Whimsical

I've been looking for inspirations on ways to use cards that feels like it's working outside those cards' expected parameters/use-cases. Things that feel like they hit strategies that WotC might not have thought about when printing the cards.

For instance, one of the most popular expressions of this is the open secret that Tivit, Seller of Secrets actually functions better as an artifact-combo commander than as a voting commander - every ETB or combat hit makes 5 artifacts, guaranteed, which makes Time Sieve combos easy.

Or, in terms of decks I've brewed/been brewing, Zevlor Elturel Exile as a poison-proliferate deck. Doesn't work great, but the idea is to try and spike the board with multiplied proliferate triggers, so I can tick people up by 3 poison per "single target spell plus proliferate as an upside" spell. Turns out that people just focus you and your commander out of the game pretty much immediately if you try that, but I digress.

Or, using Mutate as a mechanic not to try and actually proc on-mutate effects, but just to strip "legendary" off cards that are balanced around it as a mechanic, like Kiki-Jiki. Mutate him into a nonlegendary, and you can infinitely multiply him during your prior opponent's end step, and overrun the board during your turn.

It's effects like these that I really enjoy exploring, the cases that make people stop and say, "Wait, it works like that?" or, "Wait, you did all that just to do this?" It scoops a lot into the art form that is jank deckbuilding, and I'm curious to know what little corners of the MTG design-space you all have found funny little interactions in.

I was thinking about vaccines and their usefulness, when it occurred to me that, in using vaccines, we've sort of pigeonholed viruses into behaving the way covid does. Haven't we?

If a virus is slow-mutating or distinct enough, then it goes the way of polio or smallpox - that is, nearly or completely eradicated from the world, especially in countries wealthy enough to vaccinate en masse.

So the only kind of viruses that are capable of thriving for very long are those that spread fast, and therefore mutate fast enough that vaccines can "miss" like they do sometimes with the flu. And if a virus maintains lethality above some socially-determined threshold, people take it seriously enough to isolate and kill it off. So it kinda feels like humanity "made" covid, not in a lab, but sort of by default, by killing all the other behaviors of treatable/preventable plagues that could have existed.

Are we setting ourselves up for more fast-moving covid-like viruses in the future, by vaccinating the way that we do?

I guess for this to be any evidence toward changing our practices, it would have to be the case that there's a viral "ecosystem" in which vaccinating against one virus makes more room for others, and I don't know if that's true.

Are covid-like viruses simply an inevitability, or could a change in practice have reduced the likelihood of such a thing happening?

I'm looking to make a $50 budget deck which you can see here.

The deck feels generally well-balanced for normal play, but seems to have the issue that it can't really win until it draws one of its combos, those combos being:

Ivy Lane Denizen + Herd Baloth/Scurry Oak Vigean Graftmage + Faeburrow Elder/Kami of Whispered Hopes/Incubation Druid Devoted Druid + Swift Reconfiguration

The Ivy Lane combos produce infinite creatures, the other combos produce infinite mana, with Devoted Druid also letting grab infinite nonland topdeck-casts from Falco by spending the -1/-1 counters. Once I hit any of them, I can crank out enough resources to make a play toward winning the game.

However, the game feels awfully slow and inconsistent when it revolves around drawing at least one of three specific cards, plus one of the 1-3 matching combo pieces, and then having both on the field, uncountered, long enough to win the game. Feels fragile, more than a lot of combo decks I see others go for.

Am I doing this right? I currently have Threats Undetected and Shared Summons in the deck to try and help set myself up for this a bit better, and I figure that my draw/scry options, with Falco's help, can dig pretty far for cards like these, but I want to know if maybe I'm going about this totally wrong.

https://www.moxfield.com/decks/tTrk0SJM0kKSpiVEpsJ18g

If you look at the link you might... still not fully understand the goal of the deck, and that's because there isn't one. Or to be more precise - the goal of the deck is to defy consistency, and avoid having a single "goal" altogether. To do so many Jank ideas at once that every game will represent a new adventure. I want it to take a dozen games before I ever find myself playing the same strat twice.

Sidenote before continuing, budget is $50.

By keeping the theme mostly to things with the word "copy" on them, and with a little ingenuity, I think that I can make a deck that can consistently be the most nonconsistent combo deck anyone at my LGS will have ever seen.

For examples of what I have so far:

[[Hornet Queen]] + [[Mystic Reflection]] = 5 queens and 16 backup dancers, all flying deathtouch, with total power 26. Maybe not as "game winning" as a 9-mana combo "should" be but it'll force a boardwipe if anything ever will and make 3 people at a table scared as hell, so we rock it.

[[Kiki-Jiki, the Mirror-Breaker]] + Mutate. Oh right I forgot to mention this is also a mutate deck, because there's a critical benefit to mutate: it strips away "legendary". If I have Kiki-Jiki on table and mutate over him, my opponents get one round to remove him (less if I use a Flash mutate). Otherwise, during my prior player's end step, I make infinite clones by targeting the now nonlegendary Kiki with himself, and they won't go away until my end step. Enough time to kill a table.

And as long as we're packing mutate, [[Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief]] gets a free ticket to ride along as well. Unlikely to win any games directly, but by golly if it isn't fun to get double value on those spells.

[[Spellskite]] + [[Venerated Rotpriest]]. These two don't directly combo on their own, but if I have a way to make a copy of the spellskite, then the next time any player casts a targeted spell I can pay 20 life to kill them on the spot. That's a lot even by commander standards but if Aetherflux combo players can pay 50, then clearly 20 is a steal, so we run it. Shut the fuck up about our lack of lifegain, it's fine. Life is a resource.

Then we get to more "traditional" combos, like [[Dualcaster]] + Cloning spells, Kiki-Jiki + [[Pestermite]], and of course [[Kalamax]] himself + [[Reverberate]] to make him infinitely powerful given a timely reverb during an opponent's turn. Threw in a [[Biovisionary]] for good measure.

I acknowledge that this deck is primed to technically be best under [[Riku of Two Reflections]] but he's pricy against my budget, he's an obvious threat who's liable to get insta-removed, he's 5 mana, and he's just not as fun as having a big-ass dinosaur who sometime has 12 trillion counters on him. I further acknowledge that, for a combo deck, this one does an awful lot of the "giving the table a round to poke at my threats" space that combo decks normally exist to avoid, but I'm prepared to swallow that in the name of Janky glory.

I am not looking to shore up the above two concerns; my focus is instead on adding more jank combos to this deck, or cards that help fortify existing ones. This is a deck that is, in essence, designed to live off of the natural resonance of cards whose effects "rhyme", which ideally go a little bit insane if you poke them in just the right way (such as with Mutate, which is such a beautiful mechanic that I can and have ranted for hours about how much of a shame it is that WotC decided to make it parasitic and therefore unlikely to return anytime soon).

And also, to remind everyone about both the theme of this deck and my normal rule-of-jank: No tutors allowed, unless they're fucking stupid!