An upgrade to Combros Great Depression Church Mouse Farm Collective Edition! The mana base is a thousand percent better, low quality pieces swapped for better ones, and a cleaner line to assembling the combo after a turn 3 general has been established. Having lots of land, with all ten fetches, works out pretty well, and helps to ensure the correct spread of colors on 3, which allows us to consistently play our general that turn as an Explore, which gets us to 6 mana on turn 4. Since our acceleration is very aggressive and tutor package is both broad and deep, this sets us up for comboing out with a modicum of protection on 4.
The core combo is Jeskai Ascendancy with a repeatable spell and enough animals in play to pay for it. Powerful mana sources like Magus of the Candelabra, Bloom Tender, Fatestitcher, and Selvala, Explorer Returned provide a mana profit on untaps, and can all be returned via Reveillark. Sprout Swarm is the easiest spell to loop, requiring only a small initial investment of mana to create unlimited saprolings of unlimited power, while digging through the library and generating unlimited mana, depending on the initial conditions. You simply play it with buyback, generating 3 to 4 mana from your creatures and paying the rest with other sources, jeskai ascendancy triggers, all your creatures untap, and now you have one more creature to pay the Convoke cost. Repeat until you find Anger, then pitch him to the ascendancy trigger and swing for lethal.
Flame Jab
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Life from the Loam
has a smaller initial cost, is much harder to counter with traditional means, works with parts in the graveyard or hand, but happens at sorcery speed and has more parts, making it a little dicey on some boards. Life from the loam, when cast with an ascendancy on the board, gives you three lands in hand. With one of those lands, you Retrace Flame Jab, getting another Ascendancy Trigger. The draw of this trigger you replace with life from the loam's Dredge, putting life from the loam in your hand, while you discard a second land to maintain you hand count. Finally, you cast Life from the Loam again, discarding the last of your original 3 lands if keeping whatever card you just drew feels right.
The last obvious loop is slightly luck based, and absurdly dangerous against some decks, but can come out of nowhere. Life from the Loam
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Selvala, Explorer Returned
is infinite card draw and health gained at the very definite risk of letting other combo decks win at instant speed. Assembling the combo is relatively straightforward. There are many creature tutors, enchantment tutors, and spell tutors to find jeskai ascendancy, or find another card that can next turn. Once ascendancy is in play, the whole game changes. Generating heaps of mana and going off with creature activations, such as Selvala, Explorer Returned and Jace's Archivist refill your hand with more low-cost spells, giving you more chances to dig deeper into the deck for a combo piece or tutor for one. Cards like Noxious Revival, Thousand-Year Elixir, and Chord of Calling often produce large mana swings in your favor, which let the draws continue. Intuition is obviously one of the strongest cards ever printed, and choosing what to put in the set can be the most taxing part of the deck, other than sequencing things so you don't whiff your infinite with Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre. Reveillark is your friend here, forcing the opponent to hand you one of two utility creatures, the best of which are Crystalline Crawler and Selvala, Explorer Returned. The crawler is shockingly explosive, fixing mana and providing the potential for huge turns where he survives to untap. Selvala is an obvious combo piece and mana dork, and her merits are self-explanatory. Getting Ascendancy with an intuition is totally possible, and usually looks like Enlightened Tutor
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Noxious Revival
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Sterling Grove
. For finishing up with an ascendancy in play, Flame Jab
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Life from the Loam
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Mountain
. No matter what they pick, they're doomed.
Once you have either drawn or cycled the whole deck, you have your choice of win con. Flame Jab kills players during the loop with direct damage. Sprout Swarm generates a billion hasty saprolings to win with combat damage, if you combo'd in the first main phase. With unlimited mana and your whole deck in hand, Blue Sun's Zenith provides a win without dealing damage, and Laboratory Maniac ends with no interaction whatsoever. No storm spells were included, since all of them serve pretty much the same purpose as the existing win package, but with the possibility of being blown out by Flusterstorm. As it stands, the deck is fairly resistant to countermagic and graveyard hate, with multiple ways to win outside of traditional patterns. Popular EDH counterspells like Swan Song, Pact of Negation, and Force of Will do very absolutely nothing to the Life from the Loam loops, while Remand and Venser, Shaper Savant can't stop Sprout Swarm. The small number of counterspells in this deck are aimed mostly at preventing Redirect or Reverberate effects killing us with our own Blue Sun's Zenith, and protecting ascendancy. The small removal package is pretty similar, built to respond to instantly deadly threats and remove the occasional hatebear. One surprising thing is how resilient the combo is against stax type effects. A Bloom Tender on their own can smash through the heightened costs of Thorn of Amethyst and Trinisphere combined, and Gaddock Teeg doesn't seem to mind people drawing a billion cards, as long as they happen a few at a time.
