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Drift back with me into the mists of time. No, stop thinking about Gwendlyn di Corci; not that far back. I'm talking about the ancient history of Kamigawa. Back when we first saw the awesome new idea known as the flip cards.
Ever since we first saw Jushi Apprentice, I've been trying to break him as a combo engine. Tomoya the Revealer, his alter ego, has one heck of a powerful draw ability. Now, if only there were a way to untap and reuse him repeatedly. Hey, there's a perfect solution to that right here in Champions of Kamigawa as well: Psychic Puppetry. With a Puppetry in hand - and you're quite likely to draw into one if you've activated Tomoya - all you have to do is draw any Arcane spell with each Tomoya activation. Cast that spell with Puppetry spliced, targeting Tomoya, and he's untapped and ready for another round. Repeat until you've drawn most of your deck, then point Tomoya at your opponent for the kill by cramming too many spells into his head until it explodes.
Brilliant! Well, except for one problem. To pull that off, Tomoya needs to guzzle mana like a Humvee pulling uphill into an Exxon station. Okay, so let's provide some mana - doesn't Standard currently revolve around a nine-mana sorcery? Unfortunately, that won't even help us. Sure, Urzatron decks put out eleventy gazillion mana, but we need umpteen gazillion mana and a good chunk of it has to be blue. Blue does mana acceleration about as well as it does land destruction.
So it would seem that we need to couple a mana engine onto our combo train. We've already got untap capabilities in Psychic Puppetry, and Betrayers gave us Toils of Night and Day as well, so all we need is a permanent that taps for lots of blue mana. Preferably one that isn't banned in every format known to man.
Unfortunately, Kamigawa Block doesn't have any such permanents, and in Standard the best we can do is hope we can get multiple copies of Dawn's Reflection and Fertile Ground onto a land. For a true blue mana engine, we'd have to go back to Onslaught's Wirewood Channeler - but then you may as well just play ElfBall instead.
Enter Saviors of Kamigawa, and our combo's personal savior: Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant. Get this little miracle worker flipped, and we square the mana production of all our basic lands. With six Islands in play, tapping each of them produces six mana, for thirty-six mana in total! That should be enough to feed Tomoya, and each untap effect that Tomoya draws into provides another six blue mana.
And Saviors also delivers a pair of goodies that enable the flip conditions of both Jushi Apprentice and Sasaya. Seek the Horizon and Ideas Unbound both get us three cards into hand when we need them. So, without further ado, the Kamigawa-block decklist:
| Jushi Apprentice Featured by Erik Mooney on 2005-05-22 (Ravnica Limited) | ||
Artifacts 4 Sensei's Divining Top Creatures 4 Jushi Apprentice 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder 2 Sakura-Tribe Scout |
Instants 4 Psychic Puppetry 4 Toils of Night and Day Legendary Creatures 4 Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant Sorceries 3 Ideas Unbound 4 Kodama's Reach 4 Seek the Horizon Basic Lands 11 Forest 12 Island | Stats: Average mana: 1.47 Average creature mana cost: 2.14 Average creature power: 1.29 Average creature toughness: 1.86 Deck Composition: Basic Lands: 38.33% Instants: 13.33% Artifacts: 6.67% Creatures: 16.67% Sorceries: 18.33% Legendary Creatures: 6.67% |
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| Download this deck in Apprentice format! |
Download this deck in Magic Online Text format! | |
And the rationales for the card choices:
4 Jushi Apprentice
4 Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant
The core of our combo, of course. Don't Jushi and Sasaya make such a wonderful couple? He just keeps bringing her gifts, one card at a time. He's patient. He knows what she needs and gives it to her. If he can keep it up long enough with enough size (that's your hand - get your mind out of the gutter), she'll return the favor and give him everything he's ever wanted.
(I hope Sasaya is female. It's kinda hard to tell from the fairly low-res online images that I've seen so far; I don't have a real Sasaya card yet. If Sasaya isn't, the preceding paragraph just got a lot weirder. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
4 Sakura-Tribe Speedbump
Everybody's favorite green accelerator.
