Crazy Brewing Ideas - Making Synergies Work! – Mini Installment

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EpicFreddi

27 September 2016

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Hello Tappedout!

It is I, EpicFreddi, here to bring you a mini installment of my new series (if you can even call it a “series” yet... this is literally the second part...

Today I’d like to brainstorm about a newly-spoiled card: Dubious Challenge!

Like most people, I read the card and was like “wat”. So I read it again and I was like “wat”. That’s why I’m gonna break it down for you:

• You look at the top 10 cards of your deck

• You MAY exile up to two creatures cards

• Your opponent MAY choose one of those creature cards and put it onto the battlefield under his/her control

• You put the other creature onto the battlefield under your control (not a MAY)

So like most people, especially green mages, we think Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or anything else that’s really big. But here’s the thing: Your opponent gets to choose first, so they’ll get emrakul. And since this is a sorcery, they get to attack first.

Okay, so no Emrakul right away. How about Phage the Untouchable? The opponent would lose the game on the spot?

Yeah well no. He “may” choose, but you have to. So they can ignore Phage while you have to put her onto the battlefield  we lose right away.

What to do? Well, we cheat the system of course!

We have 3 ways to go about this:

• Play cards that have negative ETB effects which are not negative for us Avatar of Discord comes to mind

• Play Creatures that benefit the opponent (in this case they would benefit us, all the “hunted” creatures for example)

• Get your creatures back

To show what I mean, I threw this pile of crap together:

4x Birds of Paradise
4x Bronze Bombshell
3x Brooding Saurian
1x Canopy Vista
3x Congregation at Dawn
4x Dubious Challenge
4x Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
4x Flickerwisp
10x Forest
1x Horizon Canopy
4x Path to Exile
4x Plains
4x Summoning Trap
2x Sylvan Caryatid
4x Temple Garden
4x Windswept Heath

This is a g/w “ramp” list with Dubious Challenge as its core.

Here we’ll use Flickerwisp/Brooding Saurian + Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to cheat the system. Since Emrakul only has protection from colored spells, we could target her (him/it/spaghetti) with Flickerwisp to exile it (I’ll call Emrakul “it” from now on. I refuse to give it a gender, it has freaking tentacles) and bring it back under its owners control, which would be us.

The other option would be Brooding Saurian, which would give Emrakul back to us at the beginning of the next end step.

Additionally we play Bronze Bombshell (which, in german, is called bronze sexbomb, which is cool) to give our opponent hard choices if we fail to find the other combo (just exile the bombshell and get it for “free” [at the cost of just 4 mana, wow!])

I slammed in 4 summoning traps too, because why not. Emrakul end of turn for 6 mana (or for free) can’t be too bad.

The rest of the deck is ramp and Path to Exile.

The build is obviously not made for larger tournaments, but I’m sure this could be a blast at FNMs.

That’s it from me. I’ll go back to prepare my Death’s Shadow Article.

Smell y’all later.