Kykar's Infinite Angel-Spirits

Ky-Kaw my dudes, it's time to get brawlin'! Historic brawlin', that is! We are continuing our little dip into the Historic card pool to find even more infinite mana combos, and this one is a doozy, my friends! You might be familiar with this combo if you were paying attention to he more esoteric decks in standard, but if you're not it can be quite funny. 

You only need two cards other than our commander to get infinite mana, and the total cost is 9 mana. You play Bishop of Wings for WW, then play Kykar, Wind's Fury, and finally play Arcane Adaptation naming "Angel". Now every single one of your creatures will be Angels in addition to their other types, and since we cast a noncreature spell we now have an Angel Spirit to sacrifice to Kykar. Every time we sacrifice an Angel Spirit we trigger Bishop of Wings, giving us 4 life for an Angel Spirit entering the battlefield and making an Angel Spirit because an Angel died. At this point hopefully our opponent concedes, but if they don't we have a Banefire to finish the game off in a decisive manner, or you can just sit there gaining near-infinite amounts of life and simply outlast your opponents. I have tried having a few more ways to finish off the game like Electrodominance, Makeshift Munitions, and Jaya's Immolating Infern, but Banefire like the most effective to me. If you're playing multiplayer you definitely replace the Banefire for Jaya's Immolating Inferno, as a way to close the game on all opponents at once. 

Drawing it Up:

This deck is built to focus on the combo as much as possible. I had a version running a few more win conditions, but I found that replacing them with good honest card draw and counterspells made this deck a lot more effective, if less fun. Because it's historic we of course run Search for Azcanta // Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin, especially due to the fact that we only have one single creature in our deck. We run the trio of Anticipate, Shimmer of Possibility, and Drawn from Dreams because I absolutely love those cards in Brawl, as they really let us get to what we need when we need it, and this deck does run quite a few answers. Drawn from Dreams and Precognitive Perception are our powerful straight card advantage spells, and Precognition Field is a very powerful enchantment that is almost a Mystic Forge in our deck. Finally, we run one Azor's Gateway // Sanctum of the Sun to help loot some of our less useful cards in the moment, as well as providing us a backup way of activating a big Banefire or Expansion // Explosion if we can't get our combo off. This list has experimented a bit with Mentor of the Meek to draw every card of our deck until we find the Banefire once we get the combo off, and you should try it out and see if it's worth. More testing is needed.

Protecting the Combo:

Because this deck is so focused on the combo, with the only secondary win condition being our planeswalkers, we need to run the best protection and counterspells our colors can provide. I don't know if these are it, but I chose the Standard Dovin's Veto, Tale's End, Disdainful Stroke, and Sinister Sabotage due to them being either great mana value or giving an extra bit of utility. From Historic we see the return of Unwind, which is the greediest counterspell that ends up being really strong in Brawl, making the mana you leave up reusable to draw more cards, for example. Also from historic are Wizard's Retort, which is just simply Counterspell with our commander in play, and Syncopate as the most skill-testing of counterspells in this card pool just to be cool. As other sneakier ways to protect our combo or planeswalkers we have Expansion // Explosion to copy opponent's removal our counterspells, as well as being a backup way of using tons of mana for damage, and Leyline of Anticipation because when every card you're playing has Flash, things get REALLY stupid.

Clearing the Board:

These cards were not in the deck's original version. The first version had a VERY greedy gameplan with a secondary win condition in Emergency Powers, Smothering Tithe, Ral, Storm Conduit, and Thousand-Year Storm for another infinite damage combo and more grief. Feel free to try it out, but you're probably gonna get wrecked like I did if the opponent is at all aggressive. Instead this version runs a total of FIVE board clears and one spell that might as well be if used properly. Deafening Clarion is an excellent way of dealing with a runaway green deck that dumps 3 mana dorks by turn 3, or an aggressive mono-black strategy with Ayara, First of Locthwain. Solar Blaze is a little tricky to use, but against big green strategies can easily be a board clear. Settle the Wreckage is here to prey on the trauma of players who played previous standard, and Cleansing Nova and Time Wipe are straight board clears that can help us clear away our opponents' threats. Finally we run one Planar Cleansing as a big fuck-off reset button in case things have gone really tits-up while we were trying to find our combo.

Planeswalkers:

Every single one of our planeswalkers lets us see more cards in our deck, while being able to present a decent threat on their own. We run both Teferis because who remembers when Jeskai was good? Just me? It was never good? Whatever, Teferi, Time Raveler lets us lock our opponents out of countering our stuff as well as being a useful way of bouncing away a big threat, and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is still an excellent planeswalker that lets us draw cards, deal with threats, and just win the game on the spot if we get his emblem online. We run Narset, Parter of Veils because that card makes people hate magic as well as getting us to our cards. Karn, Scion of Urza and Ral, Izzet Viceroy both have quite similar +1 effects for this deck, which will once again be quite useful to get us to our key cards. If in trouble, they can also help us deal with some of the threats on the board. The Royal Scions is one of the cards I'm less sure about in this deck, but its ability to loot, as well as its powerful ultimate and the amount of counterspells we run makes me think it just might be powerful enough. If you're not sure about it either or you don't own it, I'd replace it with a mana rock or a Smothering Tithe, if you're nasty.

The Mana:

 If there is one thing I would really think twice about this deck, it's the mana base. We run an Arcane Signet, Treasure Map // Treasure Cove, and Primal Amulet // Primal Wellspring in terms of 'ramp'. I found these to give us some nice bit of extra value, but have been considering Chromatic Lantern and all three of the lockets for their potential card draw as well. For our lands we run Castle Ardenvale and Castle Vantress to make use of our mana in case we don't have anything to counter or put on the board and three of each dual-colored land, with both available temples, the shock lands, and check lands, and one UW gain land. The deck runs 3 Plains and 4 Islands, a Fabled Passage, and a Command Tower to help fix our colors. For colorless utility we run one Mobilized District to help control the board a bit and a Field of Ruin to nuke Field of the Dead or other important lands. We run both other blue utility lands in Mystic Sanctuary to recur any spells we might need back to the top of our deck and Memorial to Genius to draw us more cards.

This deck still has a lot of work that could be done to it to make it very streamlined and powerful. I'd love to hear from you guys with new ideas to make the deck more consistent. Thanks for reading!