Maybeboard


Introduction

  • Have you ever played an early Doomsday just to get your Laboratory Maniac killed?
  • Ever spent 2.5 days figuring out the correct pile on tight resources but finally messed up?
  • Did you study the Doomsday primer to find out that the perfect piles never exist? (literally, there is always something off)

Well, if you want to consistently draw your last card of the library, this deck is for you.

War of the Spark gave us reasonably CMCed Planeswalkers to draw, discard, protect and even win! This deck is an adaptive combo Doomsday which builds insurance for the combo turn with Planeswalkers.

The Combos

These are the kill engines of the deck!

Aternatives

These are somehow weaker/slower alternatives:

In the linked primer there's a comprehensive list of efficient piles, but since we play reanimation and thassa's oracle, there are other funny things we can do after we cast Doomsday

Requirements

all piles require BBB to cast Doomsday and an effect that draws you 1, called "the opener", either in your hand or available with an ability on the field.

Counting mana is the most difficult thing to do, so counting mana correctly is also a requirements, some brief guidelines:

  • Gush piles require 2 islands, you don't know how many times I failed at this
  • The most efficient piles require Gush into Lion's Eye Diamond + Yawgmoth's Will
  • If you want to try Underworld Breach instead of Yawgmoth's Will, double check you are adding Faithless Looting or similar effects because you'll need to exile 3 cards form the grave, therefore you'll be able to play only 1 card back from the graveyard. This is possible only if you have more mana, i.e. you can't use the LED routes, because you'll need to bring back the draw spall to draw into Thassa's Oracle, so all the resources must already be on the field in terms of lands or artifacts.

Thassa's Reanimation - 1BRUU

With at least 1 card in hand after the opener

If you want to be safer against creature removal, you need at least 2 cards in hand after the opener

The idea of the pile is obviously to discard Thassa's Oracle and reanimate it with Animate Dead.

Thassa's Will - R

2+ cards in hand after the opener, 4 life

Execution: - Play LED and Gitaxian Probe, hold priority with probe on the stack and crack the LED for - resolve the probe, draw and play Yawgmoth's Will - play from grave LED and crack for - play probe from the graveyard - draw and play Thassa's Oracle

If you have 2 islands, you can play this substituting Faithless Looting with Gush and therefore you don't need other 2 cards to discard in your hand after the opener. The best case scenario is that one of the islands is actually and Hallowed Fountain or Tundra, so with that mana you can play Silence.

Another important thing to notice is that Thassa's Oracle costs UU and LED gives you UUU, so you have one U to work with. After playing a Yawgmoth's Will, the cards in your graveyard can be played, so the cards you discarded with LED or Looting should possibly contain a counterspell.

Planeswalkers are spicy for Doomsday

By chance in the last tournament I've added Teferi, Time Raveler and Narset, Parter of Veils. They felt really powerful at either buying time or at protecting the combo turn! This is a direction I'd like to explore for the deck.

-Narset, Parter of Veils, draws one for the opener and let you re-arrange the doomsday pile, moreover stops card-draw engines and works wonder with wheel effects

-Ashiok, Dream Render, shuts down tutors (!!!) and basically can mill your Doomsday pile in one shot!

-Jace, Wielder of Mysteries, draw source, mill source and lab-maniac effect, very strong for what we want to achieve.

-Dack Fayden, still missing this guy.. looks awesome

Not in the current list but could make sense depending on local metagame

-Teferi, Time Raveler, protects your turn, draws one -very important opener for Doomsday- and bounces opposing Stax pieces if necessary. Powerhouse!

-Dovin, Hand of Control, protects your combo turn and stalls out the game, great diplomatic piece along with Maze of Ith, can see play with lots of creature-based decks

-Teyo, the Shieldmage, doesn't really help the doomsday pile but gives you extra protection which buys time

-The Wanderer, this can be a nice meta-call because it shuts down Purphoros-like effects thus buying a ton of time.

-Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor, draw 1 for the opener and also discards one which is nice for Worldgorger combo. Protecting creatures can be relevant for the Worldgorder or Bomberam combos. She costs 4 though..

Card Choices

Not optimal but gets the job done. The canopy lands are interesting since they can be the opener for doomsday. In general you have to pay attention with pain lands and the worldgorger combo. Every cycle of the dragon your lands will come into play, so shock lands will deal 2 if you want them untapped, pain land will deal 1 if you tap them, therefore make sure you can produce U from painless-sources before you go off for infinite. Don't be afraid to go off for less than infinite may the situation call for it. Final note on basics: if you run the version with 2 islands be sure to use a terramorphic or similar effect to put one in play before using Tainted Pact

Manabase

As for the lands, pay attention to pain stones like Talismans (e.g. Talisman of Progress). Signets are much better in this deck because they don't cost life to activate. Mox Diamond and Mana Crypt would be sweet indeed if you have them. Smothering Tithe and Dockside Extortionist are quite powerful with the Doomsday piles, because they allow you to build protected, mana-hungry, piles.

