There are a lot of ways to build Elf Combo in Modern. Some builds focus on Beck // Call, Forbidden Orchard, and Cloudstone Curio to try to combo out and get opponent’s dead. Other focus much more on Collected Company, Chord of Calling, and Shaman of the Pack to provide the option to aggro your opponent out as well as chain together a bunch of Shamans. Still others play Ranger of Eos packages to gain some resiliency against sweepers and ensure that you can find Heritage Druids and Nettle Sentinels to allow you to chain all of your spells. This week, SaffronOlive brings us a completely different take on the archetype with just as much explosive potential at a fraction of the cost:

Sprout Paradox ? Modern | SaffronOlive

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Regal Force
• 2 Boreal Druid
• 3 Gilt-Leaf Archdruid
• 4 Elvish Archdruid
• 4 Elvish Mystic
• 4 Llanowar Elves
• 4 Noble Hierarch

• Instants (8)
• 4 Chord of Calling
• 4 Sprout Swarm

• Aritfacts (8)
• 4 Lifecrafter's Bestiary
• 4 Paradox Engine

• Lands (21)
• 17 Forest
• 2 Cavern of Souls
• 2 Ghost Quarter

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Gut Shot
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 2 Relic of Progenitus
• 3 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Nylea's Disciple
• 2 Beast Within
• 1 Thrun, the Last Troll
• 1 Primal Command

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Alternatively, if your opponent is short on sweepers, you can utilize Sprout Swarm to slowly pull ahead. This is a bad plan against cards like Celestial Colonnade or Temur Battle Rage, but can buy you an enormous amount of time against vanilla creatures like Tarmogoyf. Sprout Swarm is also a great way to incidentally improve the power of your Chord of Callings as games go long. Most decks try to end games by Chording to put together combo pieces that typically cost no more than 3 mana. This deck wants to be able to Chord for things as expensive as Regal Force and Craterhoof Behemoth, which means that your ability to net a couple of tokens per turn cycle off of Sprout Swarm substantially helps to get enough bodies to convoke your Chords.

Lastly, this deck has the ability to go infinite with Paradox Engine. Paradox Engine has shown itself to be a powerful means of generating mana with mana creatures and artifacts, helping to power out all manner of crazy combinations of spells across formats. In this particular deck, Paradox Engine allows you to go infinite with Sprout Swarm. Additionally, this allows you to generate infinite mana, since your Saprolings can pay for Sprout Swarm while your creatures can net mana. This lets you chain together cheap creatures, paying for Lifecrafter's Bestiary triggers and finding more Gilt-Leaf Archdruids until you can find a Chord of Calling to end the game.