Tatyova Retreat
(I didn't feel like dealing with accordion block formatting when writing this so this is what we get)
This is a high power combo deck aimed at powering out early land drops into a large Scapeshift with Tatyova, Benthic Druid in play. From there the deck looks to drop the namesake combo and ascend to infinite mana and infinite draw before exiling everyone's libraries. Alternatively, Regrowth effects allow the single Time Warp to be chained as long as you have land drops to storm with.
A section on budget cuts and replacements can be found at the end of the description.
Prerequisites:
Note that the both Oboro lines (Oboro, Palace in the Clouds and Oboro Breezecaller) can be taken from any game state where you have all the pieces (either in play or in hand) but the Simic Growth Chamber line cannot be taken with SGC in play due to its enters the battlefield triggered ability.
Steps - Oboro, Palace in the Clouds:
- Scout Oboro into play
- Trigger Tatyova to draw a card and gain 1 life
- Trigger Retreat to untap the Scout
- Tap Oboro for and spend that mana to activate its ability, returning it to your hand
Steps - Simic Growth Chamber:
- Scout SGC into play
- Trigger Tatyova to draw a card and gain 1 life
- Trigger Retreat to untap the Scout
- Trigger SGC's ability to bounce a land, and return it to your hand
Steps - Oboro Breezecaller:
- Scout any land into play
- Trigger Tatyova to draw a card and gain 1 life
- Trigger Retreat to untap the Scout
- Tap any two lands to activate Oboro Breezecaller, and return one of those two lands to your hand to pay the other half of the cost. Target the second land you tapped, untapping it.
Repeat this loop to draw your deck. As you play through these loops, it is recommended to put each new land you draw in play before continuing via land bouncing. This results in all remaining lands in your deck being in play untapped once you've draw your deck, ensuring you have mana to do things. From here, move to the infinite mana section.
Ascending to Infinite Mana
Once you've drawn your deck, you need infinite mana before you can actually win the game. The primary line for this involves Lotus Cobra, but there are backups to that that are discussed below.
Prerequisites:
This line is pretty simple. Get Tatyova off the field, then demonstrate the Retreat combo as above, except replace Tatyova's trigger with "Add 1 mana of any color" and you reach infinite mana. Once you have an arbitrarily large amount of and you can replay Tatyova, since you need her to win the game.
Infinite mana backup after losing Lotus Cobra
Take this line if you are unable to access Lotus Cobra for whatever reason (exiled most likely).
Prerequisites:
Steps:
- Tap Gaea's Cradle for and any other land for ( in pool)
- Activate Oboro Breezecaller to return one of the two lands you tapped to your hand and untap the other one. ( in pool)
- Scout the bounced land back into play ( in pool)
- Repeat for infinite
Once you have infinite , demonstrate the same loop but leave in your pool in step 2 to filter green to blue, and you now have infinite mana of both colors. This loop also works with SGC.
Spell Loops and Winning the Game
What are spell loops anyway, and why are they so useful here? Why not Lab Man or some other big mana finisher?
Essentially spell loops boils down to gaining infinite casts of any card in your library. We achieve this through looping recursion spells, as demonstrated in the steps below. It's a bit convoluted, but the result is that we can turn our interaction spells like Reality Shift into win conditions. This results in greater slot efficiency, since any of our win conditions can be used for pure value, without giving up the actual win condition later. We don't have to waste slots on dedicated "I win" cards, and we get a lot of redundancy in potential outlets.
So how do we do it?
Note:
- Timetwister loops do not require infinite mana beforehand. Just having Lotus Cobra in play at the start is enough.
- For these loops, ensure Oboro, Palace in the Clouds is in play before each cast of Timetwister. Otherwise you will lose access to your infinite draw loop which could get slightly awkward.
- Noxious Revival is interchangeable with Regrowth
Steps:
- Cast any spell.
- Cast Timetwister, shuffling your library back together. Make sure Oboro, Palace in the Clouds is in play before you do this.
- Use the Retreat combo to draw your deck. If you have Lotus Cobra in play, you'll also float enough mana to cast all the spells you could want during this step.
- Cast Noxious Revival, paying with mana, targeting your Timetwister.
