[Deck] The Four Horsemen - Orb/Monolith

[YamiJoey]

I am not familiar with the origins of this deck, so I was not aware of the whole 'It's this deck but it does it differently'. I would definitely have to look into Ceph Break to see exactly what you're talking about, but as far as I can tell it is the same thing, only with variations on how you get to the 'no cards left' situation. The ability to get better against removal by running no Artifacts is something I was not aware of, and something I never considered. The Azani variant may be an answer to that. For the Azami thing I would cut a Think Twice and Cabal Therapy for the Angel and Wizard. Additional Therapies are much less relevant, as I'm mostly looking to just Flash them back. With the Angel combo you can get two Therapies flashed back, so cutting a 'Seize or something in its place may be worthwhile, as you may be wanting to use one from your hand pre-combo to ditch a Maniac or something, though I have basically just been using Brainstorms for that.

The sideboard at the moment is an Echoing Truth an 14 cards to become a Show and Tell variant, simply netted straight from the old deck. (The ones that actually ran Emrakul sonit made sense.) It's by no means what I expected it to look like. I would also like to find more answers for Chalice on 1. It's either have the conbo, or Vault for it once it's resolved, and then have something like a Redirect or Force, as you can't Threapy.

There is an option for cutting 'Seize and Vault for Preordanes and something else. Seeing as we're cutting protection, and ability to cast Therapy from our hand, we'd need something really good. There's possibly the Blue Faithless Looting, ehich doesn't seem bad in any capacity, especially seeing as Brainstorm can often be awkward on T1, or in multiples.

The option of becoming an LED deck is interesting, and I assume would come with Dark Rituals and such, attempting to play a Storm-esque turn out. Once we use Therapies etc. to dismantle their hate, we shouldn't need a hand. I am very much in favour of this route, but it would require a big rework as far as I'm aware, attempting to fit in 6 mana rocks over the FoW/MD's would be fine, but then you need Rits and Tutors, which is around 6 more cards, and I'd like to use 4 LED and 4 Petal, so that's 8 slots we're not entirely sure about. You mention cutting Vault, and whilst I'm not a fan of that it could well happen, but that's still 4 cards.

I'm unable to get too deep into this right now, but I'll be back tomorrow to evaluate my ramblings and see what made any sense and come up with some stock lists I can fish with to see if it really does make it faster. I expect to need Cabal Ritual.

[FTW]

There are different variations of Cephalid Breakfast, but the main pieces basically all cost 1-2 mana


//Cephalid:
Cephalid Illusionist

//His Breakfast:
Nomads en-Kor
Lightning Greaves
Shuto


4 Horseman pieces cost 2 and 3. So it is slower to assemble to do essentially the same thing (dump your library in your GY). Why would you do a strictly slower combo to achieve the exact same end goal?

1) 4 Horseman pieces are non-creature artifacts so they completely dodge removal while Cephalid pieces are easy to kill and require protection. However, this was in the days before Abrupt Decay and Stoneblade/Maverick, when most decks didn't have maindeck artifact destruction. Changes to the format make this old advantage moot. Abrupt Decay is a card. Blah blah blah.

2) 4 Horseman pieces do not cost 1 mana. They cannot be countered by Mental Misstep or Chalice @ 1, which were both big things for a while.

3) Because your engine is creatureless, you can run a creatureless win condition (Blasting Station + effective use of priority) to completely blank creature removal all game.

4) Orb/Monolith allows you to mill 1 card at a time, while Illusionist mills you in 3s. And mana abilities can't be responded to. What this means is you have a hell of a lot more stack control. While Cephalid Breakfast can only hope to mill itself into oblivion and then reanimate something cool, 4 Horseman has complete control of the stack at all times thanks to 1-at-a-time milling and the 1-of Emrakul.

-Someone tries to Surgically Extract Narcomoeba in response to its' return trigger? In response, mill yourself into Emrakul and reshuffle.

-Worried about StP exiling Narcomoeba from the battlefield before you get 3 out for Dread Return? First you just mill until one comes out. With its trigger on the stack, mill until you get at least 1 Cabal Therapy in the yard. Let the Narcomoeba hit the field. Without passing priority Cabal Therapy them and see their hand. Rinse and repeat until they have no hand/you use all Therapies. Assuming they had 3 or fewer answers in hand, they outright lose. They never get priority to interact with Narcomoeba on the field. If they try to interact with something in your GY before you Therapy them, just mill into Emrakul and reshuffle!

-Emrakul means infinite Narcomoeba sacrifices. This lets you deal unlimited colorless damage to any number of targets.

Basically once you assemble Orb + Monolith, opponents cannot really interact with you outside of Krosan Grip or Extirpate. The combo chain is ridiculously long and painful to play out, but you have complete control. That's the main edge this deck has over other self-milling combos.

Unfortunately, this very stack-controlling engine was deemed "Slow Play" since you can always accidentally mill into Emrakul before the card you want (randomness) and hence you cannot provide a deterministic number of iterations for the combo... you can provide a probablistic expectation, but the outcome will always be random. Any other attempt to build this deck without the Emrakul loses the beauty of that stack control that made the deck unique and resilient. At that point, you become a questionably slower Cephalid Breakfast and need to consider why Orb/Monolith should be assembled instead of Cephalid dudes.

