lucaslat
04-12-2007, 07:27 PM
It seems like it has been a while since a sensei-sensei or helm-based combo has been addressed on this forum, so I thought I would try to revive the topic with a very fast and very cheap deck I recently created. The goal is a turn two kill with some resiliency in a deck that can be quickly and cheaply compiled for anyone looking to play affordable combo, and as an alternative to Belcher. Here is what I have right now:
LAND/MANA
4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
1 Underground Sea
1 Polluted Delta
COMBO/KILL
4 Helm of Awakening
4 Brain Freeze
SEARCH/DRAW
4 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Darkwater Egg
4 Skycloud Egg
4 Conjurer's Bauble
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Chromatic Star
4 Spoils of the Vault
4 Meditate
2 Infernal Tutor
SIDEBOARD
See sideboard options below
How the Deck Plays
This deck is very simple to play. The goal is to play a first term Helm of Awakening. This is accomplished via Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors or Underground Sea plus Lotus Petal. With aggressive mulliganing and the ability to go Lotus Petal-Spoils of the Vault, this happens more often than not. In some cases, it is necessary to play a double land, play a mana filter, filter for black, play spoils of the vault, then play the Helm on turn two. You can even play a double land, play two filter cards, filter them both to draw more cards on the second turn and try to get a helm or spoils that way, but mulliganing is usually more effective.
In either case, in order to win second turn you MUST have at least two mana available. Either from the untapped land you played the first turn, or a second land you play on the second turn, or from a Lion’s Eye Diamond. If you do not have the two mana, you must wait until the next turn to go off. Some examples:
SAMPLE HAND 1
Ancient Tomb
City of Traitors
Sensei’s Divining Top
Infernal Tutor
Brain Freeze
Helm of Awakening
Chromatic Sphere
This hand I an automatic turn 2:
Turn One
Ancient Tomb, Helm of Awakening
Turn Two
Draw Skycloud Egg. Play Chromatic Sphere and Skycloud Egg (2 storm). Tap City and Filter through Skycloud egg for UW. Draw Darkwater Egg. Play Darkwater Egg (3). Sac for UB, draw Ancient Tomb. Pay B for Infernal Tutor revealing Sensei’s Divining Top. With two Tops you can go infinite on Storm and Cast the Brainfreeze using the remaining U. Probably best is to have played the Ancient Tomb when you knew you were going to win to protect against daze/disrupt, but you get the point.
SAMPLE HAND 2
Chromatic Sphere
Ancient Tomb
Chromatic Sphere
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Conjurer’s Bauble
Sensei’s Divining Top
Meditate
MULLIGAN
Lotus Petal
Skycloud Egg
Chromatic Sphere
Helm of Awakening
Chromatic Sphere
Spoils of the Vault
Play Lotus Petal, Sac for B, Play Spoils of the Vault naming City of Traitors. –7. Play City of Traitors, Play Helm of Awakening.
TURN 2
Draw Sensei’s Divining Top. Drop Skycloud Egg, Chromatic Sphere, Chromatic Sphere, Sensei’s Divining Top (Storm 4). Here is where we use Sensei tricks to up our storm count. Put Sensei on top of library drawing Infernal Tutor. Here we can use the tutor to go for something, but being short on mana, we would probably have to get a lion’s eye diamond. Let’s look for more mana first. The best things to search for are Brainstorm, a second top, or a meditate. Tap City, filter through Skycloud Egg drawing the Top back. UW. Play Top (5). Top to top of library drawing Spoils of the Vault. Filter W through a Sphere for B. Draw and play Top (6). Back to top drawing Chromatic Star. Play and sac star maintaining UB to draw the top (7) . Top back to top drawing a second Top. OK, now that we can go infinite we need to keep searching for more mana. We have a lot of options here. We can spoil for a Lion’s Eye Diamond or for a Brain Freeze and go for the Auto win, or we can spoil for the Top that’s on top of the library and infernal tutor for an LED to go for the win. First, let’s cycle that Chromatic sphere we still have on the board to see what we get. Let’s keep UB in the pool. Draw Sensei’s Divining Top. Play Top. Move to top to draw Lotus Petal! Excellent. Play the petal, play Spoils for the Top on Top, sac petal to play infernal tutor for Brain Freeze, go infinite, sac petal. I should add here that the Top-Top combo is not how this deck usually wins. One top will double the amount that each cantrip contributes to the storm count, usually enough to win via a brain freeze. Also, meditate is terrifically important in refilling the hand as we’ll see in the next example.
