Budget Magic: $42 (5 tix) Standard Reckless Panharmonicon

by SaffronOlive // Nov 22, 2016

ᑕᓂᓯ , Budget Magic lovers! It's that time again. As I'm sure you know by now, Panharmonicon is one of my new favorite cards of all time, and before I hear you groan "not again," let me assure you that this week's deck, while based around Panharmonicon, is very different than any Panharmonicon deck you've seen before. In fact, apart from a handful of Filigree Familiars and a single Pia Nalaar, we don't have a single creature with an enters-the-battlefield trigger. Instead, we are this weird, combo-rific burn deck that's sort of hard to explain in a single sentence. Oh yeah, and the deck is only $42 in paper and essentially free online, and in the paper world, more than half of the deck's cost is in the four copies of Panharmonicon and four Harnessed Lightnings, which you hopefully already have in your collection, making the deck even less expensive!

We'll talk more about Reckless Panharmonicon after the videos, but first a quick reminder: if you enjoy the Budget Magic series and the other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube Channel to keep up on all of the latest and greatest.

Reckless Panharmonicon: Deck Tech

Reckless Panharmonicon vs. GR Energy

Reckless Panharmonicon vs. Four-Color Aggro

Reckless Panharmonicon vs. GB Delirium

Reckless Panharmonicon vs. WB Fabricate

Reckless Panharmonicon vs. Mono-White Humans

The Deck

Reckless Panharmonicon is a combo deck. We are looking to get as many copies of Panharmonicon, Reckless Fireweaver, and Quicksmith Genius on the battlefield at the same time, at which point we can win in one big turn by casting a bunch of artifacts!

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The easiest way to read Panharmonicon is "whenever an artifact or creature with an 'enters the battlefield' ability enters the battlefield, that ability triggers twice." While this reading of Panharmonicon is not incorrect, it's also minimalistic and doesn't truly capture the power of the card. If you read Panharmonicon more carefully, you'll see that it causes the ability of any permanent to double trigger, as long as it's a creature or artifact entering the battlefield that causes the trigger. What this means is that, technically, Panharmonicon causes Impact Tremors to deal two damage instead of one and Seraph Sanctuary will gain you double the life whenever an Angel enters the battlefield. It's this aspect of Panharmonicon that we are looking to exploit this week, which is why we can play a Panharmonicon deck with almost no creatures with "enters the battlefield" abilities.

The Combo

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Reckless Fireweaver and Quicksmith Genius are our two main combo pieces, and both work incredibly well with Panharmonicon. While neither has an "enters the battlefield" ability, both have abilities that trigger whenever an artifact enters the battlefield, which means that with a Panharmonicon on the battlefield, these abilities trigger twice.

Quicksmith Genius allows us to dig through our deck and find the right card for the right situation, and once we get things set up, it's not uncommon that we loot two, four, or even six times (or even more) times each turn. Instead of simply discarding a card to draw a card, in our deck, Quicksmith Genius almost works like a tutor, where we get to look at the top X cards of our library and put one in our hand and the rest in our graveyard. Meanwhile, Reckless Fireweaver is our finisher, dealing a massive amount of damage to our opponent once we get a Panharmonicon or two on the battlefield.

While it might sound strange, in the late game, it's completely possible that we deal 20 damage to our opponent in one turn with a massive pile of Reckless Fireweaver triggers. Things get even more out of control when we have both Quicksmith Genius and Reckless Fireweaver on the battlefield at the same time. With this set up, we resolve a cheap artifact, deal a bunch of damage, and do a bunch of looting until we find another cheap artifact. Then, we repeat the process a second, third, and sometimes fourth time until we kill our opponent in one big combo turn.

Artifacts

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Speaking of things that sound really strange, Cogworker's Puzzleknot is the most important card in our entire deck. While it's likely near the bottom of the Puzzleknot rankings, at least for normal decks, it's amazingly powerful in our build. The reason Cogworker's Puzzleknot is so good? It's an artifact that creates an artifact (with a triggered ability) when it enters the battlefield.

Why this matters is actually a bit confusing, so let's run though a simple scenario that exemplifies the power of Cogworker's Puzzleknot. Let's say we have a Panharmonicon and a Reckless Fireweaver on the battlefield and we resolve a Cogworker's Puzzleknot. Here's what happens: Cogworker's Puzzleknot enters the battlefield, and Reckless Fireweaver triggers twice, causing our opponent to lose two life. We also gets a trigger from Cogworker's Puzzleknot that makes a 1/1 Servo artifact creature token, and that trigger also doubles up thanks to Panharmonicon, so we end up with two more artifacts, and Reckless Fireweaver triggers twice more for each, dealing four more damage for a total of six—all for casting a single two-mana, do-nothing artifact. Of course, things get even crazier if we have more than one Reckless Fireweaver on the battlefield (which would equal twelve damage for two mana) or more than one Panharmonicon.

Just as importantly, Quicksmith Genius triggers just as many times as Reckless Fireweaver (assuming we have one on the battlefield), so we also get to loot six times, discarding excess lands or spells we don't need to find more artifacts to keep the process going and deal even more damage, until we eventually kill our opponent with a huge stack of Reckless Fireweaver triggers.

