Good evening folks, Shdorsh here from Failure Guaranteed. Guess what happened a few minutes ago... Forgotten Realms hit MTGA. Guess how we are going to party it... With a janky combo deck! 

Now this combo is nothing new to most of you, but with new cards come new ways to antagonize people more reliably. Take a look:

The heartpiece of this deck

Anybody remember the Famished Paladin? You might think that a 3/3 that only untaps when you gain life is kinda eh for second turn and there are better alternatives, but we definitely need that last bit of the flavor text. With Lurking Roper, you double the chance to get lifelink and get a nice 4/5 for only 3 mana! My god, the value...

Back to the flavor text: Untap abilities are known to be janky as hell and a gateway to infinite lives. With Sorcerer's Wand, we can give our 2 favorites the ability to ping the enemy for 1 life each tap effectively. Best part: Since this is linked to the creature, lifegain applies to it as well! Put a Rune of Sustenance on it for additional draw, or have a cheap instant that gives it lifelink and it can ping, untap, ping untap, ping, untap, ping, untap...

Keep the draw on

I used to have 2 Toski, Bearer of Secrets on this spot, but after some experimentation with what The_Napier told me, I found Cosmos Elixir to be more reliable: It serves both for untap so you can swing in with Famished Paladin and Lurking Roper and stalling until you get your combo; and helps you draw additional cards when you're full on life without fear of getting blocked.

THEN I remembered (after the whole Orvar Hotel California fiasco) how much work Season of Growth puts in without even being a rare and only costing 2 mana! This quickens up the deck by a lot, letting you draw your win conditions early.

Rune of Sustenance has an inbuilt draw ability, which keeps the tempo up. Pretty damn good!

I don't want to let go of my creature :,(

So, when the combo is nearly finished, I tend to get removal spells thrown at my face. Normally, I just try to pull through wth sheer force, but this time I had EI NATH! We are going to run a thorough palette of protection spells this time, including:

• Hexproof: Snakeskin Veil is nice, as it stops any instants, exile or destroy, dead in its tracks. Not only that, it buffs our creatures even further with a +1/+1 counter and therefore can have some offensive usage.
• Protection from color: Feat of Resistance and Ranger's Guile give protection from the color we choose, saving us not only from spells but from battles, which is nice. We also get a small buff this way, in form of +1/+1 as counters or just for the turn. Warning: protection from color will unattach any permanents from said color on your creature. This can be positive in case where it is a Pacifism, or negative in case where you unequip your own Rune of Sustenance against white decks. For that reason and the fact that some people don't play artifact removal, Rune of Sustenance is therefore safer when put on the Sorcerer's Wand.

With that many instants, Mavinda, Student's Advocate comes in real handy: You get to reuse your protection spells for nothing more than what they cost, since it is targeting your own creature.

How it plays

With all the protection spells running, there is a high chance to annoy opponents massively. Even deathtouch decks don't really instill fear in it, since we can nearly always protect from whatever color, green or black, that they run. If you are running against red or black, which have a lot of removal options, please build up enough mana to cast your creature and be ready to protect it with a Gods Willing, Snakeskin Veil or what you have in hand.

Once the setup is done, it is a bit slow, pinging the opponent for 1 life over and over, but when it works and the opponent has nothing to counter it, all he can do is watch as his lifepoints get slowly reduced to 0 bit by by bit, like an assassin snail slowly licking its prey to death.

Now, one card that would be bad is Reidane, God of the Worthy, but who runs this shit anyway? With no Valkmira, that reduces our ping to zero damage or Leyline of Sanctity to hexproof our opponent most of the time, we're safe, although the creatures in this deck are big enough to be able to not be completely disabled by this.

Anyway, that's it for today, hope you guys are having a wonderful time with the new set. As usual, feel free to leave me a follow to see what other shenanigans I can come up with and until then, stay fresh, stay cool and I'll see you next time!