Preamble
I was flipping through my Constructed decks after our latest draft and thought hard about dismantling this old beauty. It was kind of stale and wasn't any less jank than the day I built it. It either needed an update or to go away forever. Lucky for me, while I was reading up on the latest cheeky infinite combos that Magic has to offer I discovered that Devoted Druid has been reprinted since the last time I looked and the price has gone way down! It's now viable for my cheap ass! Time to throw the hefty 8-mana Channel the Suns + Nivix Guildmage combo out the window and introduce:
METEOR MAKER 2.0
Now in Bant(tm) Flavour!
COMBOS
As always, the goal here is to fit as many budget infinite mana combos into the deck as possible. We're not trying to be fancy and tutor our way to an elegant and reliable solution, we're throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. If any of it does then we get infinite monkeys or bananas or whatever. This deck still operates on three combos. When you're dealing with at least 2 cards x 4 copies per combo, that fills out the decklist pretty fast.
- Kiora's Follower or Voyaging Satyr + Freed from the Real + Any Dual Mana Land (Simic Growth Chamber)
- Grand Architect + Pili-Pala
- Devoted Druid + Vizier of Remedies
This deck is supposed to be budget but it's not like all of these cards are actually very cheap. You're still looking at $12 for some of these playsets and that really adds up. My only advice would be to start collecting when you're 10 and amass enough old cards that some day you can spend hours looking for your old copies that you swear you had, so that you can save like $3 a piece on a gimmick deck. Totally worth it.
*Note: I've been seeing Freed from the Real listed with Selvala, Heart of the Wilds a lot but this combo depends on having a creature with at least three power which is highly unlikely in this deck. Plus she costs $14 right now. No thank you. We'll stick with cheaper alternatives here.
Generating infinite mana is but a means to an end. The end of course being that your friends no longer ask if you want to play Magic the Gathering with them. You are in your late 20s now. Your deck boxes are collecting dust on your board game shelf. You sometimes flip through them after drafts and remember the good times. Now when you create a dumb new deck you have to post about it on the internet to get any sort of approval. You wonder if you could have accomplished something great if you had never picked up this hobby. The average age of Olympic athletes is younger than you are. Stay focused, that's the end game here.
Anyways so if you've got infinite mana lying around you might as well use it for something. And the Wizards over at the Coast have been cooking up some cool "new" stuff since I last reworked this deck in... 2017 maybe? Let me take you through the Finishers I've settled on in this reworking:
FINISHERS
Fireball and Conflagrate: The gold standard. Turn infinite mana into infinite damage. Importantly, these cards allow you to direct the damage to multiple players at once, completely ruining the experience for as many friends as you want. You could just rock a playset of both of these cards as your finishers but variety is the spice of life.
Hydra Broodmaster: Yes you could play pretty much any Hydra and it'll come into play with X +1/+1 counters on it. Yes you could give it Trample, that would work. As long as someone doesn't remove it first. Especially if you can only wipe one person per turn with your Big Beefy Boy. Well how about instead you make infinite Beefers and they all have infinite power/toughness? You heard me right. Read it and weep, nerds.
Torment of Hailfire: Everyone loses all their life but first they get to decide whether or not they want to sacrifice everything they own. Put the decision in their hands. That's called empowerment and it's an important managerial skill. You're moving up in the world. *I'm not 100% on this one because it requires two black mana but hey it's in here for now.
Stolen by the Fae: Infinite 1/1 flying faeries. That's annoying! Congrats!
Increasing Confusion: Convert infinite mana to infinite mill. Throw their entire deck in the trash. Only targets one player but it's worth it for the rudeness factor. JK it gets two players because it's got flashback. Zing!
Blue Sun's Zenith: It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Remember that guy from the movie Seven that got stuffed with so much spaghetti that he burst? Good times.
Death Grasp: Gaining 1 billion life: good. Dealing 1 billion damage: better. Dealing Josh 1 billion damage and pretending that you sucked his soul out of his body and it has empowered you with 1 billion life as you stare down every other player in the game: best.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
Banefire: Infinite damage. Only targets one player but can't be countered.
Stream of Life: Infinite life. And in a convenient colour.
Squirrel Nest: It is very satisfying to run your friends down with infinite squirrels but it is too restrictive to keep it in the decklist. It only cooperates with a land-untapper and Freed from the Real. That means that even if you get an infinite mana engine and have this card in hand, it might not pop off. Which is a big let down.
LAND BASE
AKA: WHY DID YOU MAKE THIS FIVE COLOURS YOU MONSTER
Ok, time to reckon with my choices. But I reeeeeaaaally want to keep my fireballs in here and black has some really cool finishers too and honestly I mostly just went through my rares binder and picked out new stuff that was cool and I want to see go infinite so we have some work to do to make this work. Let's go over the stuff I'm using:
Simic Growth Chamber: We're gonna need lands that tap for two mana for the Freed from the Real combo and I took out all of the copies of Fertile Ground because we have too many 2-drops. This means we're going to need a lot of dual lands. Green and Blue are our core colours so Simic Growth Chambers is perfect but we will still need to supplement our numbers with some Azorius Chancery, Izzet Boilerworks, and Dimir Aqueduct. These will also help us to access all five colours. Remember that the dual land always needs to include blue so that we can pay for Freed from the Real.
Gemstone Mine: "But Goobfellow," I hear you and my wallet saying, "that card is worth more than $5! I thought you said this was a budget deck!" The harsh reality is that my budget is the only budget that really matters to me and my brother has at least two copies that he will probably be willing to trade. So either pony up or get a brother that's as cool as mine. But also consider that this card might be totally worth it. This card is absolutely perfect for our purposes because it gives us access to every colour for our finisher list, it enters the battlefield untapped so we can use it turn 1 or turn 3 after dropping a dual land, we can easily bounce it with our dual lands to refresh it, and we probably don't need to use it more than three times anyways before one of our combos pop.
Evolving Wilds: So you looked at your hand and you've got a Vizier of Remedies but no white mana in sight. Turn 1 solution is to go find a Plains using Evolving Wilds. We've got almost no 1-drops so turn 1 can be useful for fixing our mana situation. If you have a Grand Architect, maybe grab that second Island ahead of time. It pays to think ahead.
Survivors' Encampment: You shouldn't be using your mana dorks to attack or block so why not give them a job to do with Survivors' Encampment! No tap on entry, and all you need to do is tap an extra guy to get whatever mana you want. Fill up on these if you really can't splurge on the Gemstone Mines.
Other lands to consider might be the Vivid Creek set (although they enter tapped which slows the deck considerably), Painted Bluffs (although tapping two lands for one mana is inefficient when we're trying to pop one of these combos ASAP), Tendo Ice Bridge (although it isn't very much cheaper than Gemstone Mine at all), Seaside Citadel (which also suffers from ETB tapped), and Mirrodin's Core (which takes a whole turn to charge to be useful; good turn 1 but not if you need to bounce it for a dual land).
ANYTHING ELSE?
Oh yeah, I put two copies of Incubation / Incongruity in here. Honestly I came upon them while rifling through cards and was like "These are perfect!" Almost all of our combo cards are creatures that can get pulled straight to hand with Incubation. And if you happen to need some removal for a crazy creature threat, Incongruity has got you covered.
That's all, thanks for reading. Gimme a lil dopamine hit by tapping that upvote button if you enjoyed this. Feel free to make suggestions. And someone please send a raven if Bloom Tender ever becomes affordable. Lots of love, Goob.
