Intro
The main purpose of the deck is to make a ton of Nyxbloom Ancients. We only need four - when you have at least 81 of each color that will always be enough to win - but it is very much conceivable that you could make twenty Nyxbloom Ancients in one turn with this deck, even with as few as 12 lands on the board. Such a turn would look something like this:
- Play a Nyxbloom Ancient, or drop it in using Flood of Tears
- Play a 3CMC all-blue copy spell such as Mirror Image, which - thanks to our friend Nyxbloom Ancient - requires only one untapped island
- Kick Rite of Replication, which again can be done with a single untapped blue source since Nyxbloom Ancient + Nyxbloom Ancient
makes all our lands tap for 9 -> we now have seven Nyxbloom Ancients and our lands tap for 2187
- Use Clone Legion and/or use graveyard recursion cards such as Colossal Skyturtle to repeat step 3
Plan A
"OK, real cool Lejos, but how do you actually win?"
So that's what Gretchen Titchwillow is for. Gretchen's activated ability allows us to pick up our entire deck for about 320 mana, and allows us to play as many lands as we want along the way in case we're only starting with about a third of that. Plan A is to do exactly that: we pick up our entire deck and then play Thassa's Oracle on an empty library. That is the main plan - but it is very much not our only plan.
Plan A+
Plan A+ is to use the Risen Reef + Risen Reef
combo empty the library without Nyxbloom Ancient ever having to wake up and walk to the mailbox. Our dream game goes like this:
- Turn 2: Play a ramp spell such as Growth Spiral
- Turn 3: Play Risen Reef and hit a land with it
- Turn 4: With a land each turn, plus an additional land each from turns 2 and 3, that is now 6 untapped lands -> we play two 3CMC copy spells - Quasiduplicate twice for example - to get two Risen Reef ETBs followed by 3 Risen Reef ETBs -> this could give us 5 more lands if we're insanely lucky and 3 if we're only a little bit lucky, and 3 is enough
- Turn 5: Kick Rite of Replication to make 8 Risen Reefs see 5 new Risen Reefs, which results in 40 more cards, and of those cards ~ 15 should be lands
- Turn 6: If we actually just untapped with about 20 lands, 8 risen reefs, and the best 7 out of about 30 nonland cards, then we can play a card like Once and Future and repeat step 5, which would get us up to 13 Risen Reefs which each see 5 new Risen Reefs -> draw 65 cards which is more than what we have left in our deck -> we play Thassa's Oracle, we win the game!
Plan B
Sometimes Thassa's Oracle could end up in exile, ruining the plan A win condition. Sometimes we might not even find a Nyxbloom Ancient after 9+ turns. Plan B is to make at least four copies of Biovisionary. There's multiple ways we can accomplish this in a single turn if we have 12+ lands - Rite of Replication being the easiest. That's assuming we didn't find Nyxbloom Ancient, if we have seven Nyxbloom Ancients on the board it becomes a perfect alternative to Plan A.
Plan C
"OK, but if a card like Narset, Parter of Veils sticks to the board, are you just dead?"
Not completely, there's one more combo that doesn't require any card draw: Lotus Field + Nyxbloom Ancient + Wakeroot Elemental
. Plan C is to use this combo to make an unlimited supply of mana and, instead of drawing cards, animate all our lands. A dozen 5/5s will usually apply enough combat damage to kill whichever player is preventing us from drawing cards, followed by the Plan A or Plan B win condition if necessary.
Plan D
To add to all of this, if we somehow lose both Thassa's Oracle and Biovisionary, we have a safer way to win than setting up our opponents to be able to boardwipe all of our lands. Plan D is to make a ton of tokens, possibly an infinite amount of them if our mana situation allows for it, using a combo such as Quasiduplicate + Timeless Witness
. We have three creatures which can be used for this, and seven of our copy spells are instants or sorceries, so this one will often just pop up during the game as a useful way to spend our turn when we can't win. We can't give our creatures haste, so this plan is not OTK.
The above is how we win, and we spend the rest of the game doing three things: getting more lands down, clearing up the board, and copying stuff.
The rest of the game
We have 13 ramp spells to help with the first part, including some big ones since we need to ramp quite deep. While we can sometimes win earlier, 12 mana worth of lands is usually the magic number. Sol Ring is our only mana rock, and earns its place by being only thing we can play on turn 1 and by being profitable in a cyclone unsummoning. Hour of Promise looks like bad value on the surface, but we really care about the fact that it can get any two lands. We have many that we really like, specifically it's usually fetching our Lotus Field + Thespian's Stage
combo. On that subject, we have four other lands that help us achieve our get-rich goals. Blighted Woodland and Myriad Landscape let us buy more lands, while Temple of the False God and Castle Garenbrig each tap for one extra. I wasn't initially going to use Verdant Mastery but it's been surprisingly good when playing a similar deck on Arena and the student cost is even better in a four-player setting. Worst case, our Gretchen Titchwillow can put some more lands down and buy some more cards. Whenever we get Biomancer's Familiar, she gets a lot stronger. And finally, Lotus Field + Repudiate / Replicate
is a super fun combo :)
For mass-removal, temporary removal is good enough for us since we don't care how scary our opponents' boards are as long as they don't have time to kill us. Something like Flood of Tears will usually get the job done, especially if we can combo it with a card like Timeless Witness to cast it on every turn. Copying a Cyclone Summoner with a copy-creature like Mirror Image can also buy multiple turns of time and get some damage through, though we have no way to go infinite and will be spending copy creatures on doing so. Solve the Equation can allow us to surge Crush of Tentacles if we need to, even though we really want to be using it to find Neoform.
On the subject of Neoform, we have a nice neoform ladder set up to go from any 3+CMC creature into Nyxbloom Ancient. By neoforming into Timeless Witness, we can get neoform out of the graveyard and cast it again to get to Shipwreck Dowser, and again to get to Greenwarden of Murasa and one more time to get to our fearless leader. Solve The Equation is, again, usually fetching neoform. Fierce Empath and Primal Command are the other two tutors I have - adding more can make the deck significantly stronger and I definitely would put in Tooth and Nail and Shared Summons, for example, if I had them. As is, though, I feel like it's already about as powerful as I want for the group I usually play with.
To help stop people from stopping us, we have a single counter spell in Plasm Capture but more often we will be using Emergence Zone or Alchemist's Refuge and then trying to continue as normal and complete the entire Plan A with our opponent's removal spell still on the stack. Equally useful is using one of these to drop the Nyxbloom Ancient on the last end step before we untap. If we're ever about to draw on an empty deck, we have multiple ways out. My favorite is to cast Once and Future and pay less than 3 green for it, and additionally either of our flash lands can allow us to Primal Command one of our lands onto our library again. Speaking of the flash lands, we can also just put a Thassa's Oracle down on our upkeep. That's much less exciting though.
And finally, the fun part: copying stuff. Since we have many plans including those which don't require copy spells, we can afford to copy whatever we want. Over half of our copy spells can target our opponents' stuff. Often we will very much want to do this, but if there's nothing good to copy then we can always make an army of fliers by copying Cavalier of Gales or Colossal Skyturtle. I've found that the more copy spells I can jam into this deck, the more fun I have playing it. For that reason we have a whopping 15 copy spells, plus two copy lands, plus Thespian's Stage which could have lots of fun targets if an opponent plays an Ashaya, Soul of the Wild for example. So that's pretty much it! Question, feedback, and advice are all highly welcome.
