Simic: Orvar Hotel California

Good evening folks, Shdorsh here from Failure Guaranteed. Today, I thought: What could I do to cement myself inside the Magic: The Gathering history. At the same time, I always wanted to do something with Orvar, the All-Form. I have come to the perfect answer after watching some OmgItsJousis videos on Path of Exile builds:

Grinding the servers to a halt with shitty decks while getting some cards banned from Historic altogether!

Also, did you know that my second Arena deck I made from scratch was a Simic one, but it was so horrenduously bad that I spent months in deep depression due to my lost wildcards? This deck takes my vengeance and shapes it into everything you could ever need in infinite quantities:

• Infinite mana? Check
• Infinite cards in deck? Check
• Infinite tokens? Check
• Infinite lifegain? Check
• Infinite time while waiting for your combo to resolve in the most hideous way through stacks of +500 (and counting, if the opponent doesn't pussy out) triggers? Check
• Infinite scrying? Check
• Infinite card draw?  Kinda(Not in one turn due to hand overfill)

It is hence a thousand times better than my last attempt to find true infinity with my last deck. Here we go, but don't forget: Once you engage this infinity stack machine, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

How the Simic jank

"There they stood in the doorway

I heard the mission bell

I was thinking to myself

this could be Heaven or this could be Hell"

This combo is pretty straight-forward: Orvar copies every creature except itself that gets targeted with instants or sorceries. No, this isn't a Scute Swarm: It actually has many hurdles to making it be copy-able:

• Problem 1: It doesn't copy itself, so you can't just copy it by targeting it with an instant or sorcery. We need at least 2 instances of Orvar, the All-Form.
• Problem 2: It also is a legendary, so if we were to play a second Orvar, the All-Form, we'd have to sacrifice it.
• Problem 3: It is a changeling, and hence also a human. This means you can't just override its legendary status with mutate like I did with Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite in my Nornsense deck, since humans can't be mutated.

The great upside is if we manage to pull it off, we can self-replicate and replicate other creatures far faster than the ordinary Scute Swarm. Fun fact: at first, I wanted to name this deck "Orvar, the Scute", until I saw it in action and had a better idea.

Check it out for yourself, if you really want to. Also, no sound because I'm clumsy.

This gives us only a few choices: either we make it lose all types for a few seconds so we can mutate on top, which still doesn't resolve problem 1, or we use those rare copy spells that create a token without legendary. These include:

• Delina, Wild Mage, which creates a temporary token. If you target it with an instant or sorcery, it will also create temporary tokens as "Exile it at the end of combat" gets inherited by all other daughter token from their parent token.
• Echoing Equation, which requires another creature. This is a spell heavy deck though, to better synergize with Orvar, the All-Form.
• Spark Double, a one-off creature that can be cast on the next turn to offset the mana cost. I don't own any, though.
• Double Major, which raises the cost to 6 mana and requires a bit of ramp.
• Helm of the Host, which continually pumps out a token creature and is the reason why I took it.

Now, how do we fill this deck out, though?

Ramping to the six

A quick ramp can help you getting this deck into motion. One such way is the cheap Into the North, which lets you get some quick mana right at turn 2. This means that most of our lands will be snow lands, of course. I added the Barkchannel Pathway to offset color screw while keeping it a quick deck, though.

The Migratory Greathorn does its job for defensive purposes and also gets you some more lands into play. An all-time favorite!

Ahhh, the Prosperous Innkeeper, now the prosperous hotelkeeper of hotel California... In limited, it is already a pain in the butt, but when you go historic, that's where the jank kicks in. It is a nice target, if not the only one for the Migratory Greathorn, disregarding itself of course. It comes with an additional treasure, which is nice for ramping up, and helps you survive by adding 1 life for each creature that comes into play. Extremely ridiculous when you got your Orvar, the All-Form out, as you can keep on creating treasures, which will be used to cast more spells and can quickly raise your lifepoints when close to zero.

"Plenty of room at the Hotel California..."

Once you can copy the Orvar tokens and got a Prosperous Innkeeper in play, you will switch from casting instants on your Orvar to maximize token generation to the Prosperous Innkeeper to get more treasures and keep on casting infinitely, as you put out an innkeeper and treasure for every Orvar in play. Just broken, if you ask me.

Take a look at what this deck looks like at its terminal stage.

On the draw

Fun fact: At first, I tried making this a Bant deck with Mavinda, Student's Advocate, but you don't need to be able to cast from graveyard if you can draw infinitely.

Season of Growth is our card draw of choice: As a spell-heavy deck, we will target our own creatures often, making us draw a lot to get what we need. 9 creatures aren't much, but we are attempting to make infinite tokens, so the scrying will be nice. Once you got the engine started, you will scry for instants and other Season of Growth during the whole stack, while drawing them at the end of it.

