I have a new obsession… and it's a squirrel. Osteomancer Adept is not only a brilliant use of morphology (the word kind), but it also represents a combo engine the likes of which we haven't seen sinceworld Breach.
If you're not familiar, morphology is the study of mormes, the smallest form of language that meaning within a word. In the case osteomancer, osteo means bone, while mancer generally means wizard, an osteomancer would be a bone wizard. Oh, and the card is pretty great too.
The Bone Wizard
This little squirrel gives us the ability to play any creature our graveyard by simply foraging, which is exiling three cards from our yard or sacrificing a food. This effectively gives all our creatures 'Escape 0 ---- Exile three other cards' or 'Escape 0 ---- Sacrifice a Food.' If we're filling graveyard constantly, this means we can effectively cast as many creatures as we can afford. Unfortunately, these creatures do have finality counter on them, so near infinite sacrifice loops like we sometimes see with Underworld Breach aren't possible. However, we have some other pieces at our disposal.
Insidious Roots and Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler create a very powerful engine because the plant tokens created by Roots can tap for mana immediately, allowing them to pay for the creatures casting off Osteomancer Adept. It's worth noting that Osteomancer's effect lasts for the entire turn, not just for creatures that are presently in your graveyard upon activation. Tyvar also gives you one reanimation for free and it can even be the Osteomancer, who will also be able to activate immediately because of Tyvar's passive.
Let's put them all together in a 75 that should, hopefully, take down the ladder, and a huge shoutout to my buddy and fellow streamer TheXiled00 for turning me onto this deck idea and combo. In fact, this deck is largely lifted from one he sent me.
My Milkshake
We need to bring all the boys to the yard. The graveyard, that is, and to do that we need repeatable mill. Snarling Gorehound fits the bill nicely because it is a cheap creature that lines up with all of our synergy, but it also triggers whenever Insidious Roots goes off and tosses a plant into play. With multiple Gorehounds and/or multiple Roots, a single trip through the combo will put enough material in your yard to satisfy another forage for the Osteomancer's ability.
Cache Grab and Seed of Hope aren't repeatable like Gorehound, but they do allow us to curve out at instant speed, put material in our graveyard, and make sure we hit our land drops, all without risking milling our combo pieces. Having something productive to do in the first few turns in Standard has never been more important, and these cards help support that. That said, we don't want to have too many noncreature cards in the deck as it could reduce the effectiveness of Insidious Roots. If we aren't milling creatures, our deck doesn't do the thing.
The Removal Suite
You'll notice that we only have one piece of removal in the main deck in Harvester of Misery. Harvy is incredibly versatile as either an inefficient board wipe/threat or, more commonly, a two-mana kill spell that puts a creature into our graveyard. We also have the bonus of being able to reanimate it off of Osteomancer if we're going up against a convoke player and our deck just hasn't comboed off yet.
As for the sideboard, we have Skyfisher Spider, Haywire Mite, and even Cankerbloom. That might seem excessive, but it's really not for a graveyard deck in best-of-three. The primary graveyard hate cards in Standard right now are Rest in Peace and Soul-Guide Lantern, and it's likely that any new ones coming in the future will be either enchantments or artifacts. For games two and three, I highly bringing in at least the Haywire Mites in nearly every matchup to deal with these threats.
The Final Task
We love seeking thrills. Once the combo goes off, we will have a MASSIVE army of plant tokens that are, themselves, massive. Unfortunately, they don't have haste given our current build and most of them will be tapped because they were paying for all the creatures we've been casting from our yard, so a one-of Imodane's Recruiter might not be enough to get the job done. Bypassing combat, though, and throwing down a Voldaren Thrillseeker can absolutely do the job.
If our combo is successful, we'll go through nearly our entire deck and one of our plant tokens will have well over twenty power. If we need to activate a couple of Rubblebelt Mavericks to put it over the edge, so be it. We can use Osteomancer's ability to cast the Voldaren Thrillseeker from our graveyard and give that gigantic plant an ability to fling itself at our enemy. This should deliver the kill shot and since we're surveilling our whole deck away, only a single copy is necessary. You'll also note the red mana is being generated from our plant tokens.
That Sounds Convoluted
It is.
I highly recommend you play this deck with two hands if you're playing it on Arena. What I mean by that is have your left hand over your keyboard to tap the space bar every time you want to accept a trigger and move on to the next. This is especially useful when you get to the bottom of the deck and don't want to surveil into your graveyard anymore but the game will ask you every time. The timer can sometimes run out while you're going through your combo lines if you aren't quick, so this technique is pretty important while you're still getting the feel for the deck.
Notable Exclusions
An Agatha's Soul Cauldron would allow you to fling every plant you generate by imprinting Voldaren Thrillseeker to it. While this might give you an edge because you no longer have to combo off with the entire deck to generate lethal damage, it does little for the deck outside of that one interaction. It feels, in my opinion, similar to Thassa's Oracle in the Modern Nadu, Winged Wisdom decks. It absolutely fits, but you win the same games whether you have it or not, so you can devote that spot in the deck to more cards that increase consistency.
Obviously these two mill dorks aren't legal in Standard, but that's the only they aren't here. If either of these beauties gets reprinted in an upcoming set, you better believe I'm making room for them.
The Budget Aspect
This deck is not only a very powerful setup, but it also is very cheap to put together both on Arena and in paper. The list contains only four mythics and twenty-two rares. The mythics are also only Harvester of Misery and these could easily be replaced with a simple Go for the Throat type effect or something like the Spinewoods Armadillo. The only rares you really need to make sure the deck works as intended are Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler, and Osteomancer Adept – even Insidious Roots is an uncommon.
Not to mention that if you wanted to purchase the deck in paper (as of this writing) the whole 75 will cost you about as much as a single copy of Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. Not a bad rate if I do say so. Just be sure to bring plenty of spin-down dice and plant tokens if, like me, you plan to be that guy at your local FNM.
Thanks for reading, and happy brewing!
