"Not today, Satan!" - Bianca Del Rio, RuPaul's Drag Race 6th Season
Hello, and welcome my Mardu
Through the Breach
deck, paying homage to Mardu Goryo-Brand, RIP
Faithless Looting
.
Having said that, this is more of a gimmicky thought experiment than it is a primer of decklist that'll place at a tournament. First, a history lesson...
I can remember like it was yesterday!
Fortune favoured the bold, and Mardu
Goryo's Vengeance
was an impressive combo deck that used Faithless Looting to ditch a powerful reanimation target like Grizzy-B or Emrakul, in order to cheat it out w/ Haste for (1)(B).
Simian Spirit Guide
s let this combo happen as early as turn 1, with a reliable turn 2. The deck was well known for it's impressive ability to pivot into an attrition-machine due to mainboard
Collective Brutality
,
Chandra, Torch of Defiance
s and sideboarded
Ensnaring Bridge
s, since the Goryo-combo was trivially easy to pinch off with a casual opening hand, and only took a few slots in the deck. Now that
Faithless Looting
has been banned, the deck lost a lot of consistency, and has since shifted to a Self-Mill strategy called "Neoform" involving a convoluted
Allosaurus Rider
+
Neoform
combo, to then use
Griselbrand
to draw your entire deck (thanks to
Nourishing Shoal
), to then stick a
Laboratory Maniac
(which you get mana for with
Manamorphose
, paid for with Spirit Guides) to win as early as before your opponent on the play puts their first land into play.
So why am I taking steps backwards, looking to a deck that doesn't exist anymore? Well, I wanted to build a Modern
Hellcarver Demon
deck.
The meat & potatoes
At the end of the day, this deck is a Mardu Pyromancer control shell, that makes room for a
Through the Breach
package, but also somehow makes an argument for
Whip of Erebos
. We keep our opponents on the backfoot with
Thoughtseize
,
Restore Balance
,
Yahenni's Expertise
,
Kolaghan's Command
and
Nahiri, the Harbinger
, some of the best disruption and reaction magic that Mardu has to offer, and many of them serve utility alongside our combo.
We run a number of ways of cheating
Hellcarver Demon
and
Griselbrand
into play, including the aforementioned Nahiri, as well as
Through the Breach
and
Whip of Erebos
, oddly enough. Why no
Goryo's Vengeance
? Well, we can't reanimate a non-legendary creature like Hellcarver, and Whip does an excellent job at mitigating our really painful mana base!
With combos like these...
... Who needs friends? Multi-card, mana hungry combos like this need deck thinning, and nothing does that quite like
Mishra's Bauble
and fetchlands. 9 fetchlands and 3 Baubles can thin your deck naturally, and an opening hand with a Bauble + Fetch can be really sweet if you sequence your Bauble correctly. Play them both out, then sacrifice the
Mishra's Bauble
on your main phase to look at the top card of target player's library (you in this example, but peeking at your opponents is very powerful too).
Now that you've seen what's coming, and you know that you'll be drawing a card once you pass to your opponent, you can choose to either sacrifice your fetchland in order to shuffle that (bad) card away and spin the wheel -- or let the draw happen and fetch on your opponent's turn in order to draw the card you took a peek at.
At worst,
Mishra's Bauble
is a 0 cmc slow cantrip, and that's arguably really powerful, effectively giving you a 56-card deck that lets your either manipulate a draw of your own, or gather info on your opponents deck. An argument could be made for including a few
Street Wraith
(borrowing a page out of Grixis
Death's Shadow
), but I'm not familiar enough with it to know if that's too greedy or not.
Besides that, we have a Nahiri that can +1 rummage for us every turn that she isn't ulimating Demons into play, and
Wheel of Fate
.
Monster Combo!
So what do we actually do once we "Sneak Attack" a
Hellcarver Demon
into play? Well, let's dissect that textbox.
"Whenever Hellcarver Demon deals combat damage to a player", so firstly we gotta connect with our opponent, and I promise you that hardcasting it will just make your opponent windmill slam
Path to Exile
/
Assassin's Trophy
/ literally anything onto the table on their following turn, basically
Time Walk
ing you.
"Sacrifice all other permanents you control and discard your hand". Yikes, so your reward for smashing them in the teeth is blowing up everything but your 6/6 flyer, and
One with Nothing
yourself... But wait, there's more.
"Exile the top 6 cards of your library. You may cast any number of them without paying their mana costs". That's the juice right there! Untold riches await us! So what are some nice spicy spells to hit off the top with Hellcarver?
Big money, no Whammies! $$$
First things first, you don't have until end of turn to cast spells exiled with
Hellcarver Demon
, you gotta
Restore Balance
and
Wheel of Fate
; akin to the Cascade mechanic,
Hellcarver Demon
lets you play any Suspend card that doesn't have a cmc without having to suspend it.
Restore Balance
is a wombo-combo with Hellcarver, nuking your opponent to 0 lands, 0 cards in hand, and 1 creature (since Hellcarver is still around).