Orb/Monolith at least used to be harder to remove, but now MD Abrupt Decay means your combo pieces are easier to take out.

Advantages Orb/Monolith still has:
-the pieces are castable off Ancient Tomb and City of Traitors and do not cost 1cc, which means you can run Chalice of the Void. Chalice is prety amazing in the current format, protects you from Thoughtseize and Spell Pierce and other combo disruption....

-the pieces are colorless, not creatures of different colors, which means less strain on the manabase and you can run whichever color you think can best protect the combo. maybe that will be a blue shell with draw spells and Force of Will. maybe that will be a discard shell with Thoughtseizes and Duress. Maybe it will be a Moon Stompy shell with sol lands and Chalices and 8 Blood Moons. There are plenty of disruptive angles this deck could take.

But it's important to remember when designing it that there needs to be something about the deck construction that makes Orb/Monolith superior to another self-milling engine.

[YamiJoey]

I may have to look into a Cephalid Breakfast variant for what I'm trying to achieve here, but some of the points you make are incredibly interesting. Perhaps we could use some kind of Chalice/Diamond-based disruption shell, similar to the Loam decks and such, whether we use Loam or not. I do like the idea of loaming into the combo, and possibly just using it as both an end game and an engine to fuel our disruption. Just milling until you hit a Wasteland and Loam in your upkeep seems like it could work?

I like Mesmeric Orb with this strategy, as it just digs, but is Basalt Monolith even a good card? It feels like its inclusion would be purely there for the combo, which doesn't feel terrible, but I'm unsure if its worth it. The idea of playing Academy Ruins with them seems strong, as you could cast Intuitions to find a piece, a Ruins, and a Loam, and slowly build up your combo, whilst locking the game down with various other tried and tested strategies. By the time you go off they have nothing threatening in hand. On the flip side you still have to run all of your other combo pieces, diluting your deck further, and the Loam X decks seem to have a better end game in the 1-card combo of Devastating Dreams.

Moving away from the Loam variant, we can look into other options. Making a Chalice for 1 gives us excellent game against combo and certain tribal decks like Goblins, but isn't spectacular against things like non-Blue Stoneblade, and even the Blue Control decks could care less about Brainstorm when they can just land a Jace. Our options against this kind of strategy would include either Blue, attempting to counter their plays, or Black, using Hymns and Liliana to strip their hand. I'm not hugely familiar with disruption strategies we have access to in Legacy, but I like the idea of comboing out as an end game.

Considering our deck is "(5) Mill your deck find a way to kill your opponent", maybe some inspiration could be taken from Metalworker/MUD decks, and play a faster tutor-based deck, possibly using Kuldotha Forgemaster and the Goblin. (R 1/1, R,T, Sacrifice an Artifact: Return an Artifact) This opens up Mox Opal, and possibly use of Artifact Lands as a method of speeding through the deck to find what we need, and the Orb makes our Goblin that much better. This sounds like the kind of thing that would be better looked into in those threads, but it may simply the way I end up taking this new form of the deck.

I hate to see a good combo like this go to waste, and I may hand on to it for longer than may be useful, but if there is a better way to deck yourself, there's a better way. I may head over into the Ceph Break thread and see what I can come up with there, but I'll continue working and trsting and see what I come up with using this deck.

[beardstorm]

* necromantic powers intensifies *

Someone made a post on Reddit yesterday revealing how the combo can now (with a few tweaks) be Legacy legal!

Basically you swap the previous combo of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Blasting Station for a few copies of Dread, the new card Desecrated Tomb and an Anger.
This goes around the previous rules issue since you are able to continue milling in response to the shuffle triggers, so the only cards left in your library are the looping creatures. From that point on the combo is determinate and perfectly legal.

It does face a few other challenges, most notably the recent banning of Probe, but Deathrite being gone also presents another window of opportunity, and I think it will be quite fun to explore what the deck can do given these new options.

What are your thoughts?

Link to the original post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/co..._some_changes/

[pandaman]

I replied to this effect to the Reddit post when I saw it. I think this a really fun combo: I mean, who doesn't like infinite hasty bats?

It seems, though, that you could use the Angel of Glory's Rise+Laboratory Maniac+Lady of Scrolls combo in this shell instead of the new Sharuum+Desecrated Tomb+Anger+Dread+Dread/Guile. What are your thoughts comparing the two? LabMan seems good because it costs one slot in your deck (possibly two if you run the second Dread or a Guile) , improves your manabase consistency and resilience by keeping you out of a third colour, Red (and potentially a fourth colour, if you want to mess with Memory's Journey), and wins without needing to use the attack step. Hasty Bats seems good because it isn't soft to spot removal (if they have two removal spells when you're trying to with with LabMan you'll need to counter one, start the win attempt with a sorcery speed draw spell like Ponder, or have an instant speed draw spell like Brainstorm in hand) and you can play Pyroblast for better protection and game against U decks because you're in R and you might as well. There are definitely pros and cons for each I can see, but I could be missing some.

Based on the above, on balance, if I was going to a competitive tournament, I would play LabMan instead of The Bats so I could have a two-colour manabase and more extra slots for protection or manipulation. I would play the hell out of The Bats at my local, though!