Fucking hell, now that's a combo...

Sleeved this up on Saturday and it's everything I hoped it would be. Exceptional brew.

Could you please elucidate a bit more on how you get the infinite mana after having nettle sentinel and heritage druid on the field? do you need the phantasmal image? how does the sequence works to net infinite mana... (new player here)

Intruder Alarm

Hi,To loop Reality Shift from graveyard, you will need unlimited blue right? We get that from Birchlore Ranger. Is there any other way we can produce blue?

Why not run?:
Cloudstone Curio - bounce-play, getting more tutors
Aluren - would you consider aluren, reduces the mana cost and allows you to go off at instant speed
Coiling Oracle - tutors for you and can be used as a draw engine and potentially ramps

IrvRai - Birchlore Rangers is the easiest way to get infinite blue, but it's not the only way. You can do a loop involving Crop Rotation and Nantuko Tracer, and then any land that produces blue mana. Crop Rotation effectively "untaps" a land by sacrificing a tapped land and replacing it with an untapped land, so you can create infinite blue that way. There are also loops such as Chrome Mox + any blue card + Nature's Claim + Riftsweeper to generate infinite blue, so you should be good to go in effectively every situation.

Drak - I'll go down the list of cards and explain our reasoning for excluding em:

Cloudstone Curio - Now, this is actually a pretty interesting one, but our combo only needs a single green creature in hand to go off once we have Momir on the field.
The basic game plan is "play ramp/counter spells --> cast Momir --> Hack Momir + cast a green creature --> win the game."
Where Cloudstone Curio would come in handy is that last part, after we cast Momir. However, at that point, any green creature would do in order to win, which means that Cloudstone Curio wouldn't really be helping much. If Cloudstone helped ramp more consistently, or bounced another creature without needing you to play another creature, it might be better for the deck.

Aluren - Admittedly, I have a soft spot for Aluren. However, I'm not sure it would be a good for for this deck. While it effectively reduces the mana cost of creatures played after it, Aluren unfortunately costs 4 mana by itself. In addition, if we could go off at instant speed, it's likely that we could also go off at sorcery-speed without passing turn. It's also notable to mention that our Temur Sabertooth wincon, which is our main wincon, doesn't work at instant-speed, since Temur Sabertooth costs 4 mana and isn't Aluren-able. So while Aluren could help, it's only one mana away from Momir, and therefore it's more efficient to just cast Momir instead.

Coiling Oracle - This card actually used to be in the deck, and it's part of one of the optional alternate wincons. Basically, it's swap-able with Elvish Visionary, and for the most part you wouldn't notice a difference in your standard win lines. However, there are a few arguments against Coiling Oracle vs Elvish Visionary. For one, Coiling Oracle costs UG, as opposed to Elvish Visionary's 1G, which makes it more difficult to cast outside of our combo. In addition, while it's true that Coiling Oracle tutors for us, Elvish Visionary also tutors a creature to hand for us, even without a hack. Due to Momir Vig, Simic Visionary's wording, casting Elvish Visionary will tutor a creature to the top of our library, and then when it enters the battlefield, we will draw the creature we tutored. Since we believe that the more difficult mana cost is more relevant than the potential ramp of Coiling Oracle, we run Elvish Visionary instead.

If you were wondering about the alternate win with Coiling Oracle, it involves shuffling Gaea's Cradle into your library by getting it into your grave (either Chain of Vapor or Glamerdye do the trick), then putting it into your library with Nantuko Tracer, then looping Coiling Oracle and Temur Sabertooth to put the land into play untapped. You can use this to generate infinite mana through Glimpse of Nature without decking yourself..

Thanks for the great response back, I have played Momir Hack's in the past (as a much less competitive version) so I have almost all the pieces. I shall try it out.

Maybe I'm blind, but I can't see a single infinite Mana combo in this list. Would you explain to me how you produce an infinite amount of Mana?

Cole___

Currently, the primer is under construction, so we don't have a detailed description of the infinite mana combo. However, the infinite combo involves a lot of moving pieces, and a fairly complicated loop.

Temur Sabertooth, Heritage Druid, Nettle Sentinel, Phantasmal Image, Wirewood Symbiote, and two 1cmc elves. For the purpose of this guide, the elves will be Arbor Elf and Boreal Druid.

Basically, you start by having Phantasmal Image enter as a copy of Nettle Sentinel, so that every time you play a green spell, you get two untapping elves. Then, you use Wirewood Symbiote to bounce Arbor Elf untapping Boreal Druid, then you replay the Arbor Elf for 1 mana. This causes both Nettle Sentinels to untap, and you can tap Arbor Elf and the Nettles to make 3 mana using Heritage Druid.

Next, you bounce Wirewood Symbiote for 2 mana using Temur Sabertooth, and then replay Wirewood for 1 mana, which untaps the two Nettles again. Now, you can tap the Boreal Druid and the two nettles to make 3 more mana.

If you do the math, you'll notice that this loop costs 4 total mana, but nets 6 mana per iteration. This means we can use it to make infinite green mana, and then use Birchlore Rangers to make infinite blue.

AverageDragon

It took a couple times of me running through it in front of me to get it but I got there, thx. Hey, if you get a sec, check out my Momir list and tell me what you think.

Just a thought: Lys Alana Huntmaster can do the job of a Phantasmal Image copying the Nettle Sentinel, allowing you to net 3 mana per 1 mana elf you play. The pro is that it gives you another tutor, the con is obviously that it costs more and doesn't have the ability to copy something else. What do you think about that?