Mana Acceleration

The boys! they work well in our combo turns or enable the combo turn. In an all-in deck you probably want to play ad nauseam + angel grace, but catching people off guard in the early turns is not very likely.. so the planeswalkers route gives you some more time and protection to go off in a safer situation.

Planeswalkers

The usual blue auto-include cards plus a bunch of cantrips which are important Doomsday openers. Narset with a wheel effect is also back breaking, so tutor for it aggressively if you open her or a wheel.

Draw engines

A minimal set of counterspells, Muddle the Mixture is almost a tutor, works well for Animate Dead, Isochron Scepter, Dramatic Reversal. The weakest one is probably Spell Snare which is being replaced with Narset's Reversal in testing but didn't play in a tournament yet.

Permission

These slots are really meta-dependant, I usually encounter creature-rich decks, but if you don't, you can swap all of these cards for more counterspells, more wheel effects or PWs.

Interaction

The 4 main combo engines, try to first assemble a worldgorder or bomberman early on, then try the sceptre, if all else fails, go for doomsday/tainted pact. Unless you are served with a very strong combo hand (turn 3/4 kill) you should avoid the early kill plan in general. The combo-to-attempt order which works best for me is:

  • Worldgorger/Bomberman, can happen really fast, so fast that the risk of opponents interacting with it is slim and even if they do you don't lose much. Don't try these combos after T5/T6, especially without protection.
  • Dramatic Scepeter, the risk of performing this combo is really low, worst case is you get the scepter destroyed and you lose the Dramatic Reversal. So you can try to sneak this even without protection to bait out hate which they should save for..
  • Doomsday / Pact, the decklist allows you to perform the most efficient Gush pile, so you can go off after Doomsday with 2 islands for gush and UU to play and re-play the opener. But either you do this really early or you'll just lose UNLESS you have a bunch of planeswalkers helping you out:)

Combo Kills

The weakest here is probably intuition because of the mana cost. Intuition though is quite powerful as it's an instant tutor for whatever missing piece of which there are at least 3 instances in the deck:

  • full color source: command tower, commander's sphere, chromatic lantern
  • reanimation: animate dead, dance of the dead, necromancy
  • tutor: any 3 tutor
  • cantrip: any 3 cantrip
  • graveyard combo piece: dragon, lion's eye diamond, auriok salvagers (when you have a reanimation in hand it doesn't matter which piece they choose)
  • island: any 3 of the islands (you need 2 to go for the Gush doomsday pile)

Only imperial seal has this flexibility, which, of course, would be very nice.

Tutors

Notable Missing Cards & Extra Spice

Cards I'd like to add or at least test

  • Tale's End, looks very promising, I've never seen a match where a triggered ability shouldn't be stopped.. with added flexibility to counter legendary bombs!

  • Mana Crypt, of course

  • Dack Fayden

Meta-specific cards

At the LGS where I play there are a majority of creature based decks: elves, strange stax to midrange-value versions, mono red aggro-combo. Therefore I use a varying mix of board control/specific creature hate cards which may not be optimal but served me well:

"Cute but meh" cards

They felt a bit underwhelming, although cute in theory, are either cut or very close to being cut from the deck

  • Aetherflux Reservoir never really felt necessary. Basically the only use case for it is to combo off with Scepter when an opponent calls Pithing Needle on the Commander.

  • Trespasser's Curse was a local meta call, but probably a counterspell or a Stiffle would have done it better.

  • Exsanguinate, it is in the list because it can kill 3 players immediately but it feels most of the time as a worse version of Expansion//Explosion. Sorcery speed, no flexibility.. not a fan.

  • Triskelion was used in the earlier versions but it was always slow. Besides there are much more powerful things that are not dead-draws outside of the Worldgorger combo.

  • Flashback package for Intuition: Deep Analysis and Mystic Retrieval. They are so slow, they allow you to use Intuition like a value+tutor engine, but it takes forever to setup. Analysis is slightly better because you can embed it in some doomsday piles, image to open with faithless looting, discard analysis.. cute.. still borderline.

  • Winds of Change I just love the card, but it's a lesser version of time twister/wheel of fortune which feels underperforming a lot of times (it's ok with Narset, but that's about it)

Suggestions

Updates Add

This deck feels the most explosive I can build with my cards, I had abandoned it for a while to play around with green, but the sheer power of the Doomsday concept is just one of my favorite feelings!

I've updated to Thassa's Oracle and Underworld Bridge, needless to say this is going out of hand, it's just brutal! Still didn't update the pictures but I'll get there:)

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Casual

96% Competitive

Revision 4 See all

(3 years ago)

+1 Brain Freeze main
Top Ranked
Date added 4 years
Last updated 3 years
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

3 - 0 Mythic Rares

48 - 0 Rares

27 - 0 Uncommons

18 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.03
Tokens Bird 2/2 U, Thopter 1/1 U, Treasure
Folders cEDH, Kenrith, the Returned King EDH lists
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