Cogworker's Puzzleknot also has one more trick: we can sacrifice it once it is on the battlefield, which allows us to trigger Reckless Fireweaver and Quicksmith Genius at instant speed (for instance, in response to a removal spell). As a result, we often just let our Cogworker's Puzzleknots sit on the battlefield until we find some of our combo pieces, rather than just cracking them to get the 1/1 token.

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While Metalspinner's Puzzleknot and Prophetic Prism don't deal as much damage as Cogworker's Puzzleknot, they are still super important to our deck because they keep generating card advantage and help us cycle through our library to find our combo pieces. If we have a Panharmonicon on the battlefield, each plays like colorless, two-mana Divinations, and it's very possible that they draw us three or more cards in the late game , which makes it easy to find more copies of Reckless Fireweaver and Cogworker's Puzzleknot.

Our card-draw artifacts are also key to maximizing the power of Quicksmith Genius. Sometimes, we are playing off the top of our deck, which means we don't have any cards to loot away to Quicksmith Genius, but when we resolve a Metalspinner's Puzzleknot or Prophetic Prism, if we stack the triggers in the right order, we get to draw first, and if we draw something we don't need, we can immediately loot the card away to our Quicksmith Genius triggers.

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Filigree Familiar and Pia Nalaar are our "enters the battlefield" creatures, and while neither is essential to our combo, they are both very strong in our deck. Filigree Familiar is an artifact, so it triggers our Reckless Fireweavers and Quicksmith Geniuses while also gaining us life and clogging up the ground by chumping for a turn. It's also card neutral, since we get to draw when it dies. As a result, it's key to staying alive against aggressive decks while also being reasonable against control. Meanwhile, Pia Nalaar makes a 1/1 artifact Thopter token, and if we have a Panharmonicon or two on the battlefield, we can end up with several flying chump blockers that also trigger our Reckless Fireweavers and Quicksmith Geniuses.

Removal

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Not much to see here. Harnessed Lightning and Fiery Temper don't really have any synergy with the rest of our deck (other than the fact that we can discard Fiery Temper while looting with Quicksmith Genius and cast it with madness), but they are sort of a necessary evil, since they allow us to interact with Smuggler's Copter and other early-game creatures, hopefully buying us enough time to set up our combo and win the game. Don't forget: Fiery Temper can also go to our opponent's face, so if we can get our opponent to three or fewer life, we can just loot a bunch of times with Quicksmith Genius, hopefully find a Fiery Temper, and close out the game.

The Mana

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I don't usually talk about the mana, but I did want to take a minute to mention that we have the full four copies of Drownyard Temple which is great in our deck. We can discard it to our Quicksmith Genius, draw a new card, and then use it to ramp by returning it from our graveyard to the battlefield. While most of the cards in our deck are pretty cheap, we do like a lot of mana because we often try to win with one big turn, which requires casting two or three two-mana artifacts and sometimes Reckless Fireweaver as well. One of the challenges of our deck is that we only get four copies of Reckless Fireweaver, which means that if our opponent has a bunch of removal and can kill them all, we'll have a hard time closing out the game. As a result, we sometimes hold onto our Reckless Fireweaver until we can cast it and a bunch of artifacts in the same turn to combo off in a way that avoids sorcery-speed removal.

Ultra-Budget Reckless Panharmonicon

No ultra-budget list this week. The version we played in the videos is already amazingly cheap at just $42 in paper and 5 tix online. Plus, as I mentioned in the intro, half of the deck's cost is tied up in the four copies of Panharmonicon and four Harnessed Lightnings, which means that if you already have these cards, the deck is as close to free as it gets!

Non-Budget Reckless Panharmonicon

This is a weird deck to upgrade because there really aren't a lot of changes to be made to the main deck. We could play many cards that are more powerful in a vacuum, but to achieve our goal of comboing off with Reckless Fireweaver, Quicksmith Genius, and Panharmonicon, we really have the best options available in Standard. One interesting possibility would be to include a Metalwork Colossus package and perhaps Skysovereign, Consul Flagship, but then I think we'd have a harder time comboing off and end up being a worse version of various UR Colossus decks (although perhaps it would be fine as a free artifact, backed up by Sanctum of Ugin to find more copies). Because of this, the only changes I made were to the sideboard. I played a couple more matches after recording the videos and ran into control decks, and these matchups were extremely difficult. While our deck was really good at drawing cards, we only have a small number of cards that matter, so if our opponent saves their removal and counters for our important cards, it's really difficult to win. As such, we add Thought-Knot Seer and Chandra, Torch of Defiance to give us more game against heavy control decks after sideboarding.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. We finished up 3-2 in our video matchups, but the record falls to 3-4 when you toss in a couple of matches against control decks I ran into after recording. As such, I'm not sure Reckless Panharmonicon is the most competitive Budget Magic deck we've had in recent months, but that doesn't really matter because it's one of the most fun and—by far—the cheapest Budget Magic deck for Kaladesh Standard. Plus, it actually combos off pretty consistently, and when it does, it's awesome! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com!