- Scout Oboro to draw Timetwister.
This allows you to cast any spell you want infinite times. See the Outlets section for how to use this to win the game.
Note:
- These loops require infinite mana beforehand because you do not draw enough cards during the loop to gain enough mana off of Lotus Cobra to pay for all of the spell casts needed.
- Noxious Revival is interchangeable with Regrowth
Steps:
- Cast any spell
- Cast Memory's Journey, targeting that spell.
- Scout Oboro to draw that spell.
- Cast Noxious Revival, paying with mana, targeting Memory's Journey.
- Scout Oboro to draw Memory's Journey.
Repeat the loop from here. After the first iteration, the Memory's Journey cast in step 2 will also target Noxious Revival and in step 3 you will draw both spells.
Outlets for Spell Loops
Each of these spells, when cast infinite times, can win the game for you.
Note: Winds of Rebuke can also be looped bouncing your own Eternal Witness with infinite mana to mill the table, without going through the steps listed in the Spell Loops section.
As some of you may have noticed at this point, the Retreat combo, while effective, has a single point of weakness - Retreat to Coralhelm itself. It's the only piece that isn't redundant and it's also the hardest piece to find. Fortunately, with the release of Throne of Eldraine, we have a backup combo available that only requires one card change, and it's one we'd make anyway. Enter Mystic Sanctuary. With Oboro Breezecaller and either Gaea's Cradle or Simic Growth Chamber, Mystic Sanctuary allows us to loop Summer Bloom to get land drops, and therefore draw cards, as well as to produce infinite mana.
Prerequisites:
Note:
Since this combo is not as straightforward as the Retreat combo, I'm going to track all my resources at each step using the following format: (floating mana, cards drawn, available land drops). For the cards drawn number, I will not be including drawing the spell you put on top of your library with Mystic Sanctuary, so this number will show only the net cards drawn through the combo. I will also use the shorthand "Play Mystic Sanctuary, getting [some card]" which means this sequence of actions:
- Play Mystic Sanctuary, triggering Tatyova and Mystic Sanctuary.
- Stack the Mystic Sanctuary trigger above the Tatyova draw drigger.
- Resolve the Mystic Sanctuary trigger for whatever spell you wanted, putting it on top of your library.
- Resolve the Tatyova trigger, drawing that spell.
With that out of the way, here's the actual combo.
Steps:
- Tap Gaea's Cradle for , Mystic Sanctuary for , and some other mana source for (, 0, 0)
- Cast Summer Bloom (, 0, 3)
- Activate Oboro Breezecaller, returning Mystic Sanctuary and untapping Gaea's Cradle (, 0, 3)
- Play Mystic Sanctuary, getting Summer Bloom (, 0, 2)
- Tap Gaea's Cradle for and Mystic Sanctuary for (, 0, 2)
- Activate Oboro Breezecaller, returning Mystic Sanctuary and untapping Gaea's Cradle (, 0, 2)
- Play Mystic Sanctuary, getting nothing, and drawing a card off Tatoyva (, 1, 1)
- Tap Gaea's Cradle for and Mystic Sanctuary for (, 1, 1)
- Activate Oboro Breezecaller, returning Mystic Sanctuary and untapping Gaea's Cradle (, 1, 1)
- Play Mystic Sanctuary, getting nothing, and drawing a card off Tatyova (, 2, 0)
- Tap Gaea's Cradle for and Mystic Sanctuary for (, 2, 0)
- Repeat from step 2.
This line is a bit complicated on paper, but it's fairly straightforward to demonstrate. Essentially, each activation of Oboro Breezecaller nets 1 mana, and we activate it 3 times for each time we cast Summer Bloom. That nets us 3 mana each time we spend 2. If you're looping with Gaea's Cradle and not SGC, you can put dorks into play as you draw them and have spare green mana, making the Cradle tap for more each time through the loop.
Another thing to be aware of is that this loop does require you to have Tatyova in play (so you can redraw Summer Bloom, which means we need some way of not dying once we reach the end of the library. If you have access to the Retreat combo, you can use the lines above, either the Lotus Cobra line or the backup line. But for the sake of argument, let's assume we don't have access to Retreat to Coralhelm at this point, but we still need to be able to perform the spell loops.