HAND 3
Chromatic Sphere
Darkwater Egg
Spoils of the Vault
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Helm of Awakening
Darkwater Egg
Lotus Petal
This isn’t perfect, but it will do for what I want to try to show here—that a turn one kill is often possible, but not likely.
Turn One
Lotus Petal, Spoils of the Vault naming City of Traitors
-13 life
Play City of Traitors
Play Helm of Awakening
Now we have a choice, we can go for the turn one win, since we have Lion’s Eye Diamond, or we can wait for another card and more mana. Please, always wait a turn if you can. Let’s see what happens if we get greedy:
Drop Chromatic Sphere, Darkwater Egg, Lion’s Eye Diamond, Darkwater Egg. Storm count is at 7. Sac Lion’s Eye Diamond for 3 Blue. Sac an Egg. UUB. Draw Spoils of the Vault. Sac Egg. UUB. Draw play and sac Conjurer’s Bauble (8). Draw play and Sac Chromatic Star (9). Draw Meditate. We got lucky, that might win it for us. Cast Meditate (B remaining), draw Ancient Tomb, Helm of Awakening, Conjurer’s Bauble, Spoils of the Vault. Play and sac Conjurer’s Bauble (10). Draw and play Lotus Petal (11). Chances are quite slim now. Sac the Chromatic Sphere and draw a Darkwater Egg (which we can no longer activate). Play Darkwater Egg (12). There is only one way left to win, Spoils for Meditate with a lucky draw on the Meditate and getting lucky on the Spoils. Let’s try it. Cast Spoils (13) naming Meditate. –6 life, putting us at 1. Play Helm of Awakening with the floating B (14). Sac Petal for U, play Meditate (15 Storm, zero in mana pool). Draw Lion’s Eye Diamond, City of Traitors, Infernal Tutor, Skycloud Egg. Play Lion’s Eye Diamond, Skycloud Egg, and Darkwater Egg (18). Sac LED for UUU (very sad we don’t have B left for the Infernal Tutor, but that’s why we should have waited for a second turn win). Discard Ancient Tomb, Spoils of the Vault, City of Triators, Infernal Tutor. Sac Skycloud Egg to draw Meditate. UUW. Play Meditate (19 Storm, this is enough to kill so we won’t keep track of storm anymore). UW remaining. Draw Skycloud Egg, Chromatic Star, Infernal Tutor, and Brain Freeze. Play Brain freeze for the win with 1 life and 12 cards in the library. The odds of winning that game first turn were quite low, and second turn quite high. It could have gone wrong a million times, so don’t get greedy unless you have to.
SIDEBOARDING
There are two different approaches that can be taken to sideboarding for this deck: responsive or transformative, depending on how you like to play and your metagame. An example of a Responsive Sideboard:
4 Abeyance
4 Seal of Cleansing
4 Orim’s Chant
3 Metagame Choices (Academy Ruins, Shattering Spree, Extract, Whatever)
The point here is that you do NOT have to worry about creatures. If you fear things like pithing needle (which is NOT detrimental, but can be a pain) or Chalice of the void, you’ll need some artifact destruction, especially some that can deal with Chalice. Lot’s of counterspells running around? Go for Orim’s Chant/Abeyance type place (Abeyance being perfect since it’s a 1cc cycler that stops counters cold).
An example of a transformative sideboard:
4 Brainstorm
4 Intuition
4 Force of Will
3 Disrupt
This is the type of sideboard to use if you fear combo that’s faster than you (not much running around) or if you want to run a slower ship. As another note, this deck can be built around blue fairly simply if you want it to be slower.
