Peasant Magic is probably the hardest format to build a combo deck in. Most combo enablers are either rare or uncommon, and those that are uncommon are required four-ofs in most situations. However, there have been Peasant combo decks in the past, and there will be in the future.

There are also rumors of first-turn wins.

Peasant Magic's most famed first-turn win comes from Channel, Fireball, three Lotus Petals, and a land. Now, as you can probably imagine, this win occurs once in a Pale Moon. Some people may also remember the troublesome Frozen Tide deck that led to the restriction of Brain Freeze.

A Peasant combo win will be rare simply because almost every Tutor is either rare or uncommon - and in order to make space for all of those tutors, you need to allow less space for integral combo pieces. However, there are ways to work around this.

Here is the deck that I named: Peasant's Elf (I know elf decks are common in this format, but this one is a little different).

4 Argothian Elder (U)
4 Crop Rotation
4 Fertile Ground
4 Fireball
4 Fyndhorn Elves
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Lotus Petal
4 Priest of Titania
4 Quirion Ranger
4 Skyshroud Elf
4 Wild Growth
2 Timberwatch Elf

12 Forest
1 Wirewood Lodge (U)
1 Mountain

The deck works like this: enchant a Forest with either Wild Growth or Fertile Ground, then cast Crop Rotation on another hand and fetch a Wirewood Lodge, then use the Argothian Elder to untap both of those lands and loop into an arbitrarily large amount of mana.

The Crop Rotations effectively allow this deck to run four copies of both Argothian Elder and Wirewood Lodge, which lets this combo go off with most of the combo pieces being four-ofs.

Of course, this deck has a back-up plan of just beating the opponent silly with little elves, or using Priest of Titania to cast the slightly smaller, yet equally fatal, Fireball.

But too many people play with those accursed elves... so instead, let's use another obnoxious little critter from Magic history: the Kobold. I thought that this deck would be easy to make, but it was anything but. Nobody in the Vintage world has yet built the perfect Kobold Clamp deck. Though everyone on forums says that their pet deck wins turn 2, I'll be honest and say that this typically wins much, much later. With Peasant Magic, winning fast is even harder, especially if you have space for only four Skullclamps and Tendrils of Agony.

Thankfully, I found a solution. There exists another card with storm that is almost like Yawgmoth's Will in this deck. It is called Reaping the Graves, and is basically a Raise Dead with Storm.

Peasant's Little Red Monsters
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Crimson Kobolds
4 Crookshank Kobolds
2 Culling the Weak
4 Dark Ritual
4 Kobolds of Kher Keep
4 Lotus Petal
4 Myr Moonvessel
4 Ornithopter
3 Reaping the Graves
4 Skullclamp (U)
4 Songs of the Damned
1 Tendrils of Agony (U)
14 Swamps

The game plan is rather simple: Play Kobolds, then drop the Clamp on them, then draw two cards, then do it again. Finally after playing ten or so spells, play that Tendrils of Agony that you drew into and win.

Unfortunately, it does not always work this way... and that's where Reaping the Graves comes in. It allows you to return all the 0cc boys back to your hand, then Clamp them all again. Because mana is seldom a problem in a deck with fourteen mana-creating spells and fourteen lands to service zero-mana creatures, you can typically cast Reaping the Graves in the same turn that you will win the game.

Songs of the Damned acts as extreme mana acceleration as they can create as much as sixteen mana for the price of one: not a bad deal if I ever saw one.

This deck can win as early as turn 1, if you manage to find a God hand... but that will rarely happen (if ever). Turn 2 wins occur some of the time, and turn 3 and 4 wins are, for the most part, common. I warn you that like almost any combo deck, sometimes the deck will fizzle and go nowhere; the Reaping the Graves prevents this from happening some of the time, but cannot solve the problem all of the time.

Unfortunately, if you somehow lose the Tendrils of Agony, you lose the game - unless you feel like attacking with a 1/1 Ornithopter each turn.

This next deck is nowhere near as fast as the fist two decks, but it is still a combo deck, and that is saying something. It is based around the amazing uncommon Eternal Witness.

4 Brainstorm
4 Careful Study
4 Eternal Witness (U)
4 Fertile Ground
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Snap
4 Stream of Life
4 Wild Growth

13 Forest
7 Island

Now, this deck only has four - yes you heard me, four - uncommons, but it still can go infinite.

I used Stream of Life to gain infinite life once I cast two enchant land spells then cast an Eternal Witness, and then Snapped her back to my hand, untapping those lands, leaving me with one excess land. Then, I cast the Eternal Witness and brought the Snap back and repeated the process until I got enough.

So in the end, combo does not win; it just makes sure that you don't lose. Better card options might be Flash of Insight or Krakilin, but I did not test with those.

The final deck is one that every single Extended player knows all too well: Life.

A Peasant's Life
4 Crop Rotation
4 Daru Spiritualist
4 Lotus Petal
4 Nomads en-Kor
2 Quirion Elves
4 Skyshroud Elf
4 Spirit en-Kor
4 Task Force
4 Wayfarer's Bauble
4 Worthy Cause (U)
1 Starlit Sanctum (U)
11 Plains
10 Forest

Here is yet another deck that abuses Crop Rotation to let it play four copies of an uncommon card.

The deck works, as most of you know, by redirecting 100,567 damage to either Task Force or Daru Spiritualist and then sacrificing them, thus gaining 100,570 life.

This deck does need to find a way to win, but typically the other player will just become bored and scoop up his or her cards (let's say Sue from the old Magic rulebooks was playing).

You might want to add some control to this deck (and to each of the others) to prevent valuable combo pieces from disappearing.

Building combo decks is no easy business - and it is far harder in Peasant Magic - but I managed to find ways to work around the limitations in card allowances and made these decks more consistent than the format would typically allow. I had fun building these decks, and I hope somebody out there has fun trying out some Peasant combo decks.

Roman Pazuniak
The Eat on the forums
The_Eat on Octgn