I am in love with cool, elaborate decks that try to win in unusual ways. It could take a while to wrap my head around this beast, but it looks like the most significant downside is not having enough mana as early as possible; countering other combo decks trying to also win on turn 4. Would you consider Pact of Negation for when you're tapped out after casting your commander?

Dankey

We used to have Pact of Negation in the deck, but we found that since it's a lot worse when you have to pay the upkeep cost, we'd rather have a different counterspell. It does very well at protecting combos on-turn, but we already are pretty resilient against counterspells, so we don't feel that pact is a good choice for this deck.

Is this a good deck for entry into cEDH? I play in a small playgroup, and all the other players have a cEDH deck, including two of them having pretty close to 100% cEDH decks. The decks are Doomsday Zur and Teferi Chain Veil (the 100% ones), and a less pimped out but still deadly Teferi Chain Veil. I have a lot of the green staples for the deck, the creatures are cheap, I have a Mana Vault, I really only need the expensive counters and Crypt.

MTGNerd08
Very much so! Hackball is a quality deck which works very well in comp metas, but more importantly, there aren't any huge investments which are specific to this deck. Almost all of Hackball's price comes from transferable staples, such as rocks, lands, and interaction, so if you decide you don't like the deck all that much, it's super easy to just build something else with the pieces. Rashmi Control is a popular swap, for instance, since they share a lot of cards.

I absolutely love the concept - I've always wanted to do something with Magical Hack effects, and this seems really awesome. The winning combo seems slightly labored though, are there no faster ways to win with less pieces?

MrTomDawson, yes, I'm sure there are, but where's the fun in that?

Wurmlover: I prefer to have my game-ending combo require a bit les assembly usually, as this makes for less chance of having it shut down. Once you've done it once, won't everyone know to target key pieces so you can't go off? The more pieces there are, the more opportunities to be disrupted.

MrTomDawson, true, but with more moving pieces, the more adaptable the combo can be, as stated in the primer, there are multitudes of ways to recover mid combo.

Also, how do you not deck yourself when doing the infinite Mana loop while using Google, since the draw isn't a may ability

Glimpse, not Google

Wurmlover

You actually have to swap to a different infinite mana loop entirely using Crop Rotation, Gaea's Cradle, Nantuko Tracer, Green Sun's Zenith, and Temur Sabertooth.

When you have drawn your library, you should have some large amount of mana from doing the (normally infinite) mana loop, which is not enough to win the game but enough to let you do just about anything else. The first, most important step of this loop is that every time you draw into Green Sun's Zenith, you should be casting it, so that you don't deck out. Be sure to have around 10 or more creatures on the battlefield, just to be sure you're netting enough mana with Gaea's Cradle.

To begin, shuffle Green Sun's Zenith into your library, then get Gaea's Cradle into your graveyard and return it to your library with Temur Sabertooth and Nantuko Tracer. If it's stuck in your hand, you can use Glamerdye to Retrace it into the graveyard, where it is then able to be put into the library with Tracer. Next, cast Crop Rotation, sacrificing a land you have on the battlefield. Search for Gaea's Cradle, put it on the battlefield, then tap it for some amount of mana. Next, use Temur Sabertooth and Nantuko Tracer to put Crop Rotation back into your library, and then draw it, usually by just bouncing a dork and replaying it, taking advantage of Glimpse of Nature's draw trigger.

At this point, you should have a land in your graveyard, a tapped Gaea's Cradle, and Crop Rotation in your hand. Next, use Temur Sabertooth and Nantuko Tracer to put the land that you sacrificed earlier back into your library, then sacrifice Gaea's Cradle to Crop Rotation in order to find it. You then put Gaea's Cradle back into your library with Tracer, and continue looping Crop Rotation and Nantuko Tracer in order to continually generate more and more mana. This allows you to generate infinite green without decking out, thanks to Green Sun's Zenith, and you can then convert it to infinite blue, and subsequently perform the winning loops as normal.

The Glimpse combo is convoluted, but thankfully, it doesn't add any extra dead pieces to the deck.

MrTomDawson

While the combo might seem fragile, it's actually very resilient thanks to the utility of "dork chaining". Since we're able to generate mana and tutor any pieces that we need, it allows us to run compact and efficient backup plans.

For example, our primary recursion package consists of Nantuko Tracer, Riftsweeper, and Scavenging Ooze. This means that if we run into almost all forms of interaction, we're able to tutor and cast a recursion spell for very little additional cost, and continue comboing off. If someone gets rid of Heritage Druid, we're able to use Birchlore Rangers, Nettle Sentinel, and Phantasmal Image to tutor chain to generate mana, tutor up recursion, and then use it. If someone exiles a combo piece, we can tutor up Riftsweeper, shuffle the combo piece into our library, and then tutor it up immediately after using a different piece. And finally, in the event that Nantuko Tracer gets stuck in the graveyard, we can tutor up Scavenging Ooze, exile it, then return it to our library with Riftsweeper.

The reason we don't use a simpler combo is that in its current state, the deck has at least 2 or 3 layers of redundancy for every core piece, thanks to the tutorable recursion. A simpler combo might work, but it would likely include additional dead cards that aren't really all that essential. One of the deck's prime appeals is its powerful resiliency, which operates effectively through interaction.

+1 from me! I have a similar type of deck with Tishana, Voice of Thunder and Greater Good/Cloudstone Curio+Intruder Alarm/Paradox Engine, but this is so much more consistent! I'll need to read through a few of those lines again. I love the complexity of the combo.

Do you ever have any issues finding a hack to set off the combo?