Every year, December is a month that I can count on mostly not having any important tournaments to play in or plan for, which is a nice break. It’s traditional to spend the holidays with one’s loved ones, and that’s basically how I’ve spent my month. In Magic, that means I’ve been doing a few drafts and playing around with some weird brews in a variety of formats. My greatest love, as you may remember from some of my previous articles, at the moment is the proliferate mechanic.
It’s like an addiction, seeing how many counters I can add to meaningless things each turn. This article will follow my process through that sickness as I try to find some way to do something competitive with cards I have so much fun with.
The basic shell that I’m trying to exploit is something I’ve written about before. I want to use Surge Node to power up Everflowing Chalice. Ideally, I want to use that mana to activate Contagion Clasp or Contagion Engine and then do something with all those counters and all that mana.
I actually started by working on a mill deck. In fact, the entire project began with Patrick Chapin suggestion to try Shriekhorn in U/G graveyard-based decks in Standard. Somehow, I decided to try proliferating on Shriekhorn and Grindclock in Modern.
Unsurprisingly, I found that, while I could kill someone this way, the actual Shriekhorn didn’t do anything, and Grindclock only won the game when I’d taken control with something else—although the card was awesome against control—with any easy way to win through Ensnaring Bridge.
Unfortunately, as I’ve been updating the deck I’ve been saving over old versions, so I can’t track the entire history.
I started with an entirely colorless deck. Well, I could make colored mana with Mox Opal, and I could spend it on Tezzeret’s Gambit, but it was entirely unnecessary. Getting to play with entirely colorless lands is actually awesome, but figuring out which ones are best is tricky in Modern.
I started with something like 4 Tectonic Edge, 4 Ghost Quarter, 4 Darksteel Citadel, 2 Mystifying Maze, 4 Inkmoth Nexus, 2 Buried Ruin. That was very far from ideal, but it lets you see what kinds of things you can do with lands in the format, though to be honest, it barely scratches the surface. I’ll get back to that; the spells probably tell you more about what’s going on.
Grindclock and Shriekhorn both give me good ways to use Voltaic Key and Surge Node and power early Mox Opals. Throne of Geth and Contagion Clasp let me really get things going, and Ichor Wellspring and Tezzeret’s Gambit provide fuel. That was the core of the deck; from there I just needed to figure out how to stay alive.
There are a few cards that can do remarkable work in that department, most notable, Ensnaring Bridge and All Is Dust.
Playing with the deck, as mentioned, I was pretty underwhelmed by the mill package, but I was impressed by how resilient the deck was to a lot of what my opponents were doing and how quickly I could build mana and proliferate. I won more often with poison from a single Inkmoth Nexus hit than by milling (by a lot).
I wanted to cut the mill package, but I needed something else to do with my Voltaic Keys and Surge Nodes because I loved their interactions with Everflowing Chalice, but I couldn’t always count on drawing Everflowing Chalice, and I didn’t want them to be dead the rest of the time.
It turns out I had a lot of options.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself again. I’ve written about these cards before, but most people haven’t played with them. Earlier today, I played a land, Surge Node, Mox Opal, and Everflowing Chalice for zero. That meant I had three artifacts, so I could tap Mox Opal for a mana to put a counter on Everflowing Chalice, which I could then tap for a mana, which I used to play a second Surge Node; then, just to be sure I could resolve it, I cast Orochi Hatchery for zero. You might need to read that one.
I don’t remember exactly how the game went from there, but I’d played my entire hand on turn two and made five Snakes on turn three or four and nine more the next turn.
In less explosive situations, turn-one Surge Node, turn-two Everflowing Chalice for one, activate it to power it up to two still leads to four mana on turn three before you’ve played a land and puts you in position to ramp absurdly quickly from there.
So this engine is great at generating charge counters on artifacts no matter what I draw and huge amounts of mana if I draw Everflowing Chalice. So where to go from there?
I played a game against Jake Van Lunen in the tournament practice room on MTGO, and he was playing a Dralnu, Lich Lord control deck. He played Dreadship Reef, and I realized I could do that too. In games after that, proliferating on Dreadship Reef proved to be an amazingly efficient way to generate more mana. Unfortunately, it didn’t let me do anything with Surge Node.
Impressed by how much mana I could generate with this new engine, I decided to focus on getting an Everflowing Chalice and casting Emrakul, which it could do very quickly. I added Trinket Mages to find Everflowing Chalice and a single Expedition Map to find a single Eye of Ugin to find Emrakul. It was a cute way to sneak extra Emrakuls into my deck.
