Graham, also known as HamHocks42 on the internet, is a Twitch streamer who adores Magic: the Gathering in all its forms and tries to find the fun, even in the most competitive and sweaty environments.
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An all-in combo deck existed prior to rotation that leveraged Breach the Multiverse, Conspiracy Unraveler, and Repository Skaab to easily mill out both players and pass the turn to your opponent's mill loss. The combo died when Repository Skaab rotated this past fall because Standard wasn't left with a way to recur Breach the Multiverse consistently, but that loop was a favorite of mine and I decided to tackle a build using lots of those same pieces but with less emphasis on combo-killing the opponent and more on the power and value you can set up with the shell.
The Core Engine
Breach the Multiverse is a powerhouse card that allows you to access some of the most powerful creatures in the entire game while also giving you massive information on your opponent's deck. The card is excellent in metas where opponents are likely to bring good creatures and/or planeswalkers to the game so you're getting value coming and going. Even creature-light decks in today's meta carry a few copies of Overlord of the Mistmoors or sometimes Atraxa, Grand Unifier, so we should be safe here. The dream is an opponent who runs Jace, the Perfected Mind, which has been known to happen.
Today's deck is going to look a lot like Domain decks you've seen in the past, but with a janky twist. Instead of Zur, Eternal Schemer, Overlord of the Mistmoors, or Atraxa, Grand Unifier, we're going to play Doubling Season in Standard.
Since the core of the deck is full of known powerhouse cards, why bother messing around with a top end that's been proven? Well, it started as a goofy experiment to see if we could make Doubling Season work in Standard, but after playing it for a while on the ladder, I can confidently say there are some games (especially the mirror) where the extra power of Doubling Season, Doppelgang, and Three Blind Mice
The Card Draw and Ramp
Dimir has been a popular color pairing in Standard for some time now, and the deck has gone through massive changes in that time. Back in October, Javier Dominguez took down the World Championship with Dimir Demons, but in the last few weeks, the demons package has fallen out of favor in place of a more aggressive build focusing around Kaito, Bane of Nightmares.
This means that meta-hating hipsters like me can start playing the demons package and see what all the former fuss was about. Of course, I wasn’t going to just net deck the previous list, but instead look at its card choices and figure out how to use that base to power up a strategy I was already going to play.
The Core
As a wise Batman antagonist once said, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Well, today's deck certainly isn't heroic by any means, so I suppose I've entered my villain arc. Fortunately, I'm able to get there with a card I have an unhealthy nostalgia for prior to its appropriate Standard ban in 2020: Agent of Treachery.
Why is This Card Problematic?
The card Agent of Treachery is a human that can steal any permanent on the battlefield when it enters. There are a number of safeguards that we see on cards like this, but none of them apply to Agent. It could have checked if it had been cast upon entering, it could have not had the card draw stapled to it, or it could at least have limited its targets to nonland permanents. Since none of those are applicable here, if you can get Agent of Treachery onto the battlefield quickly, you can start stealing your opponent's mana base, which limits their resources while ramping you up.
A card from March of the Machine that has always read like my favorite kind of nonsense is Kroxa and Kunoros. The combination of Cerberus with the serial numbers filed off and a generic hunger titan lends itself to very silly reanimator combinations that can put a ton of power on the board very quickly if you can fill your graveyard quickly. Cards like Breach the Multiverse can do this very well, but for today's deck, I decided to look into other mass graveyard filling options that just work well together.
The Main Buildaround
Kroxa and Kunoros requires a bit of setup, but fortunately they trigger on entering as well as attacking. If you can stick this unit, your opponent will need to respect it or be utterly beaten down because of the stats, but the real power in this card is the fact that it rarely ever enters alone unless your opponent has found a way to hose your graveyard.
The Unexpected Jank: A Unique MTG Explorer Deck Build
Unexpected Results is a new rare in Pioneer Masters, and I crafted it so that you don't have to! Out of all the new, powerful cards the set has brought to Arena, I decided I wanted to tackle the silliest jank rare that was clearly thrown in to pander to us casual folks still brewing around on Arena to see how big our numbers can go. Turns out, this card absolutely delivers on what it promises: inconsistent explosiveness.
Normally in these articles, I wait for the conclusion to really break down whether or not the deck is good, but I won't bury the lead on this one. This deck is inconsistent, and you will lose more games than you win if you play it, but the wins will be incredibly satisfying and unreasonably fun to pull off. If you want something goofy to jam in the play queue or against your friends, this deck is excellent, but I wouldn't register it at a local Pioneer tournament.
The Main Build Around
Orzhov life gain and drain is a powerful archetype that has been making a lot of headlines these days because of Bloodthirst Conqueror making infinite 'I win' turns very possible in Standard or even in draft. We're not going to play with that guy today, though, because I set out to build a with only four copies of a single rare with the rest of the 60 being made up of commons and uncommons.
This deck is a glass cannon that wouldn't likely survive sideboarding well, so we're playing in Best-of-One.
The Rare
It's wild to me, that they reprinted Omniscience in Magic: the Gathering Foundations, but they did, so let's do our best to break it. The main goal of this deck is to cheat Omniscience out (possibly as early as turn four) and then combo kill our opponent with a loop that's only infinite if we don't have to spend mana for spells. Like so many of my decks, this deck requires a lot of setup, clever positioning, and plain-old good draws to be successful.
If you’re a fellow fan of glass cannon combos, I’ve got a good one for you today!
The Core Combo