Some morning.. I’m not sure why, but today I awoke with a brand new combo deck in mind. Just like that. I launched Cockatrice and had a working version soon after.

Stephen Menendian’s last article about his reanimator deck in the “Magic 95” format (no universal nomenclature there, I’m afraid, Eternal Central has a similar format that they call Old School 95, and reddit has a “95 Magic” entry) triggered an interest in me and some deckbuilding in that format ensued. It is with Original Type II and “Point 94” one of the few formats that satiate my mtg needs these days : each very young formats ! I started building using the Eudogames rules : Necropotence restricted, and unrestricted Hymn to Tourach. While it certainly looks good not to have those two unrestricted at the same time, having unrestricted Demonic Consultation and HtT is a major force in a format, or at least I think it would be.

That can be disagreable for sure, but it’s not necessarily an entirely bad thing as let’s face it : it’s really great to know that that tech is probably unavailable to The Deck or traditional, slow control decks in general (the consultations requires of you to win relatively fast, and BB isn’t very easy to squeeze in the deck). Menendian’s deck also has the privilege to easily put the whole 4 Consultations, since it can discard any unnecessary one to the Bazaar. Still, Bazaar or not, many combo decks are greatly reinforced by the DCs, and as of today my impression is that it is the key card of the format. I initially looked into combo decks, and, no surprise, Power Monolith combo, already very strong in 93/94, with the addition of the DCs, along with some Brainstorm and Diabolic Visions

becomes a quite terrifying combo deck. I didn’t spent too much time trying to tune that deck, it just seemed so brutal as to be a little bit on the nose (I’m not saying it crushes control, just that the combo is very reliably, very quickly assembled if you go all in). Anyways I thought of looking into other combos, some that potentially wouldn’t have been possible without Ice Age. In the meantime I had try to build some card advantage engine with Land Tax, Zuran Orb and Brainstorm in control. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, or just went the wrong way but it seemed clunky and not worth it : the numbers just weren’t there : I needed some decent amount of basic lands, which was a constraint, then I had to add some Taxes and Zuran Orbs, but I couldn’t remove the jewelry it seemed, so I ended up having a slow card-drawing engine that demanded of me to remove a lot of important slots and was tough to navigate since even with a Zuran Orb against many decks you’d have to limit your land counts to make it work, which would be more harmful to you than to them. Still what I got from that is that after a while, Land Tax makes your Brainstorms into virtual Ancestral Recalls : once you’ve taxed your deck out of its basic lands, cast Brainstorm, put back two basic lands that you’ve cared to keep in hand, then tax them back ! 🙂 I looked into the Vercursion Recursion deck by Mark Chalice : another very cool combo deck by the first great Combo Master (I won’t talk too much about it since you can learn all about it at Eternal Central for a modest price in Menendian’s history of Vintage). Like his Fork Recursion deck, there was a big focus on Timetwister to recur thing over and over, along with Fastbond to make the mana work.

That was the buildup. What I awoke with :

(Link to the tapped out entry)

It’s a very rewarding deck to play : it’s not just that you’ll sometimes take off and do unholy thing, taking turn after turn drawing stupid amounts of cards, it’s also actually quite technical at times, and demands some care in the execution, sometimes surgically so.

The engine you’re building is made of Land Tax + Zuran Orb + Fastbond.

That’s a three card combo, and not one that gives you a win on a silver platter, but on the other hand none of those cards are bad on their lonesome, they’re rather excellent, let alone the fact that Tax+Zorb is a very powerful combination already. You’ll want to start by taxing, using Zuran Orb to gain life and enable the taxing, which increases your chances to draw additional Land Taxes which increases your chances to draw the Fastbond that will let you empty your hand chock full of lands into play, to sac’ them again and again once you’ll start to shuffle your library in your graveyard. The rest is mostly card draw : everything to get the engine, and once you have it to get the graveyard recursion or Time Walk you need to keep you going. It won’t be long until your Brainstorm become Ancestral Recalls, as explained above, this is “the” deck to do that reliably and comfortably. At that point your amount of card draw combined with the scarcity of lands in your deck to draw makes the redundancy almost inescapable. If you take off, you’ll end up chaining turns after turns where you tax 12 lands, play them, gain 12 life (-1 by Fastbond, +2 by Zorb) and cast a Timetwister almost every turn. You’ll draw your entire library with Braingeyser, and then regrowth and cast your twister in the same turn. After a while you’ll have most of your permanents in play, and enough life to channel that into a gigantic Braingeyser on your opponent. In fact it’s possible the purest version should avoid Channel, as you could win by just casting several Braingeysers on your opponnent. Needless to say, since you’ll cast multiple Timetwisters, you’ll be exposed to a counterspell if they have the mana for it : this is not necessarily a disaster since what matters the most is to have the engine online. The Feldon’s Canes seem necessary, you’ll need them to feed your taxes before you can start to regularly Twist your lands in the graveyard back to your library. So while people are usually wary of putting more than two Land Tax in their deck, here we don’t have that kind of reservation : you can enjoy having an early Tax on a regular basis 🙂 Another little piece of tech that I incorporated is Nature’s Lore. That card is no Rampant Growth ! In most format it would be worse, in this one, it’s considerably better. That forest you put into play doesn’t come into play tapped. That forest is a forest, I think, not a basic one, which means it won’t just give you the color of your choice (by looking for the appropriate dual land), it will add another green on top of that, and won’t deplete your forthcoming taxing of a basic land. Also with Brainstorms and Sylvan Libraries in the deck, it doesn’t hurt to have another shuffling effect, and we’re playing four color, so we can use the help. The last piece of tech is Balance, or to be more accurate, in how and when to play it, which can take some work to master. In this deck as in most combo decks you’ll sometime seem to falter when taking off : that’s when Balance saves the day and is often about as good as a Time Walk. Maybe more importantly, by limiting their mana to one, that’s a way for you to fight one of the weak points of the deck by putting them out of Counterspell mana, along with Strip Mining their lands turn after turn. With fastbond you can empty your hand of your lands, and with Zuran Orb you can sacrifice all of them but one (you still need to keep one in play to be able to tax later on) : usually your Balances will be very close to Mind Twist + Wrath of God + Armageddon !