Notice: These stacks can become pretty big, so cast your instants in reverse order: Start with the innkeeper, then go on to Orvar, interrupting the current stack. This is because you will run out of timer during the stack once it gets going real bad. It goes even so bad that you will somehow run out of the opponent's timer, as the code starts his turn while he is stuck watching the animations of the stack.

Clear the Mind is my go-to graveyard recycler: Easy to pull off and gives you 1 card to draw, so it doesn't just serve one purpose. This works nicely so you can keep on creating more and more tokens and not fear self-milling.

Notice 2: On too many cards in hand, probably with more than 1 Season of Growth, if the timer ran out you will discard the rightmost cards in hand first. This means that you have to keep the instants and the Clear the Mind in hand below the eighth place and fill the other side with lands, land fetches and doubles of your legendaries for optimal play.

The spell kit

"And in the master's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast"

With only 9 creatures in a deck, you run the risk of having them removed and standing there defenselessly. With Clear the Mind, you might be able to retrieve them, but it takes time that you might not have if the opponent has big creatures out. As such, I added all the hexproof instants that I could find in here: Snakeskin Veil, Dive Down and You See a Guard Approach will sometimes be enough of a nuisance to the opponent that he just gives up if he's running heavy control and can't get rid of a Prosperous Innkeeper. With all of these, multiplying with Orvar, the All-Form becomes a child's play and you can hang on to see if you get your combo done.

The Setup

It is a bit slow and clunky, but bear with me. We will need a few requirements to make this insanity happen.

On the board: Prosperous Innkeeper and up to two Season of Growth.

1) Search your deck for Orvar, the All-Form and either Double Major or Helm of the Host by casting some instants on creatures.

2) Copy Orvar, the All-Form with either Double Major or Helm of the Host. These copies are non-legendary, so you can have as many as you want of them. The original Orvar, however, not.

3) Cast cheap hexproof instants on the Orvar token. The original Orvar is needed, since it is the original one that copies the token. Orvars can't copy themselves. As this goes on, your Season of Growth lets you scry for each time Orvar got copied and you draw a card at the end, since you targeted a creature with an instant. Try to find another instant so you can copy the Orvar token again. If you cast an instant on the original Orvar, the copy will also be legendary and you can only keep one of the legendary Orvars. Might be good against removal, although as long as it isn't getting exiled, I'd rather have it dead in case of boardwipes and who needs originals when you can have thousand copies?

4) If you managed to make it go off but are about to be short of mana, target a Prosperous Innkeeper with an instant. This will copy the Prosperous Innkeeper for each Orvar you have. As they come into play, you gain a treasure for each incoming Innkeeper and lifegain from each other one that is on the field. You also keep scrying and drawing for even more cheap instants.

4b) Buff up your tokens by mutating a Prosperous Innkeeper into a Migratory Greathorn. This thins out the deck a little and helps you deal more damage.

5) Clear the Mind helps reshuffle all your instants back into your deck, making it so that you can do this infinitely.

6) Disrupt your opponent's turn by playing an instant and copying more Orvars and Innkeepers on your opponent's turn. As your timer runs out, your opponent's turn will slowly run out as well while he's stuck watching the animations. This will deny your opponent his own turn.

7) You win by your opponent's concession. You never swing in, because you are far too busy copying your tokens. Tokens is all you need. They are life, your blood, your family. Treat them as such. If you are ever presented with a (purely hypothetical) situation, where you could win the game by swinging in or make more tokens, always make more tokens. The game will win itself when your opponent concedes after 20 minutes of you gaining 1 life, 1 token creature, possibly 1 token treasure and scrying twice over and over.

All in all

To be honest, I don't know how WotC will react to this extreme jank. The combo takes some time to pull off, so it isn't all child's play. The effects of it however, can be extremly janky. Will they ban Orvar, the All-Form, Prosperous Innkeeper or Season of Growth for enabling this game breaking deck build? Not sure.

What I know for sure is that Wizards of the Coast need to redesign the stack triggers. I don't need to know that a thousand of the same triggers are happening at the same time card by card: After letting the code check if nothing procs off of it, just make the interface show an "x [number]" near the card being triggered if it's exactly the same effect by a card with the same stats if the ability is related to the card's stats and trigger it all at the same time. What I mean is: Just find a way to bundle the same effect triggers together.

And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"

Also, what's evil about this deck is that how the code works, it doesn't let you go into the options interface while something is being triggered. This means that if your opponent and you ran out of timer, both of you will have to sit a long time in front of the screen without the ability to actually concede.

Also, in the deck builder: Can we please have a checkbox somewhere that fills out the lands in a deck with the snow variants? just a button with "Use snow lands instead" would be real nice. Thanks Wizard of the Coast!

Anyway, that's if for today. I think I met my own expectations. This deck was quite a bit in the making, I had to restart with the core ideas a few times but here it is. 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!