Welcome to Hackball!
Hackball is a deterministic elfball adaptive combo deck that utilizes the interaction between Momir Vig and Sleight of Mind effects to chain through 1 mana elves thanks to the combination of Heritage Druid and Nettle Sentinel and Phantasmal Image as a nettle sentinel, which team up with Temur Sabertooth looping wirewood activates to generate an arbitraily large amount of mana. This gives us the capacity to draw the entire library through the use of Elvish Visionary.
This current iteration of hackball also has access to the powerful foodchain combo, which is also a deterministic win with a green creature in hand. The way that works is the generation of an arbitrarily large amount of coloured mana via Food Chain and Misthollow Griffin and then casting momir vig, followed by the green creature in your hand. Misthollow can be recast after every green tutor to draw the tutored creatures via momir's second ability at which point winning the game is a formality.
This iteration of the deck is tuned to minimize the slots necessary for winning the game without leaving our opponents with any resources. Through a combination of Eternal Witness Beast Within and Temur Sabertooth we can turn all of our opponents permanents into beast tokens, and then loop Reality Shift until our opponents manifest their entire libraries and have zero things left on the board. It's not flashy, but it allows the deck to close the game purely through spells that also function as valuable interaction.
Your goal as a Hackball player:
As mentioned in the opener, this is an adaptive combo deck. We're slower than similar decks such as Selvala Brostorm, but we have two amazing things going for us:
- We're a blue deck, and blue is fucking busted
- Momir Vig is a tutor machine, and can tutor all our silver bullets, allowing us to feel like we've kind of preboarded for all our matchups.
I'll explore each of those points in a little more detail:
- Having access to all the most powerful countermagic in the format is an incredible resource for a creature based combo deck. The best way for us to beat powerful hate cards is to never let them hit the table, and blue gives us that power. It also means we can play a slower game, wielding countermagic to prevent fast wins while we set up our board position to go off right after our opponents try. It's a pretty common thing in cEDH for the second combo deck to go off to win, and as a slower combo we're really counting on that to steal some of our games. Blue also gives us access to the powerful Gilded Drake, which our deck might be the best user of in the format. The only thing better than killing Linvala, Keeper of Silence is turning it on the opponent who thought it might stop us. Lastly we gain access to some number of cantrips and of course all the blue hacks, which are crucial to keeping this deck so consistent.
2.The point above I made about Gilded Drake? This is why we're probably the best. When we need it we can tutor it, and since all it takes is casting a creature, both linvala and Torpor Orb effects can't stop us. A momir list can easily be tuned to play the best creature answers to any hate card in the format, and you can have that at your disposal if you need it. Unless its humility. If you can't counter humility you're probably doomed.
Important interactions to be aware of:
Glimpse of Nature and Vizier of the Menagerie are hack effects. They don't explicitly function the way hacks to, but they function the same way for the purpose of this deck. You can stack glimpse triggers so you tutor first and then draw (this is why momir being on cast is amazing) and vizier allows you to tutor creatures to the top of your deck and then just play them from there. Vizier is also a tutor itself, and can therefor start the chain with momir all on its lonesome.
Wirewood Symbiote can be used during your combo chain to grab two creatures in addition to netting you mana. Use this to grab answers to on board permanents you thing might be problematic.
Notable exclusions:
Survival of the Fittest: We don't abuse it very well. It's usually just worse than momir. One of the reasons momir is so powerful is that green staples like this can be replaced with protection or answers.
Natural Order: We have no big green creatures to tutor for. This just isn't very good here. Ditto reasoning for Chord of Calling and Eldritch Evolution.
Coiling Oracle: People ask why we don't play this over elvish visionary. The answer is that it all comes down to that little blue mana symbol in the top right corner. This deck makes way more green mana than it does blue, so it's important to preserve all the blue mana we can. The upside of sometimes spiking a land if you draw it naturally and cast it before you combo is insanely marginal, and while the upside of tutoring a creature and getting the oracle trigger is real, the easier casting cost on visionary is ultimately more valuable. Also it's sacrilege to play elf ball without Visionary.
That's all for now everybody! I'll gladly take any questions in the comments below <3
