With so much of Magic: the Gathering's design seemingly focused on casual Commander play where giant effects and crazy interactions are critical to the game's success, lots of incredibly powerful interactions find their way into formats like Standard. Wizards has a keen eye for effects that are known problems, so safety valves are commonplace with cards often limiting eligible targets or only triggering once per turn. Today, we're working with two such examples and finding a way around them so they can work together to create a semi-infinite that's good enough to win the game.
The Combo’s Core
Whiskervale Forerunner is a card that's a little too small to be a control finisher and a little too big to fit most aggro decks, but it's just right for our purposes today. When it becomes targeted for the first time each turn, you look at the top five cards of your deck and put a creature with mana value three or less from among them onto the battlefield. This effect can only trigger once per turn since it will only happen on the first target, but what if the targeting ability creates a copy?
Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds has another insane ability that lets all your nontoken creatures tap to copy a token creature that entered the battlefield this turn. The wording on this is incredibly specific so it can be competitively costed creature without allowing very easy Splinter Twin scenarios. Overly complicated Splinter Twin scenarios, however, are still very possible.
Kicking It Off
In order for Ghired's ability to copy Whiskervale Forerunner, Whiskervale Forerunner needs to be a token, and what better way to make a token quickly than Molten Duplication? At only two mana, it produces a token copy that Ghired can copy, but it also targets the Forerunner for the first time in the turn. Even if you don't have Ghired on the battlefield, there's a chance you'll spin into it off this trigger and go nuts.
Keeping It Going
The deck is loaded with cheap creatures that the Forerunner can cheat onto the battlefield with its trigger. Every one of these has haste because Ghired will give them the ability to copy the brand new Forerunner and keep the chain moving. The ones selected are also great because they include key members of the prowess decks that are running rampant on the ladder, so your opponent will likely kill them on sight. Rarely does one let a Monastery Swiftspear or Slickshot Show-Off untap if given an opportunity.
Charming Scoundrel is probably the most valuable of the hasty setup pieces, though, because of her ability to generate treasure tokens. These will allow you to drop the Forerunner earlier and possibly even Forerunner and Molten Duplication on the same turn. If mana's no trouble and you topdeck it, you can also use the discard/draw mode to keep digging for answers.
This is a spot in the deck where you can easily make substitutions as well for budget reasons. Cards like Frantic Scapegoat or Cunning Coyote will literally work just as well as many of the rares included here. Heck, even Gingerbrute could get the job done and it's literally a common.
Sealing the Deal
If the combo is successful, you'll have a field full of hasty creatures that are all tapped and a giant army of Whiskervale Forerunners that don't have haste. In marches the uncommon that has proven its worth time and again in Standard, Imodane's Recruiter. As a three-drop creature, it grants haste to the whole team including itself, so it can easily keep the chain going if you don't have enough Forerunners for lethal yet, or it can boost the team once it's huge for the alpha strike. The card is honestly nuts and I don't understand why it's mere cents in paper when Monstrous Rage is worth three dollars.
The current list also includes Rustler Rampage as a way to untap your team including your hasty friends to either keep the combo rolling (if your opponent has too many blockers) or to add more combatants to the swing. It's a secondary plan and, honestly, could probably stand to be cut in hopes of making our main gameplan more consistent.
The Deck
Modification Considerations
I've exclusively played this deck in Best-of-One and it feels like the kind of deck that shines in such an environment. The moment the opponent knows the gameplan, they can easily target the combo pieces and shut down what we're trying to do. Rebuilding this many pieces after such a blowout would be difficult to say the least, and the current card pool in Standard lacks Storm the Festival or Collected Company effects that might be able to quickly repair the board. Samut, Vizier of Naktamun can do excellent work in refilling our hand against an otherwise empty board while also synergizing with our combo, but she's only one creature.
If you were to attempt this in Best-of-Three, I would recommend swapping out some consistency in the combo with cards like Charming Scoundrel and Rustler Rampage and bringing in combat tricks found in the prowess builds like Monstrous Rage or Dreadmaw's Ire so the deck has a more consistent aggro early game at the risk of the combo not being as explosive when it goes off.
Frankly, a version that's less all-in would likely win more games even if it combos less often.
Conclusion
I want to give a huge shoutout to Twitch community member GoKalper for submitting this combo to the weekly brewing stream on my channel. I hadn't considered this interaction before and the deck they originally submitted included combat tricks and was more aggro-focused. The deck above and featured below is my adjustment to it in the hopes of getting those sweet combo clips. The deck is a delight to pilot in the way so many Splinter Twin style combo decks are and the joy of watching an army spring up from what was an empty board moments before is incredibly satisfying. This probably isn't a good deck to climb the ladder if you're serious about getting to Mythic, but if you want to have some explosive moments, it's an absolute joy.
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