2 Sakura-Tribe Scout
This may seem a bit odd in a deck that essentially wants to keep lots of lands in its hand, but it will help avoid mana-deficiency stalls during the combo. Once the engine is running, you can target this guy with some of your untap effects. Each use of this guy can put an extra Island into play for an extra four to six mana available.
4 Seek the Horizon
4 Kodama's Reach
A full complement of land fetching to first flip both Jushi and Sasaya and then maximize Sasaya's squaring power. The simple raw card advantage provided by Kodama's Reach is important - it fetches a land into play while not costing you a card from your hand.
3 Ideas Unbound
More cheap raw temporary card advantage to flip our flip cards. It also helps filter through the deck if you're missing one of them. For the discard, you'll usually have at least one extra copy of a Divining Top or one of the flippers to pitch. I include only three copies, as it's pretty much a dead card once the combo engine comes together.
4 Psychic Puppetry
4 Toils of Night and Day
These untap effects are the coal that Tomoya will be madly shoveling into the engine room of our combo train. Toils by itself can untap both Tomoya and a mana source to get another massive-draw activation even without a Puppetry. And a Toils with two Puppetrys spliced on will pretty much reset your side of the board. Finally, a spare Toils can be used to tap an opponent's lands at the end of their turn if you're ready to launch the combo and don't want them interfering.
11 Forest
12 Island
It usually isn't optimal to have a mana base of only basic lands in a two-color deck, but that's pretty much our only choice here. We don't want to use any multicolor lands, since they won't really participate in Sasaya's mana-squaring effect. Twenty-three lands should be enough with the massive land-fetching and the Divining Tops to smooth the draws.
It's worth taking a moment to explain the use of land in this deck. Once you've played Sasaya and cast a couple land-fetchers, you really don't need any more Forests. Two Forests in play will almost always be sufficient - just get that and then maximize your Island count. (If you take this deck out of Kamigawa Block into an older format, adding Harrow to exchange a Forest for two Islands would be more totally sweet than a ninja wielding a fudge cookie.)
Too bad Saviors didn't have a Sweep card for Forests, as that would be ideal here. One theory for that omission is the presence of Masumaro, First to Live. Imagine Sweeping five forests after the opponent says "no blocks" against that guy. Painful. But I digress.
4 Sensei's Divining Top
This is one of those decks where the Top will subtly win a lot of games. With a full twelve shuffle effects, the Top lets you browse through huge chunks of your library to find exactly what you need. Also, a Top can cantrip itself back into another card in hand for free - if you're one card short of flipping either or both halves of our couple, this is just the ticket.
A Top can also turn an untap effect into an extra draw, if that's what you need: Activate the Top's second ability, then in response play the untap effect targeting the Top. Let the untap resolve, then activate the Top's second ability again. The latter activation will resolve: you draw and put the Top on the library. Then the first activation will resolve, drawing you the Top back again.
An ideal game would go something like this:
Turn 1: Forest, Sensei's Divining Top
Turn 2: Island, Jushi Apprentice
Turn 3: Forest, Kodama's Reach for two Islands (4 cards in hand)
Turn 4: Island, Seek the Horizon (6 cards in hand)
Turn 5: Cantrip the Top (8 cards in hand), activate Jushi and flip him, then play an Island and Sasaya.
Turn 6: Activate Tomoya for eight, drawing enough lands to flip Sasaya. Play an Island, which will be your fifth one in play. That's twenty-five blue mana available from the five lands, which should be enough to untap Tomoya with a spliced Puppetry as many times as necessary to draw your deck, then target your opponent with Tomoya for the win. (Tomoya will usually have to hit them twice; once will be sufficient only if your hand is bigger than their library.)
Yeah, this won't be a tournament deck anytime soon. Any removal pointed at Jushi Apprentice means that we have to find another. And Cranial Extraction for either combo piece can only be answered by putting crying on the stack. (It is worth noting that Sasaya dodges creature removal if you have the trigger condition in hand: just activate Sasaya again in response to the removal and she'll flip into the enchantment before the removal resolves.)
But when the combo pieces link up, it's more beautiful than Elle MacPherson on the beach. Well, okay, not quite _that_ beautiful, but it's surely a lot cooler than hearing "Play a second Kokusho to Drain you for ten, I win" for the 97th time.
