Hey again. Last week, we talked about creating a softlock and controlling the board. This week, we’ll be doing an in-depth analysis of a Chainer deck a reader sent in.

Here is the decklist. The first problem I immediately see is a lack of a win-condition. You’ve got the Living Death loop - I use that too in a different deck, albeit substituting Xia-Hou for Eternal Witness. That doesn’t seem like enough though. For those who don’t know, the combo works like this. First, you have to have six or more creatures distributed among your Graveyard and the battlefield. One of those creatures needs an Enter- or Leave-the-Battlefield effect, or you can have seven creatures in one of those zones instead. One of those creatures has to be Xia-Hou. You also need a Phyrexian Altar in play. You sacrifice all your creatures to Phyrexian Altar, then cast Living Death, returning all of them. Use Xia-Hou to grab Living Death, then sacrifice your field to Altar, giving you enough mana to cast Living Death again, and repeat an arbitrarily large number of times for infinite mana and/or ETB triggers.

In mono-black, another solid combo is Mikaeus and Triskelion. While I’m a big fan of Mikaeus stand-alone, Triskelion is less powerful without its brother Mike. We could include this combo, or we could focus on ending the game with a few massive creatures. We were given a few useful end-games in the form of Eldrazi a few years ago. One of these guys can serve as a decent end-game, but I’d recommend including both. While they might seem counterintuitive in a graveyard-based deck, note that you can reanimate them at instant speed with Chainer in response to the shuffle trigger. (Note - this trick doesn’t work with Blightsteel Colossus, which has a replacement effect instead of a trigger.) To get them into your graveyard, you can use Entomb, or the more-cumbersome-but-still-effective Buried Alive.

Chainer decks are all about repeatedly using Enter-The-Battlefield, Leave-The-Battlefield, and Sacrifice effects. Here, we use that theme effectively. Some especially effective cards I notice are missing include Burnished Hart, Big Game Hunter / Dark Hatchling, Corpse Connoisseur, and Thought Gorger. Respectively, those all offer either resource acceleration (counting your graveyard as a resource) or removal.

You’ll also need repeated sacrifice. When you get a bunch of creatures that you want to recur over and over, you need a way to put them in the graveyeard. We’re already playing Dimir House Guard, Phyrexian Altar, Infernal Tribute, Trading Post, High Market, and a few one-time effects. Couple this with Ashnod’s Altar and Altar of Dementia and you’ll be fine.

There are some Chainer staples you’re missing that I recommend. Mikaeus is an absolute bomb. I’m aware that your opponents’ creatures will undie on their side of the battlefield, but the advantage you get will almost always outweigh the cost. You’ll also have a sacrifice outlet on the field a lot of the time, so you can respond to whatever would kill the creature you control that your opponent owns by sacrificing Mike. If you’re really that worried about it, remember that you can often reanimate your opponents’ undying creatures with Chainer in response to the trigger.

Another important staple is Black Market. While it’s a high-priority kill, the value that you’ll get out of it while it remains on the table is notable, and at least that’s removal that isn’t going towards Chainer. Black Market is one of those cards that can win games if you can make it stick. It’s got mad synergy with another auto-include, Nim Deathmantle.

A final card you ought to consider is Bitter Ordeal. You can use this card either to exile specific cards your opponent plays, making a lot of their combos impossible, or in conjunction with infinite combos to exile all libraries.

In terms of cards that seem like dead weight in the deck, there are a few. Bloodghast and Reassembling Skeleton are pretty good with Skullclamp but are otherwise not very powerful; I wouldn’t include them. Wurmcoil Engine beats, but rarely ends games, and Blood Artist and Falkenrath Noble don’t do enough. You play a lot of sweepers - Mutilate is the worst; I’d cut it. Your creature sweepers, Kagemaro and Massacre Wurm, are redundant - cut whichever seems worse. Sangromancer is simply sub-par; while it has some cute synergies, it doesn’t do enough by itself. Liliana of the Dark Realms is also not very good - planeswalkers attract combat damage, especially in a multiplayer format. Sickening Shoal or Dismember should probably be Snuff Out. There’s no reason for Withering Boon to not be straight-up removal - it seems bad in general. Trading Post seems slow, and Caged Sun can be replaced by High Market. Graveborn Muse doesn’t do enough. Loxodon Warhammer just seems awkward. Wayfairer’s Bauble turns into Burnished Hart.

After a few edits, the final list looks like this. The deck plays smoothly, if a tad slowly, and has cards to hate out other strategies. We’re able to race other combo decks or grind out late games, and we have multiple win-conditions.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully the reader who owns this deck is satisfied with the changes, and I hope the rest of you learned something about Chainer - maybe you want to create a deck, or maybe you’re interested in it so you have a better matchup. Anyway, I’ll see you next week.