4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Sprouting Phytohydra
3 Phytohydra
1 Indrik Stomphowler
4 Guilty Conscience
4 Sterling Grove
3 Eladamri's Call
3 Blasting Station
4 Faith's Fetters
2 Ghostly Prison
1 Proper Burial
1 Pariah
1 Lure
1 Fecundity
1 Pariah's Shield
1 Storm Herd
6 Forest
6 Plains
4 Krosan Verge
4 Selesnya Sanctuary
3 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree |
  Power
Plant.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
There are some cards that are forever linked
in the minds of Magic players. You can't mention one without mentioning
the other. If you write a sentence about Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind, you'd
darn well better talk about how great the Dragon is with Curiosity. How
else could he have gotten so freaking smart? He's all about
self-improvement. Whenever I've talked about the Santa-Claus-esque Sky
Swallower, I've invariably been on the receiving end of a barrage of
angry email, questioning my competence for failing to include the
all-powerful Sky Swallower + Brand combo. It's a fine combo, but I don't
find it terribly exciting. You end up with an 8/8 flier. Most of the
other Sky Swallower combos I've written about will either win you the
game immediately or one turn later. Besides, after the hundredth time of
hearing about Sky Swallower and Brand, wouldn't you rather read about
something new?
With this in mind, I'm going to talk about a combo that
no one else has ever talked about: Phytohydra + Pariah/Pariah's Shield.
Actually, numerous people have talked about this combo, including faithful
readers Luis Brunson, Benjamin Nightingale, Stephen H., and Brian Mitzel.
Phytohydra is immune to damage, and with one of the Pariah cards attached
to it, so are you. The only problem with this is that all it does is stall
your opponent until they can find an answer to one of the two cards. In
the meantime, you've just got a 1/1 creature putting “pressure” on them.
One of the problems with Phytohydra as an offensive creature is that your
opponents have very little incentive to block it. I've tried offering them
candy, flowers, and some nudge-nudge wink-wink “I wanna be in
compliance”-style bribery, but nothing seems to work. Since no one will
block the Plant Hydra, you've essentially played a five-mana, unblockable
1/1, which frankly isn't that impressive. To get around this, Mr. Mitzel
suggested pairing Phytohydra with Lure or a Channeled Shinen of Life's
Roar, forcing your opponent to block and make your Phytohydra huge in the
process. Pariah's Shield would make counterattacks fruitless, pumping your
Hydra up even more. It's a little on the expensive side, and pretty
fragile, but it just might work. AJ Richardson, meanwhile, had other
ideas. His one-mana solution to the “nobody blocks Phytohydra” problem was
the Scourge common, Guilty Conscience. Now whenever Phytohydra deals
damage, it will deal that much damage to itself, which will double its
size. Next turn, it will double again, and double again the turn after
that. When it's not growing your Hydra exponentially, Guilty Conscience
acts as “removal,” either keeping the creature at bay while your opponent
finds a way to get rid of it, or by destroying the creature in a suicidal
attack.
So far, we have about half a deck. To fill out the rest
of it, I asked myself, “What could be better than a Plant Hydra?” Two
Plant Hydras! In an email, Noel deCordova regaled me with a tale of
Dissension Prerelease woe. It seems that Lady Luck wasn't on his side, and
he opened up Sprouting Phytohydra and Proper Burial among his Rares.
Instead of bemoaning the fact that he was dealt these lemons, Noel went
ahead and made some lemonade. The missing ingredient?
You will need all three cards in play, as well as any
other creature (Saproling tokens will work just fine). To paraphrase Noel,
“With this, you get infinite life. Sacrifice the token to ping the
Sprouting Phytohydra with Blasting Station, which sprouts another copy of
itself and untaps the Station. Now sacrifice the original to ping the new
copy. This will give you another copy and untap the Station. This is a
loop, and each time through it you gain two life. If you have Fecundity in
play, you can draw your entire deck as well.” With all of this life, I
decided to play a single copy of Storm Herd. It's pretty good on its own
(you can reasonably cast it with all the mana from Sakura-Tribe Elder,
Krosan Verge, and Selesnya Sanctuary), and it will often be an instant win
if you have Blasting Station on the table. As with all infinite life
combos, this one is a little cumbersome to pull off on Magic Online, but
gaining twenty life is often enough.
The rest of the deck is full of tutors for most of the
major combo pieces and ways to slow your opponent down. You can fetch
either of the Phytohydras with Eladamri's Call, and all of the
enchantments can be found (or protected) by Sterling Grove. Faith's
Fetters and Ghostly Prison combine with Guilty Conscience to help keep you
alive until you can get one of your combos online.
I'm certainly not immune from bombos, those sad little
combos that don't actually work. The less said about my Quicken / Sins of
the Past deck, the better. I was very excited about putting a Druid's Call
on my Guilty Conscience'd Phytohydra (Squirrel factory!), but
unfortunately this doesn't work since Druid's Call requires damage to be
dealt and Phytohydra replaces damage dealt to it with the production of
+1/+1 counters. Frown. The same went for Rite of Passage. Both of those
enchantments can do interesting things with Sprouting Phytohydra and
Blasting Station, but in the end they just weren't worth it, and besides,
I ran out of room. Other enchantments worth considering are Privileged
Position, Armadillo Cloak, and Pollenbright Wings. |
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