbons
would be the endgame of choice thanks to aftermath: we wouldn't need to care if it ended up in the graveyard because of our own draw spells. With
Commit / Memory
too we don't need to worry of having our finisher go into the graveyard, letting us exploit in addition all the added assets that very finisher grants us by its own vitue.
Walking Ballista
allows for having a 0-mana spell to start the combo out of nowhere - or simply to net mana, more than any other dedicated endgame could - before being shuffled back with
Memory
. On the other hand - sanctioning its maindeck inclusion over
Walking Ballista
-
Mastermind's Acquisition
(which you could easily cast by means of your rainbow rocks at the very least) allows for not featuring the endgame in the maindeck (freeing up a much needed slot) possibly being any piece you may lack at that point: you will then shuffle it back with
Memory
and cast it again to get your actual finisher from the sideboard. You'd probably want other copies of
Inventors' Fair
weren't it legendary, but surely you don't want any other non-
Island
(-like) land because you need to make full use of your mana every time and you obviously want to keep 2-landers in whatever mix they come.
The chances of this deck working are so low already that adding maindeck disruption of our own (especially as for what is currently available in the format) will damage ourself more than it could ever hinder any opponent; so we will adopt no interaction on our side (
Commit
doesn't really count, as it is an expensive spot removal/counterspell in a deck with no other forms of interaction - which makes it actually useful solely against slow midrange decks, control often having too much interaction regardless apart from some game 1s). And we don't need silver bullets for
Mastermind's Acquisition
, since we sport any piece we could reasonably ever need to fetch in the maindeck already apart from the finisher:
Paradox Engine
, little draw spells netting mana, mana rocks, removals or counterspells in
Commit
, big draw spells in Pull form Tomorrow or simply ways to shuffle the graveyard back into the library in
Memory
.