I added more All Is Dusts to defend myself and switched some of my colorless lands to Islands, and others to Eldrazi Temples. This meant I had to cut things like Tectonic Edge, Ghost Quarter, and Mystifying Maze. Buried Ruin, incidentally, was amazing. Most often it would just get back an Ichor Wellspring that I’d sacrificed to a Throne of Geth, but every now and then it would help get back a key piece that my opponent had somehow dealt with. Other times I could sacrifice Contagion Clasp to Throne of Geth so that I could Buried Ruin it to put a -1/-1 counter on another creature. Lands that sacrifice to do something are awesome because after the first few turns, I have so much mana from Everflowing Chalices that I really don’t need my lands in play.
I played a game with this configuration where I got three Everflowing Chalices and two Dreadship Reefs in play with Contagion Engine and two Voltaic Keys. I proliferated nine times in one turn and ended up with the ability to make triple digit mana per turn.
Ultimately, I didn’t like Eldrazi Temples. The one mana was insignificant most of the time, and they just didn’t have enough utility. Tectonic Edge had been amazing. Similarly, I didn’t like Trinket Mage. It took a lot of slots, made my mana worse, and was really slow at getting Everflowing Chalice anyway. If I were to try something like that again, I think I’d actually rather just cast Fabricate. I’m not doing anything with the 2/2, and the ability to get a finisher would be nice (though Orochi Hatchery deals with that need pretty well).
Next I tried Lux Cannon. I was making so many counters that I could see it taking over pretty quickly. I’d been playing one as a way to deal with problem cards, but I wanted to try focusing on them as a game plan.
I wasn’t a fan. They were just too slow, and I had to work too hard on them. I could pretty easily kill one permanent a turn, but that often just wasn’t enough if that was my “clock.”
Next I tried Golem Foundry. This gave me more relatively cheap artifacts to put counters on, so I also added Energy Chamber, which functioned like another Surge Node that I didn’t have to invest in every turn and that could get +1/+1 counters on my Golems so that I could start proliferating them too. Unfortunately, it didn’t work especially well with Ensnaring Bridge, but it did have the advantage of providing early blockers while I was getting set up.
It’s good because it works quickly, doesn’t require devoting any mana specifically to it, and can take advantage of Surge Node and proliferate very well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t interact with Voltaic Key at all, but I guess I can’t have everything.
The build I’ve played most recently looked something like:
Lands (19)
Spells (41)
This build is designed to focus as much as possible on the Golem Foundries and Orochi Hatcheries at the expense of other defensive cards and finishers I’d been playing before.
The deck is still very much a work in progress. I’ve been surprisingly unimpressed with Energy Chamber. I thought that not needing to spend mana after I play it, like I do on Surge Node, would be a huge benefit, but the fact that it costs two to start, which is the same as so many of my other cards, makes it a lot worse. Also, unlike Surge Node, I can’t double its speed with Voltaic Key, which is one of the best ways to ramp with Everflowing Chalice (since the Key can switch to untapping the Everflowing Chalice to double my mana after it gets charged).
Not having access to Karn Liberated, Emrakul, or Ensnaring Bridge in the maindeck is pretty disappointing as well. I see the following as basically the core of the deck:
3 Mox Opal
4 Everflowing Chalice
3 Surge Node
2 Voltaic Key
3 Contagion Clasp
3 Throne of Geth
4 Ichor Wellspring
4 Tezzeret’s Gambit
18-20 lands
From there, it’s just a question of finding out what to do with it.
Either Tezzeret is extremely powerful, and I’ve played with both a little. They make me want a few colored lands, but honestly, Dreadship Reef and Mox Opal let you skimp surprisingly low on other colored lands; still, it’s enough that you lose more utility than I’d like on lands, and All Is Dust gets a little worse, but Karn Liberated is a pretty good replacement.
One thing I want to try that also wants colored lands is experimenting with some sunburst cards. I think Pentad Prism might play surprisingly well as a weird additional mana source, and Infused Arrows might be amazingly effective at dealing with creatures even at very low sunburst numbers. Clearwater Goblet is another card I’m curious about, but I think it’s just a little too expensive and narrow in terms of what decks it’s actually good against for me to want to play it main.
Mindslaver is another respectable finisher, especially if you’re playing enough colored mana to support Academy Ruins, which is pretty good in the deck anyway.
As for the lands, I think the deck is at its most unique and interesting when all the lands do cool things, which is why I’ve been trying to stick to the colorless builds of the deck. Dreadship Reef, Buried Ruin, Tectonic Edge, and Inkmoth Nexus are standouts. I cut down to one Inkmoth Nexus with the Golem build because I figured I’d usually win with damage, but Nexus + proliferate has been absurd for me in other builds. I’ve never tried playing fewer than four Darksteel Citadels because I want to turn my Mox Opal on as soon as possible, and I like being able to sacrifice lands to Throne of Geth, but it’s possible that the other lands do so much that it’s wrong to play four Darksteel Citadels. Mystifying Maze is great, but you probably don’t need a lot of them. Urza’s Factory is a new addition, but I think I like that it provides something pretty new to the deck.
