So one day I stopped on that card, and considered it. The card used to be weaker. It used to work just as advertised : you could activate your Jayemdae Tome or Library of Alexandria during your opponent’s draw phase and essentially ignore the chains’ effect. No more, the card has been promoted through errata and work as intended. “Damn how this could be good ! This kills Ancestral Recall and Braigeysers, Jayemdae Tome and Library of Alexandria and even Sylvan Libraries !” I then thought. If I could find another use for it things would look great. Except you quickly realize this doesn’t exactly stop the Tomes and LoA, it just transforms them into a respectively expensive and cheap Jalum Tome. It makes them loot, which is still a great ability, in other words it doesn’t kill those crucial cards, it merely makes them less great. And as for finding the disenchant for the Chains, it is just as good. So you have to manage your expectations with that one, people almost certainly won’t want to play their Braingeyser, Ancestral Recall and Sylvan Library, which is nice, but there aren’t all that much of those around. In that light I aimed for fun first and quickly found this nice jocker of a combo :

So here’s what happens if there are two Chains of Mephistopheles (CoM), and at least one Howling Mine in play : people draw their cards at the start of their draw phase, and then the HM triggers are put on the stack, if you don’t have any other cards in hand and can’t play that card you just drew, you won’t be able to do anything, as the CoM#1 will replace your HM draw by a discard and then “draw”, except that draw gets replaced by the CoM#2 by the milling of a card. But of course that only works if they have an empty hand. So how do we empty their hand ? Here’s the little nugget of the day :

This is not the first time Winds of Change has been at the source of a major magic inspiration, and note that it works with Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune too, and that if your deck is the one more equipped to deal with empty hands, it means you probably make those cards dead in their hand, as any Chains in play transforms a “draw 7” into a “discard 7” (and mill 7). But Winds of Change is not restricted so this will make it the default card and means we have to play red and black, and even though those casting costs aren’t that demanding and our option are open, any time I have a basis for a deck that involves only two colors inside what I’ll call the triangle of mana-virtue (Jund, or black-red-green) -that is, as I discuss in that tourney report, The Book or other 4 colors+ deck have very shaky manabases these days, and playing inside that triangle can be very helpful against those- I think of keeping it simple and if possible playing Blood Moon. So that’s what we’ll try first, blue’s usual best cards don’t work well with the plan, and neither do green or at least Sylvan Library, so it’s possible our only regret would be white’s StPs Disenchants and Moats.

The idea would be to play as much Howling Mines as you can (if you do the math, 2 Chains + 2 or more Mines is another way to deplete player’s hands such that soon the only play left would be instants luckily drawn as the first card of the turn) and hope to land two Chains (as long as you only have one, if you play it while having a HM, it still helps you loot to the second one). Now clearly the Chains, the Winds are weak on their lonesome, but we’re starting to see many synergies if not devastating combos emerging around them. While it’s not the easiest choice to make, it’s important to remember that Winds of Change is a decent tool to find other missing elements of the Combo. So how do we win ? Well I put it up there ! What, you didn’t know ? Howling Mine IS a wincon. If I remember well, it was once dubbed “the oldest trick in the book” by Michael Flores. Anyways, back then it took us some time to realize how dangerous the Howling Mine was. After a while you came to that conclusion : I’ve been decked, and yet haven’t been milled for one card; I’ve just been “mined” like a noob ! The howling Mines let the opponent draw their cards first, and drive you to the next howling mine, so soon enough everybody is drawing like crazy, have solutions to everything all the time and gets fast through their deck, until suddenly they realize that as they’re the one drawing those cards first, they’re the one that gets “decked”. But still, we probably shouldn’t expect people to ignore and let the Mine live like most people did in ’95. We need another wincon. It could be a Millstone, since almost nobody seems to play Feldon’s Cane, a Library of Leng (!),or The Rack. I chose the latter because who could resist playing that :

This is not all the fun, on top of playing many nonbos, weak cards that will leave your opponent baffled, you just have to try to imagine the matchup against the Dreams combo deck : they play Howling Mine, you play yours, they play a Black Vise, you play a Rack, they play an Underworld Dreams, you play a Chains of Mephistopheles, and then.. What the.. What ? Well I’ll leave it to you to discover how that can turn out.

Here’s the list I stopped on :

Let’s see, though, if we might just play a little less nonbos in our deck. While the double chains + mines is hilarious for a while, I felt the Winds of Change gambit might be enough, and isn’t as fragile in the face of artifact removal.

Since we can’t hope to keep our opponent’s hand empty with the mines+chains combo, we’ll just have to rely on our several “discard 7” and a few Disrupting Scepter to top that. And while it’s possible we should just play Blood Moon, as I have discovered working on the balance case, Evil Presence is actually quite good in decks that aim to empty hands fast so I’ll drop the more expensive Blood Moons and add another card that will make my opponent wonder what kind of noob I am to the mix. With that in Mind, here’s a more reasonable version :

Don’t get your hopes too high this isn’t where you get the next big thing, this is very hit or miss, but if you can take the misses, here’s the kind of nice turn 2 you can get :