I hope you will all understand that this is my first post and actually my first deck construction. I tested the deck over 50 goldfish games, on the play every time, with the following results (counting turn 4 wins as losses, which I assume they would be. Other losses were due to Spoils of the Vault, which cast Turn 1 will, I believe, cause a loss 8% of the time naming a 4 of):
NO MULLIGAN
Turn 1: 3 times
Turn 2: 18 times
Turn 3: 8 times
Loss: 7 times (some of these should have been mulliganed)
SINGLE MULLIGAN
Turn 2: 6 times
Turn 3: 1 time
Loss: 2 time
DOUBLE MULLIGAN
Turn 3: 3 times
Loss: 2 times
TOTAL
Turn 1: 3 (6%)
Turn 2: 24 (48%)
Turn 3: 12 (24%)
Loss: 11 (22%)
At this point I don’t think the deck is quite viable and would like some help. I have tried variants with only 8 lands (the double lands), replacing the Underground Sea and Polluted Delta two more Infernal Tutors. I have also tried Dark Ritual to make it faster (which it does, but fizzles out a bit more) and Brainstorm to add another cantrip.
Your ideas and testing are appreciated. I will not be able to attend the Legacy tournament in Columbus this May, so my goal is just to make a cheap legacy deck a lot of people can use if they want to join the format. Feel free to make expensive additions, but the cheaper the better.
LAND/MANA
4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
1 Underground Sea
1 Polluted Delta
COMBO/KILL
4 Helm of Awakening
4 Brain Freeze
SEARCH/DRAW
4 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Darkwater Egg
4 Skycloud Egg
4 Conjurer's Bauble
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Chromatic Star
4 Spoils of the Vault
4 Meditate
2 Infernal Tutor
SIDEBOARD
See sideboard options below
How the Deck Plays
This deck is very simple to play. The goal is to play a first term Helm of Awakening. This is accomplished via Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors or Underground Sea plus Lotus Petal. With aggressive mulliganing and the ability to go Lotus Petal-Spoils of the Vault, this happens more often than not. In some cases, it is necessary to play a double land, play a mana filter, filter for black, play spoils of the vault, then play the Helm on turn two. You can even play a double land, play two filter cards, filter them both to draw more cards on the second turn and try to get a helm or spoils that way, but mulliganing is usually more effective.
In either case, in order to win second turn you MUST have at least two mana available. Either from the untapped land you played the first turn, or a second land you play on the second turn, or from a Lion’s Eye Diamond. If you do not have the two mana, you must wait until the next turn to go off. Some examples:
SAMPLE HAND 1
Ancient Tomb
City of Traitors
Sensei’s Divining Top
Infernal Tutor
Brain Freeze
Helm of Awakening
Chromatic Sphere
This hand I an automatic turn 2:
Turn One
Ancient Tomb, Helm of Awakening
Turn Two
Draw Skycloud Egg. Play Chromatic Sphere and Skycloud Egg (2 storm). Tap City and Filter through Skycloud egg for UW. Draw Darkwater Egg. Play Darkwater Egg (3). Sac for UB, draw Ancient Tomb. Pay B for Infernal Tutor revealing Sensei’s Divining Top. With two Tops you can go infinite on Storm and Cast the Brainfreeze using the remaining U. Probably best is to have played the Ancient Tomb when you knew you were going to win to protect against daze/disrupt, but you get the point.
SAMPLE HAND 2
Chromatic Sphere
Ancient Tomb
Chromatic Sphere
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Conjurer’s Bauble
Sensei’s Divining Top
Meditate
MULLIGAN
Lotus Petal
Skycloud Egg
Chromatic Sphere
Helm of Awakening
Chromatic Sphere
Spoils of the Vault
Play Lotus Petal, Sac for B, Play Spoils of the Vault naming City of Traitors. –7. Play City of Traitors, Play Helm of Awakening.