Since we don't have an infinite scout effect, we need to retain access to Summer Bloom at all points in the combo, which means we can't use Timetwister loops, right? And we can't use Memory's Journey loops because we only net 1 mana per rotation, right? Wrong on both counts. You can use the Summer Bloom loop from above, but only play the first land drop each time you cast Summer Bloom. This gives us infinite land drops.
But wait, we only net 1 mana per loop, right? If we don't use a second land drop, how are we supposed to cast Summer Bloom again? With Gaea's Cradle that's easy - just get a dork into play and net 2 mana per loop. Once we have infinite land drops, we can bounce Tatyova and use Oboro Breezecaller to filter land drops into mana by untapping either Gaea's Cradle or Simic Growth Chamber and bouncing and replaying some random land. Replaying Tatyova puts us back to a state of infinite mana and infinite draw, and we can perform spell loops as normal.
Without Cradle, just use Time Warp. Drawing your deck generates more than enough mana to cast it by the time you're at the end of your library. Cast Noxious Revival to put it back on top, then move to the extra turn. From here, use
Memory's Journey loops to loop Noxious Revival, Time Warp, and some other outlet spell of your choice. The extra turn is how you generate enough mana, and you can use Oboro Breezecaller and literally any other way to put a land into play to make sure you can draw all 3 cards on each turn. Any scout effect or exploration effect is good enough here.
It's technically possible to assemble the Summer Bloom loop all at once, from a single Mystical Tutor and a lot of resources. I'm not going to explain the line here, because realistically you shouldn't ever be trying to do that. If you want to look for the line, you're welcome to do that, but please just tutor for Scapeshift in a real game. Please.
Budget Options
If you're looking to play this list on a budget it's definitely doable. However, I would advise that you make sure you understand the lines of play the deck has and consider how any given cut may alter those lines.
- Drop Timetwister, Memory's Journey is enough. If you really need a backup to Journey, run Gaea's Blessing. Probably just replace Twister with the next best counterspell not in the deck.
- Drop Gaea's Cradle as it's mostly unnecessary. Simic Growth Chamber functions well enough for the no Lotus Cobra backup line. Cradle is definitely good for the Mystic Sanctuary kill but that kill is a backup anyway.
- You can drop the mana rocks (they're all pretty expensive, Crypt and Diamond more than the others) for more dorks or land ramp spells. The deck will slow down slightly but be functional.
- You can drop the expensive counterspells (Force of Will and Mana Drain for cheaper but slightly less effective counterspells.
- I would not advise cutting fetchlands or Oboro unless you're really desperate, they're all really fantastic in the deck. If you have to cut these for budget, cut fetchlands first and Oboro last. Oboro is the most resilient part of the combo we have, and the most powerful combined with Exploration and Asuza, Lost But Seeking.
- Speaking of Azusa, she's like $40 now, thanks Amulet Titan. Without Azusa we lose out on some of the grind game, but replace her if she's too expensive. Same goes for Sylvan Library. Any sort of card advantage engine is probably okay.
Prerequisites:
Steps:
- Tap Gaea's Cradle for at least
- Cast Crop Rotation sacrificing Gaea's Cradle and hold priority ( in pool)
- Cast Noxious Revival paying mana targeting Gaea's Cradle ( in pool)
- Resolve Crop Rotation finding Gaea's Cradle, placing a draw trigger and an untap trigger targeting your blue dork on the stack
- Using your blue dork, respond to the triggers by casting Memory's Journey targeting Crop Rotation and Noxious Revival ( in pool)
- Resolve your untap trigger to reset your blue dork and your draw trigger to draw Crop Rotation
- Cast Regrowth targeting Memory's Journey ( in pool)
- Use the Retreat combo to draw your library ( in pool, full reset except Regrowth is in the yard)
- Repeat, except on each additional iteration you will also target Regrowth in step 5 alongside Crop Rotation and Noxious Revival
Demonstrate this loop to produce infinite green mana. Once we have infinite , we can filter that into infinite by repeating the loop with an Island instead of Gaea's Cradle.
After achieving infinite mana, win the game as normal.