As for the sideboard, Dismember is a good catchall. It’s a theoretical out to Splinter Twin that happens to deal with things like Gaddock Teeg and Kataki, and sometimes you just want some removal. Welding Jar is there to hedge against people who can actually kill artifacts, but Ancient Grudge is going to be a bit of a nightmare for you no matter what. I’m at four Chalice of the Void because the deck really can’t beat combo, and it uses Chalice very well, in that it can quickly set it to whatever number it wants. Honestly, four Chalice of the Void isn’t enough. If you want to beat combo, you need more. Some combination of things like Trinisphere, Thorn of Amethyst, Torpor Orb, Witchbane Orb, and Mindbreak Trap. Ensuring Bridge is obviously good against basically any creature deck, and the singletons are basically just there to give me some options.
Honestly, I haven’t played the deck in any tournaments, and I don’t really intend to. The deck can’t really beat combo or people who are prepared for it. It’s possible that there is a deck that uses some of these interactions, probably with Tezzeret to try to actually kill people, that could be competitive, but the purpose of this deck is mostly just to have fun doing weird things in my time off. I suspect a lot of you are interested in that as well, and if you enjoy the same kinds of things in Magic that I do, this deck is remarkably fun and challenging to play.
It’s a real challenge to maximize value on the order in which you activate abilities, like tapping Chalice of the Void after proliferating on it as many times as possible and getting counters on as many different things as you can before proliferating and figuring out when to use Throne of Geth and what to sacrifice. When all the pieces work together, you can go from playing a bunch of cards that don’t appear to impact the board to having a completely overwhelming board state remarkably quickly, and it’s fun to watch it happen. It’s not the most interactive deck, and if you’re slow to think through everything, it might be frustrating to play against, but if you’re looking for a way to keep your mind engaged and have plenty to think about while playing, it’s a great deck for that. Besides, it costs almost nothing to build, since the deck is almost all uncommons, so you should try it out.
That’s all I have on Proliferating, but I wanted to talk a bit about another issue that’s starting to emerge: streaming MTGO.
A long time ago, Lauren Lee suggested to me that I should broadcast myself playing Magic Online. At the time, I didn’t really see the point. If my opponent found out about it, they could just open my stream and see my hand; it sounded like a lot of work to get set up; and I didn’t really see the point or know if anyone would be interested.
Eventually, AJ Sacher started doing it. I like AJ, and I wasn’t doing anything, so I watched his stream for a while. I was immediately impressed by the possibilities this medium offers.
Before draft videos were popular, I thought they’d be a great way to teach players Limited. Now that they exist, I almost never watch them. It just takes too long. For a lot of people, I’m sure watching a stream is the same way, but for me, I think it’s a lot more fun, and a lot more valuable, because it’s actually possible to interact with the player who’s streaming through the chat in the stream.
After seeing that, I really believe that streaming video content with interactive commentary is the future for Magic strategy content.
Not only will it be possible to explain all my picks while doing a draft, I can actually answer questions about cards I might not have even bothered discussing and have a dialog about other directions I might want to take the draft. More importantly, I can pick up a Constructed deck I’ve never played before and discuss difficult plays and sideboarding with hundreds of players watching the game. This means that I can learn enough from streaming to easily compensate for potential loss in EV due to the possibility that someone might cheat against me by looking at my hand while playing against me, and I think a moderated discussion with someone who is trying to learn how to play a deck might, in many cases, actually be a better tool for learning than watching someone who already knows how to play a deck effortlessly go through the motions.
There are certainly concerns, but I don’t think any of them are deal breaking. I’ve heard concerns that it’s a violation of the terms of service to have multiple players playing together on one account. Honestly, I don’t know or care if it is. Everyone knows that everyone does it all the time because there’s no way to know how many people are sitting in front of a computer. This makes it clear that you’re doing it, so Wizards could crack down on it, but I think it’s so clearly good for everyone that if they do anything, it would be to change policies to make it explicitly legal (if it isn’t already).
I haven’t been able to get started on streaming because my computer can’t handle it without significant lag, which prevents most of the utility I see in it, but I’ve ordered a new computer which should arrive very soon, maybe even by the time this goes up, and I’m looking to try it out as soon as possible.
Watch my Twitter for updates on that @samuelhblack.
Thanks for reading,
Sam