I had the impulse to build a crazy Standard deck this week. I guess it’s just to keep ya’ll on your toes week to week. Commander? Legacy Casual (does anyone call it that)? Commander again? Legacy Casual with Made-Up Cards? Commander again again?

I do love Commander, but it’s time for something different. Here’s what I came up with.

"No Hints Combo"

• Creatures (24)
• 1 Archweaver
• 1 Axebane Stag
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Duskdale Wurm
• 1 Elderscale Wurm
• 1 Savageborn Hydra
• 1 Sylvan Primordial
• 1 Worldspine Wurm
• 4 Burning-Tree Emissary
• 4 Slitherhead
• 4 Soul of the Harvest
• 4 Galvanic Juggernaut

• Spells (12)
• 4 Cackling Counterpart
• 4 Dual Casting
• 4 Heartless Summoning

• Lands (24)
• 4 Breeding Pool
• 4 Drowned Catacomb
• 4 Overgrown Tomb
• 4 Rootbound Crag
• 4 Stomping Ground
• 4 Woodland Cemetery

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Now, if you can figure out what the heck is going on there . . . well, congratulations I guess. Seriously, though; there’s a combo in there. You can tell because there’s a Dual Casting. Go ahead and look for it if you want to—or just scroll down to the comments where I hope someone will spell it out for all of us.

But I did like the idea of Dual Casting, and I decided it would be a fun place to start for a deck that I could actually imagine playing with.

If we’re going to really combo off with this spell-doubling red Aura, we’ll need to untap—repeatedly.

No, I am not trying the Juggernaut again! I’ve already been down that path. Village Bell-Ringers could be doable with Cackling Counterpart and a bunch of creatures, except that I can’t think of any -producing mana creatures in Standard.

Oh, except for Axebane Guardian I guess. New plan!

Return to Ravnica hinted at a defender subtheme that panned out approximately zero percent in Gatecrash, but now with Dragon’s Maze, we have all the defenders we’re going to see for the block—not that there are actually any good ones. But at least I know not to expect any more now . . . 

Anyway, we have the Dual Casting and the Axebane Guardian, but we still don’t have the ability to untap our defender friend. Fortunately, Dragon’s Maze did bring us something, even if it’s not a defender. It’s this strange new Dimir spell with a pretty useless cipher ability.

In Urza’s Legacy, we received the blue free spells: cards that allowed you to untap a number of lands equal to their mana costs. The most famous is Palinchron, pretty easily generating arbitrarily large amounts of mana with mostly anything, from a Caged Sun to a Zhur-Taa Ancient to a High Tide. Snap and Cloud of Faeries even make appearances in Legacy and all sorts of combo decks of their own.

The point is that when a card pays for itself, it doesn’t much matter what its effect is. Enter Hidden Strings.

For 2 mana, we get to untap two lands. If we learned anything from Urza’s Legacy, we know that’s all that matters. But we don’t have to just choose lands, and we don’t even have to choose to tap the targets. Cipher is interesting and all, but it’s not particularly so here, and depending on how we choose to win in any given game, we may not even let the spell resolve before the game’s over. I’m sure there are ways to play Hidden Strings while taking our combos seriously, but I prefer silly. Let’s go.

Tap for Infinite

How to Spend Infinite Mana, Part 1 – X Damage

Once we have infinite mana, it shouldn’t be difficult to win the game. We basically need a spell at that point.

The trick is picking a spell. Devil's Play seems reasonable. How about the new Savageborn Hydra? We could always use Cinder Elemental.

Ugh. These are all so boring! Remember what I said about silly? Let’s move on.

How to Spend Infinite Mana, Part 2 – More Tapping

Oh, and since it’s on-theme, how about Doorkeeper? It can count as our second defender all by itself, although that means we’ll need a third creature to perform the Dual Casting. This is important because sometimes we’ll be untapping a mana creature, and sometimes we’ll be untapping a creature with another ability we want to activate, and in both cases, we’ll need to also be untapping the creature with Dual Casting. Since Axebane Guardian doesn’t have the other ability we want to activate (in this case Doorkeeper’s), that means we need three creatures. Unless a Lightning Prowess is involved, but that’s another story.

How to Spend Infinite Mana, Part 3 – Ooze Flux

In case you aren’t up on the super-casual tech, Ooze Flux works great with 0- and 1-power evolve creatures. If you have, for example, an Elusive Krasis with a +1/+1 counter and an Ooze Flux, you can pay , remove the counter, and make a 1/1 Ooze token, thus evolving the 0-power Krasis. Pay another , and repeat. With two copies of Elusive Krasis, you can pay the same amount of mana but remove a counter from each, thus making a 2/2, evolving both of them, and setting you up to—again—repeat. The trick works better and better the more evolve creatures you control, and the more you have, the higher their powers can be to begin with.

Anyway, my point is that with infinite mana and two Clinging Anemones (hey, why not? It’s a defender), we can make as many 2/2 Ooze tokens as we want. (With three Anemones, we can make 3/3s, and so on.) And while Elusive Krasis doesn’t have defender to fit the theme of the deck, it can play well into this little sub-combo; Ooze Flux loves 0 power. The Krasis also serves as the deck’s one “fair” win condition—an unblockable creature in a deck full of defenders.

If you love this win condition, consider playing one Hellraiser Goblin or Akroma's Memorial to win with your Oozes the turn you grow them.

How to Spend Infinite Mana, Part 4 – Reaching the Maze's End

No, I still don’t think it’s good, but it looks fun nonetheless, and not-good-but-fun is one of my favorite descriptions for a card—as long as I’m playing in Casual Land. I’ve already put Maze's End into my five-color Commander deck, and I haven’t even added any Gates yet. Well, I haven’t played the deck since then either, but my point stands.

Anyway, our infinite-mana-defender-dual-casting deck is missing a few final pieces. One, I think, would be at least one other instant or sorcery to copy with Dual Casting. I knew there had to be a way to win with Maze's End once we had infinite mana—if there’s one thing I’ve learned in Magic about infinite mana, it’s that once you have it, you can do anything you want—and I rediscovered Urban Evolution. Not that I ever forgot about it; my four-color Dragon’s Maze prerelease deck loved that spell!

Wow, I talk a lot sometimes about useless stuff.

With our mana and Dual Casting iterations, we can repeatedly copy Urban Evolution, drawing a ton of cards and allowing us to play an additional land each time. A single copy of Serene Remembrance will prevent us from decking ourselves, and we can make sure nine Gates are on the battlefield before we activate the Maze's End to find the tenth and win the game. Sounds simple enough!

Clearly, we’ll need a second Dual Casting–enchanted creature. Once we have infinite mana, one creature can copy Hidden Strings repeatedly while the other creature copies Urban Evolution repeatedly. That just leaves us the problem of having both sorceries on the stack at the same time. Hypersonic Dragon solves that issue for us, though we’ll need to have had it in play already before casting the initial Hidden Strings and going infinite. Or else we just need to have a second copy of Hidden Strings to resume going infinite after taking a break to cast our creature.

Fortunately, Mercurial Chemister can solve the issue of finding us our necessary cards. Using the Doorkeeper example from above, we can draw cards instead of milling our opponent, thus allowing us to draw as much of our deck as we desire. From there, we can cast the Hypersonic Dragon with a second Hidden Strings to resume infiniting. We’ll need a second Dual Casting creature, and Hypersonic Dragon makes a great candidate with its haste superpower. Mercurial Chemister also solves another problem I hadn’t mentioned yet: If we want to win with a Maze's End’s activation, we’ll need to make sure a Gate is in our library as the End’s ability resolves, and the Chemister will allow us to discard the tenth one—after playing the first nine with Urban Evolutions’ addition lands—and then shuffle it back in with our Serene Remembrance.

"Defender Infinity"

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Hypersonic Dragon
• 2 Doorkeeper
• 2 Elusive Krasis
• 3 Fog Bank
• 3 Mercurial Chemister
• 4 Axebane Guardian
• 4 Clinging Anemones
• 4 Gatecreeper Vine

• Spells (14)
• 1 Serene Remembrance
• 4 Hidden Strings
• 4 Urban Evolution
• 2 Ooze Flux
• 3 Dual Casting

• Lands (23)
• 3 Forest
• 1 Azorius Guildgate
• 1 Boros Guildgate
• 1 Dimir Guildgate
• 1 Golgari Guildgate
• 1 Maze's End
• 1 Orzhov Guildgate
• 1 Rakdos Guildgate
• 1 Selesnya Guildgate
• 4 Gruul Guildgate
• 4 Izzet Guildgate
• 4 Simic Guildgate

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This deck has a few ways to enjoy going infinite, but I obviously like to shoot for the crazy endings.

I look forward to timing out on Magic Online.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com