Welcome Goblins and Ghouls to another special edition of Vanguard: Across the Formats! As always I am your eternal host, Luthervamplord.

This theme week has me brimming with excitement; MDV is finally a shade of black that I can really enjoy: Combos. Anyone who roots through my extensive deck list collection on Magic Workstation (164 and counting) will soon come to realize that Luther loves his combos.

The intricate designs, the way they can turn a game 180 and pull victory from the jaws of defeat. The ingenuity and complexity that some of these combos employ and the loop-holes in the wording and rules that just makes you shiver when you realize just how painful this combo could really be. Just thinking back over some of the combos I’ve seen makes me all tingly inside—it’s strange to realize I still have feelings like this left in me.

But enough about this old vamp going gooey-eyed at the idea of an infinite storm count, you came here to see Vanguard cards used in alternate formats; but this time you’re going to get something extra—true to this week's theme I’ll be showing you how to combo up your Vanguards' abilities with other cards to make nice engines for your deck. However because of this I’ll be building the decks with the pure Casual Vanguard game in mind; no alternate rules beyond the cards this time around I’m afraid.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t combos that become more or less useful in other formats; in fact certain Avatars such as Higure seem practically built for the Ninja Tribal deck and Birds of Paradise has Prismatic written all over it. But what I want to do here is to show you the door and leave you to walk through it at your own pace.

Alright then; let’s get started!

The main combo of note here is the seamless interaction between your Hell's Caretaker Avatar and Cathodian, which conveniently enough provides you just the right amount of mana on its death for you to bring a creature back from the grave; all you need to do is help it on its way.

This is where the Phyrexian Altar comes in, though it could be easily replaced with the Altar of Dementia to give the deck a whole different feel and vibe for all you Mill fans out there, but in this case we want that extra mana.

Here’s how the combo works: You sacrifice your Cathodian to the Altar and net yourself one colored mana of your choice and three colorless. You allow the creature to hit the graveyard, as the mana burn won’t actually kick in until you decide to end your mana phase. Now you use the three colorless to bring back your Cathodian and so the cycle begins again.

This in itself is not a bad combo and can be used for this deck's main finisher: Decree of Justice. However, should you find yourself without a Decree in hand you might still want to trigger the cycling of Cathodian:

• With either Angelic Chorus and/or Proper Burial you can net yourself infinite life.
• Golgari Germination is just another means to the same ends when it comes to token creatures.
• Cathodian and Nether Traitor are going to become fast friends in this deck.
• Being able to recycle other creatures such as your Shriekmaws and Selesyna Guildmages isn’t too bad of a deal either.

To cap it all off the deck runs a suitable suit of cards to handle anything but counterspells and creature removal, but then no deck is perfect. With a means even to target your opponent’s lands, the added land drop from Rites of Flourishing is somewhat diminished; though the card pull might work against you with certain decks, hence the inclusion of Horizon Canopy in the mana base.

Speaking of the mana base, you’ll notice that I’ve used Pain Lands rather then the more popular Shock Lands of Ravnica fame. This is due to speed and the option of colorless mana—in truth we don’t mind losing life, because should the deck be running smoothly we'd be able to finish the game before it becomes an issue or regain it before the enemy can press his advantage.

Now the following deck was bad, mean, wrong and just plain broken when it was a T2 deck without a Vanguard card added on, but since this is Evil Combo week, I thought you might like to see it anyway!

NOTE: This avatar was errata'd recently.  Now the starting starting hand size is -1 (6) and the starting life is +4 (24).  The image above is incorrect.

Basically this deck does what most standard Affinity decks do; only a fair bit faster! Cap that off with the fact that the first non-creature spells each turn cost your opponents one more, this means Counterspell becomes Cancel and Shatter just got that little bit harder to play.

The Tooth and Scale could be replaced with Welding Jars and indeed I’d advocate them as at least sideboard material should you be running in a group that has an extreme hatred for artifact decks.

It’s also my advice that you take out some Health Insurance should you actually plan to run this deck as it certainly will make you popular—or rather infamous—but for the reasons your doctor really won’t want you to be.

This deck uses a very old combo, but one which Sliver players are always drawn to at least once in their time (or at least in my experience). It’s quite simple really; more Slivers equals more mana, more mana equals more tokens and more tokens equals more mana—the pattern continues until you decide to end it. Luckily Mana Echoes gives you that option.

Normally I would run something like Coat of Arms in this deck, simply based upon numbers, but the number of times my opponent has swept the board clean to avoid the huge amount of damage is getting rather high, and since Door of Destinies is slower, it really shines when you do lose creatures in such a manner.

Alright folks, I feel you’ve had enough of me for now; next article we’ll be looking at anew format that has been brought to my attention, so all you alternate format junkies out there: Watch this space. If you have a question or opinion you’d like to share, please drop by the forums and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Otherwise drop me an email at Luthervamplord@hotmail.co.uk or via PM if you want to keep your opinions on the down-low.

Here’s hoping you enjoyed this article and the theme week in progress.

Until next time Ghosts and Ghouls, This is Luthervamplord; Signing Off.

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