Last week, I mentioned my plan to write about Psychatog, Radiate, and Fire // Ice. My intention was to look at the old decklist and see how recent cards could spice up the brew. Well, unfortunately, there’s been no better Psychatog than Psychatog, Radiate is irreplaceable, and the seemly innocuous effect of Ice is actually quite unique. But I wouldn’t let that hold me back. I decided to find new, exciting cards to Radiate. We’ll get to that in a second, though. First, let’s take a look at what the old Standard deck might have looked like—any of you who have been playing combos a while may remember or recognize this.

Radiate Ice Combo - Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (10)
• 2 Flametongue Kavu
• 4 Nightscape Familiar
• 4 Psychatog

• Spells (26)
• 1 Recoil
• 3 Radiate
• 4 Counterspell
• 4 Fact or Fiction
• 4 Fire // Ice
• 4 Terminate
• 3 Deep Analysis
• 3 Reckless Charge

• Lands (24)
• 4 Island
• 4 Salt Marsh
• 4 Shivan Reef
• 4 Sulfurous Springs
• 4 Underground River
• 4 Urborg Volcano

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• Survive.
• During your opponent’s upkeep or at the end of his turn, cast Ice and Radiate it. Everything will tap, and you’ll draw a card for every permanent on the battlefield.
• Untap.
• Cast Psychatog and target it with Reckless Charge.
• Win the game.

Note that I did skip a step in there: the draw step. Make sure there aren’t more permanents than there are cards left in your library when you Radiate Ice.

Revisiting Radiate

Perhaps I could Radiate Argent Mutation and then cast Bludgeon Brawl and Vulshok Battlemaster . . . but that’s a lot of mana, and unlike the previous combo, Radiating during my opponent’s turn and then untapping means I’m not really benefiting from the effect (other than the library-ton of card-draw, of course). Also, while attaching every noncreature permanent to the Battlemaster with her magnetic superpower sounds like a lot of fun, most of those will be land cards, which notably lack mana costs, meaning she’s really not going to enjoy much power boosting. We’ll have to revisit the Battlemaster another day.

Moving on to the Temple of Might

Benzir here has a good idea to start with. But Radiate doesn’t know the difference between the weak and the strong, so when we cast our spell here, it’s going to hit all the permanents.

The Radiating Beast Experiment

Returning to my Epic Experiment roots, I concluded a great way to cast Radiate and Beast Within—and whatever spells we may want to cast along with them—was to generate a large sorcery.

Bah, I’m tired of beasting within the bush. Let’s just delve in:

The Radiating Beast Experiment - Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (4)
• 4 Goblin Electromancer

• Spells (31)
• 2 Fire // Ice
• 4 Beast Within
• 4 Radiate
• 1 Army of the Damned
• 1 Goblin Rally
• 2 Empty the Warrens
• 2 Peer Pressure
• 3 Conqueror's Pledge
• 4 Epic Experiment
• 4 Explosive Vegetation
• 4 Skyshroud Claim

• Lands (25)
• 1 Swamp
• 4 Forest
• 4 Island
• 4 Mountain
• 4 Plains
• 2 Breeding Pool
• 2 Overgrown Tomb
• 2 Stomping Ground
• 2 Temple Garden

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Mana

Finding all these lands does more than just ramp up to an Epic Experiment, as we’ll see later.

Tokens

Goblin Rally straight-up makes us four tokens, and Empty the Warrens can make a couple blockers early or way more as part of an Epic Experiment.

Radiating

Okay, great! Now, let’s say we get to cast Epic Experiment for, oh, say, how about 10? Let’s assume we hit five spells out of that. What does our stack look like?

• Conqueror's Pledge (resolving first)
• Radiate
• Beast Within
• Peer Pressure
• Explosive Vegetation (resolving last)

When we Epic Experiment, it’s not like Genesis Wave, for which permanents are placed on the battlefield in the order they appear off the top of the library. Instead, we are able to see all of the instants and sorceries and then cast them in any order (and resolve them in reverse of that order).

Here, we’ll make six 1/1 Kor Soldiers, then Radiate Beast Within, then start resolving a ton of copies of Beast Within. Every permanent will become a Beast token, leaving everyone manaless—but extremely Beastful!

We then see a card so far yet uncovered in this article: Peer Pressure.

If we did it right, we can now take all the Beasts. All our opponents’ lands? Creatures? Artifacts? Enchantments? They’re all Beasts now. And we get to keep them. And just to top it off, we can now resolve our Explosive Vegetation to fetch two lands to everyone else’s zero.

If we didn’t hit a Peer Pressure off our Epic Experiment, it’s time for a little something I like to call Beast Wars (which we can hope to win considering the larger number of Beasts on our side; but otherwise: Oh well!) On the other hand, double-land-searching spells could set us up to just cast Peer Pressure normally—outside of the Experiment phase.

Unfortunately, this is usually the part when everyone scoops.

Until next time, I’m Andrew saying, “I recommend carrying a stack of fifty or sixty Beast tokens—be prepared.”

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com