Ral Zarek has a Machine Gun
It's combo season, ladies and gentlemen! Izzet calls, and the guild's second-best planeswalker is ready to pew-pew-pew his way to making your opponents concede, four clicks at a time! That's right, we're doing the Ral infinite damage combo, in Brawl!
The combo is as follows: with our commander on the board, 9 extra mana, and an extra card to discard; we play League Guildmage, give it haste with Maximize Velocity, and hold full control. Next we jump-start Maximize Velocity with that extra card in our hand, and cast Expansion // Explosion to copy it. Then, with Expansion // Explosion still on the stack, we tap League Guildmage for X=2, copying the original Expansion // Explosion. With this we will infinitely copy Expansion // Explosion with the original version we cast, dealing one damage to our opponent with Ral, Storm Conduit every time we do so. This is where if you play in paper, you simply explain the combo and shake hands with your opponent. If you're doing this in Arena, however, it will take a minimum of FOUR clicks for every point of damage you will be dealing. Eventually, hopefully, your opponent will concede before that.
Getting the Combo:
When it comes to combo decks like this, it is crucial we have have ways to draw through to the cards we need as fast as possible. To fulfill that need we have card draw in its many forms. Anticipate and Shimmer of Possibility gives us some pretty deep card selection to dig through to what we need, fast, and Drawn from Dreams is the more powerful and expensive version of the same effect. Most of our planeswalkers draw cards, and The Royal Scions along with Narset, Parter of Veils will let us search deeper for the pieces we need to combo off as soon as possible. For straight up card draw we have Chemister's Insight, Precognitive Perception, and Finele of Revelation to let us stay ahead in cards. Mission Briefing serves as a double-dip on any spells we might need in a pinch, or even bring back one of our combo pieces if it got sent to the graveyard somehow. Finally, we have the very ambitious Invert // Invent, which is here mostly as a guarantee to pick up both our combo spells if we have the mana to do so.
Protecting the Combo:
Because this deck is a filthy solitaire player deck, we can't let our opponents disturb our fun. We wide variety of counterspells in Disdainful Stroke, Negate, Tale's End, Ionize, Mystical Dispute, and Sinister Sabotage. Our combo is very fragile, especially our Legion Guildmage, and we want to keep all of the pieces as safe as possible. For extra redundant protection for both the guildmage and our commander, we also run Lazotep Plating and Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor. These can be quite useful since we usually need our commander to survive one turn on the board to pull off the combo with reasonable amounts of mana.
Supporting the Combo:
Unfortunately there is not much redundancy to our combo, and as such we must ensure that our deck survives the situations in which we take a long time to draw it, or the combo gets broken. For this, we have a few early threats in Goblin Electromancer, Electrostatic Field, and Irencrag Pyromancer. These cards can help deal some damage and provide us with some board presence, as well as being targets for removal early in the game (god I miss Guttersnipe). As later threats we have God-Eternal Kefnet for his ability to copy our expensive draw spells and get us closer to our combo, Ral, Izzet Viceroy for good removal and card selection, as well as Niv-Mizzet Parun and Chandra, Awakened Inferno as ways to close out the game if the combo isn't going to happen. As a suggestion from Ral himself, Crackling Drake is in the list for the possibility of surprise burst damage with Maximize Velocity For removal we also count with Beacon Bolt, Flame Sweep, and Ral's Outburst, as ways to deal with specific threats that might be breaking our combo up.
The Mana:
The combo needs 9 mana at least, which is quite an ask, so maybe a few more lands might do us better here, but I am unsure. Arcane Signet, Izzet Locket, and Midnight Clock are this deck's mana rocks, and excellent targets for our early card-selection spells. For the lands, I felt like this deck needs a lot of both red and blue mana, so I toned down on the utility lands. I kept Castle Vantress for the scry potential to help us get to our deck, and Mystic Sanctuary to reuse any of the draw or counter spells if necessary.
Now go enjoy the carpal tunnel you'll get from clicking your opponents to death.
6 comments
$1.84€1.160.02 |
Creature (7) | |||
---|---|---|---|
$0.20€0.090.03 | |||
$1.66€0.680.02 | |||
$1.99€1.610.02 | |||
$0.20€0.100.03 | |||
$1.01€0.850.03 | |||
$0.40€0.220.02 | |||
$0.25€0.130.03 | |||
Instant, Sorcery, Enchantment, Artifact (23) | |||
$0.25€0.150.03 | |||
1
Ionize
|
$0.49€0.300.02 | ||
$0.20€0.070.03 | |||
$0.20€0.090.03 | |||
$0.67€0.450.02 | |||
$0.620.44 | |||
$0.40€0.260.02 | |||
$0.48€0.360.03 | |||
$0.40€0.420.18 | |||
$0.15€0.080.03 | |||
$0.19€0.030.05 | |||
$0.19€0.070.03 | |||
1
Negate
|
$0.25€0.100.04 | ||
$0.18€0.180.03 | |||
$1.80€2.960.03 | |||
$0.50€0.320.02 | |||
$0.26€0.160.02 | |||
$0.25€0.150.03 | |||
$0.20€0.180.03 | |||
$0.35€0.160.02 | |||
$0.79€0.760.07 | |||
$0.25€0.140.03 | |||
$0.25€0.150.03 | |||
Land (24) | |||
$0.20€0.050.03 | |||
$0.16€0.030.03 | |||
$0.720.01 | |||
$5.69€4.040.15 | |||
$12.90€11.940.96 | |||
$0.60€0.640.02 | |||
$1.42€0.860.03 | |||
6
Island
|
|||
8
Mountain
|
|||
$0.44€0.220.02 | |||
$0.20€0.110.03 | |||
$0.25€0.100.03 | |||
Planeswalker (5) | |||
$0.75€0.750.02 | |||
$9.94€9.423.57 | |||
$14.25€9.091.17 | |||
$0.94€0.670.04 | |||
$0.25€0.100.03 |
Please log in to be able to store your favorite decks for easy access under My Decks in the main menu.
27 | 14 | 13 | 5 | 0 |
---|---|---|---|---|
0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |