Whenever a card with the words “win the game” is printed, it’s always going to be the basis of some crazy brews. Hedron Alignment from Oath of the Gatewatch is no different. This Blue enchantment is no Show and Tell, but it’s still got Finn brewing up something wacky to meet the requirement of putting one Hedron Alignment in all of the appropriate zones. Let’s take a look:
U/B Hedron Alignment ? Legacy | Finn
- Creatures (2)
- 2 Faerie Macabre
- Spells (41)
- 1 Coffin Purge
- 2 Flash of Insight
- 2 Murderous Cut
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Intuition
- 4 Lim-Dul's Vault
- 3 Preordain
- 4 Gitaxian Probe
- 4 Ponder
- 4 Hedron Alignment
- 1 Relic of Progenitus
- 4 Lotus Petal
- Lands (18)
- 2 Swamp
- 4 Island
- 2 Bloodstained Mire
- 3 Flooded Strand
- 3 Underground Sea
- 4 Polluted Delta
This is one of the most redundant decks I’ve ever seen. The full set of Ponder and Brainstorm plus three Preordains and four Lim-Dul's Vault means you will be able to find the key engine of the deck: Intuition. The goal of this deck is to cantrip your way into the first Hedron Alignment and then Intuition for the other three to get two into the graveyard. That way you can cast one, and use one of your many tools to exile another. This completely sets you up to win the game on your next upkeep. Even better would be to cast a Hedron Alignment, and then cast Intuition at the beginning of your upkeep with the Hedron Alignment trigger on the stack.
With Lotus Petal in the mix, this deck can consistently threaten to kill on turn four as long as you can reasonably get one of your enchantments into exile. That doesn’t appear to be a problem for this deck, though. Relic of Progenitus and Faerie Macabre are fairly narrow ways of getting it done, but you can also use the flashback on Flash of Insight or just pitch an extra Alignment to Force of Will. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could even go for something like Chrome Mox to speed up the combo.
The strength of this deck is in the density of cantrips to help smooth out your draw. Given enough time, this deck will be able to battle through all manner of disruption to stitch together its combo, especially given that Hedron Alignment has hexproof. The largest concern this deck faces is figuring out how much redundancy can be cut to make space for interactive elements like Duress or Counterbalance.
The real weakness of this strategy is its lack of the explosiveness prominent in other combo decks like Storm or Show and Tell. This could certainly be solved through the use of cards like Chrome Mox and Ancient Tomb, but that makes the mana more inconsistent and takes away some of the power of the cantrip engine. If you can find the right balance between keeping your opponent from executing their plan while still trying to assemble yours, then this seems like yet another reasonable, if very strange, Blue combo deck in Legacy.