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Main » Articles » 75% – Combo Out of Nowhere

75% – Combo Out of Nowhere

Jason Alt
Posted on June 18, 2014
 Reddit

Not all of my decks are 75%.

I am on vacation visiting my in-laws, and someone in one of the local game stores (LGS) I stopped by recognized my Brainstorm Brewery hoodie, and we got to talking. When I mentioned that not all of my Commander decks are built as 75%, decks he seemed a little taken aback. I’m the proponent of the theory, after all—shouldn’t I exemplify it in every way possible with a ton of 75% decks? The truth is that when you are playing with your regular playgroup, you don’t need a 75% deck. I play my 75% decks with my playgroup, certainly; in fact, that’s all I use. But a 75% deck wasn’t designed to be played with a group in which you know what to expect from them—and in which they know what to expect from you.

Rafiq of the Many
That last sentence stuck with me all afternoon. I paid for the singles I’d picked out (once a financier, always a financier—is it just me or is Dictate of Erebos at $1 incorrect?), waved goodbye to everyone I’d just met, and left thinking about how I’d never really developed that thought fully before. You build a 75% deck because it’s useful in any situation. You won’t smash casuals, bore your regular playgroup, or show up to a fight with a serious playgroup with your pants already around your ankles. That was my vision for the project. The fact that you wanted your deck scalable and capable when you didn’t know what to expect from the other players was obvious from the outset, but it finally clicked for me that the deck you play matters against a new group because they don’t know what you’re up to. I had been intuitively aware of that to an extent, and so was every reader of this column. In conversations I’ve had with people about the 75% project, everyone has come to the same conclusions regarding commanders like Rafiq of the Many—you could build them 75%, but that’s a bit like waving a toy pistol around in a police station: You know you don’t mean any harm, but you can’t be all that surprised if you’re treated as hostile.

Your own playgroup will know your Rafiq deck isn’t the kind of Rafiq deck that they need to smish-smash before it gets going, but you don’t necessarily need a 75% Rafiq deck to play with them. You can just build a fun deck that is scaled to the power level of your specific group. In fact, why not use this as a chance to create another axiom to inform future 75 deck-builders?

  • 75% decks are designed to be competitive against players unknown to you yet be fair and useable against a regular playgroup. If a deck won’t be useful in both of those capacities, do not pursue a 75% build.

My 75% decks are tuned and powerful, and I will bust them out against a group I’ve never encountered before. This limits my choice of commander slightly. I was aware of this liability in the past, but I’m just realizing that there is a flipside to it. When you’re playing against a new group or debuting a 75% deck with a regular group, you have the element of surprise on your side. They may get the wrong idea and overestimate your hostility and capability if you reveal a Rafiq in your command zone. Why not give them the wrong idea and make them underestimate your deck?

Reddit user /u/sivartus submitted a deck to me three months ago and probably thought I forgot. The north remembers, /u/sivartus. It also thanks you for your deck idea. Let’s get into it.

Marath, Will of the Wild ? Commander | sivartus

  • Commander (0)

/u/sivartus says he built this deck to be played by his wife in their local group. The deck is an improvement on the precon, and there are some very good card choices in here. However, it’s not really a 75% deck, but I’m not sure it needs to be. I think this could be a great deal more powerful and not make the people in the LGS roll their eyes when his wife shuffles up. I think if we want to make the deck 75%, we can go a few different ways with it. I want to try something I’ve never tried before and assemble a combo deck, and since no one is going to expect a Marath player to combo off, we’re going to use that element of surprise. Your LGS playgroup will be able to deal with it once the players know how it works, attenuating the power level slightly by removing the element of surprise. Let’s see how it would look as a 75% combo deck.

Marath, Will of the Wild ? Commander | Jason Alt

  • Commander (0)

I left the mana base alone because it’s expensive enough as it is with Gaea's Cradle in there. Besides, there is nothing about a mana base that makes or breaks a 75% deck that I have found. It’s the rest of the deck that I wanted to tweak.

Mana Echoes
Experienced Commander players will probably see this coming, and when you start to jam cards like Mana Echoes, they will know what you’re up to. But that’s the point: They will know you’re on combo only after you begin to move that way. They won’t say, “Get the combo player!” The second they see a Sharuum the Hegemon on your mat. They are going to let you play your own game for a bit. More casual groups will let you play your game regardless, and I think comboing off with +1/+1 counters and tokens is fun and novel. For me, not playing blue with my red and green is novel enough.

There are a lot of fun combos, some which are trickier than others. I will leave some of them for you to find, especially if you sleeve this up, but, broadly, you want to somehow double what you are doing to go infinite. If you have a Mirari's Wake out, you can make two tokens each time you take a damage with Darien, King of Kjeldor out. If you also have Warstorm Surge, you can deal a ton of damage, both to them and to yourself. Deal 2 to yourself to make two more tokens and 2 to opponents to kill them. Suture Priest will keep you alive. You can go noninfinite with some of those cards missing, which is the best part.

Putting counters with Marath’s X ability on cards like Gyre Sage or Viridian Joiner lets you generate more mana—mana that can be used to replay Marath with more counters or make more tokens. Making tokens is silly with Mana Echoes out, and that fuels a lot of infinite combos for itself. Mana Echoes combos well with Ashnod's Altar, Doubling Season, and Assemble the Legion. Frankly, Mana Echoes combos well with the deck.

Mirari's Wake
Having good cards like that makes me want to play tutors. This is the largest number of tutors I have ever advocated, but they are face-up tutors, they’re kind of narrow, and they can help you win a game. Plus, they are broad within a narrow category. Does that make sense? Idyllic Tutor is narrower than a card like Demonic Tutor. However, within the category of the enchantments in the deck, you can use it for more than just comboing off, and that makes it broad and utilitarian. You can grab Mirari's Wake to arm your tokens, grab Assemble the Legion because it’s a great card, or grab Sylvan Library to smooth your draws.

This is the first 75% combo deck I’ve advocated. Is this too powerful? What about our new axiom about whether we should build a deck 75% at all? As always, leave it in the comments. Remember to send me your decks—as /u/sivartus learned, the fact that I haven’t mentioned it in three months does not mean I’ve forgotten about it. Thanks for reading, and swing over to reddit.com/r/edh to join the conversation over there when you’re done commenting here. Until next time!

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TAGS articles, elder dragon highlander, casual, edh, commander, cmdr, jason alt, marath will of the wild, 75% commander, 75% cmdr, marath

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