This is a midrange Bant ramp combo strategy. I did a re-working of this old standard combo deck that was centered around
Horizon Chimera
,
Fathom Mage
, and
Archangel of Thune
. When these three cards are in play, it is an almost infinite combo to draw your entire deck, make all your creatures obnoxiously large and gain a ton of life, attacking with a flying trampler in
Horizon Chimera
. My goal is to figure out the cards that enable this relatively slow combo to work in a very fast modern format. What I found out is that the combo is less important to winning the game than the other pieces I ended up using.
Arbor Elf
is our ramp of choice. After trying out
Birds of Paradise
and other 1-drop options, the little elf that untaps forests has been functioning the best, especially when paired with a
Utopia Sprawl
which also helps to fix our mana.
At the 2-drop we have
Scavenging Ooze
and
Kiora's Follower
.
Scavenging Ooze
does a great job neutralizing many of the top strategies in the format, by exiling important cards from graveyards. The fact that it gains life and adds +1/+1 counters to itself is a bonus synergy with both
Archangel of Thune
and
Rishkar, Peema Renegade
.
Kiora's Follower
at first glance just seems like copies 5 and 6 of
Arbor Elf
, but when it is used to untap
Winged Temple of Orazca
, you can actually use it's ability twice in one turn. It is an extremely versatile card, that can also untap one of our larger creatures after it attacks.
At the 3-drop we have
Rishkar, Peema Renegade
,
Tireless Tracker
and
Courser of Kruphix
. Both of these cards are powerful synergistic pieces.
Rishkar, Peema Renegade
is a bit of ramp tech that makes most of our creatures into mana-generators. Also, casting Rishkar, adding a +1/+1 counter to
Fathom Mage
will draw you two cards because of the evolve ability of the mage.
Tireless Tracker
is a potent threat that must be answered and helps to draw cards which will gain life if
Horizon Chimera
is on the battlefield. It also gives itself a +1/+1 counter to become a mana-generator with Rishkar in play. Finally, we have a single copy of
Courser of Kruphix
that gains life with each land coming into play and lets us see the top card of our library--this works well with the tracker, as well as with
Archangel of Thune
.
At the 4-drop, we have two of our combo pieces
Horizon Chimera
and
Fathom Mage
as well as a single copy of
Vizier of the Menagerie
which lets us play creatures cards from the top of our deck.
At the 5-drop we have the third piece of our combo in
Archangel of Thune
as well as
Prophet of Kruphix
. The prophet lets us untap lands and creatures on our opponent's untap step, and flash in creatures at any time during their turn or ours.
Rounding out the deck is a playset of
Path to Exile
to deal with troublesome or large creatures, and 3 copies of
Chord of Calling
which we can use for our combo's consistency as well as a toolbox enabler to find the right creature for the current situation--this makes many of our sideboard choices work.
The lands are a work in progress. I know I want to keep the
Gavony Township
and
Horizon Canopy
as they help in a pinch and don't typically hurt our consistency in the three colors. There are also 2 copies of
Field of Ruin
that deal with problematic lands as well as fixing our colors.
Overall, the deck is performing better than I expected in playtesting against the wide field of the current modern meta. I'm not sure if there are certain things that can ever push this deck into being legitimately competitive, but I'm open to suggestions. I am also very excited about including
Shalai, Voice of Plenty
to deal with opponent's removal and burn, and use her ability as a mana-sink late game.
Hadana's Climb
is a powerhouse finisher for this deck and it can flip the turn it comes into play granting one of your creatures flying and doubling it's power.