TURN 2
Draw Sensei’s Divining Top. Drop Skycloud Egg, Chromatic Sphere, Chromatic Sphere, Sensei’s Divining Top (Storm 4). Here is where we use Sensei tricks to up our storm count. Put Sensei on top of library drawing Infernal Tutor. Here we can use the tutor to go for something, but being short on mana, we would probably have to get a lion’s eye diamond. Let’s look for more mana first. The best things to search for are Brainstorm, a second top, or a meditate. Tap City, filter through Skycloud Egg drawing the Top back. UW. Play Top (5). Top to top of library drawing Spoils of the Vault. Filter W through a Sphere for B. Draw and play Top (6). Back to top drawing Chromatic Star. Play and sac star maintaining UB to draw the top (7) . Top back to top drawing a second Top. OK, now that we can go infinite we need to keep searching for more mana. We have a lot of options here. We can spoil for a Lion’s Eye Diamond or for a Brain Freeze and go for the Auto win, or we can spoil for the Top that’s on top of the library and infernal tutor for an LED to go for the win. First, let’s cycle that Chromatic sphere we still have on the board to see what we get. Let’s keep UB in the pool. Draw Sensei’s Divining Top. Play Top. Move to top to draw Lotus Petal! Excellent. Play the petal, play Spoils for the Top on Top, sac petal to play infernal tutor for Brain Freeze, go infinite, sac petal. I should add here that the Top-Top combo is not how this deck usually wins. One top will double the amount that each cantrip contributes to the storm count, usually enough to win via a brain freeze. Also, meditate is terrifically important in refilling the hand as we’ll see in the next example.
HAND 3
Chromatic Sphere
Darkwater Egg
Spoils of the Vault
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Helm of Awakening
Darkwater Egg
Lotus Petal
This isn’t perfect, but it will do for what I want to try to show here—that a turn one kill is often possible, but not likely.
Turn One
Lotus Petal, Spoils of the Vault naming City of Traitors
-13 life
Play City of Traitors
Play Helm of Awakening
Now we have a choice, we can go for the turn one win, since we have Lion’s Eye Diamond, or we can wait for another card and more mana. Please, always wait a turn if you can. Let’s see what happens if we get greedy:
Drop Chromatic Sphere, Darkwater Egg, Lion’s Eye Diamond, Darkwater Egg. Storm count is at 7. Sac Lion’s Eye Diamond for 3 Blue. Sac an Egg. UUB. Draw Spoils of the Vault. Sac Egg. UUB. Draw play and sac Conjurer’s Bauble (8). Draw play and Sac Chromatic Star (9). Draw Meditate. We got lucky, that might win it for us. Cast Meditate (B remaining), draw Ancient Tomb, Helm of Awakening, Conjurer’s Bauble, Spoils of the Vault. Play and sac Conjurer’s Bauble (10). Draw and play Lotus Petal (11). Chances are quite slim now. Sac the Chromatic Sphere and draw a Darkwater Egg (which we can no longer activate). Play Darkwater Egg (12). There is only one way left to win, Spoils for Meditate with a lucky draw on the Meditate and getting lucky on the Spoils. Let’s try it. Cast Spoils (13) naming Meditate. –6 life, putting us at 1. Play Helm of Awakening with the floating B (14). Sac Petal for U, play Meditate (15 Storm, zero in mana pool). Draw Lion’s Eye Diamond, City of Traitors, Infernal Tutor, Skycloud Egg. Play Lion’s Eye Diamond, Skycloud Egg, and Darkwater Egg (18). Sac LED for UUU (very sad we don’t have B left for the Infernal Tutor, but that’s why we should have waited for a second turn win). Discard Ancient Tomb, Spoils of the Vault, City of Triators, Infernal Tutor. Sac Skycloud Egg to draw Meditate. UUW. Play Meditate (19 Storm, this is enough to kill so we won’t keep track of storm anymore). UW remaining. Draw Skycloud Egg, Chromatic Star, Infernal Tutor, and Brain Freeze. Play Brain freeze for the win with 1 life and 12 cards in the library. The odds of winning that game first turn were quite low, and second turn quite high. It could have gone wrong a million times, so don’t get greedy unless you have to.
SIDEBOARDING
There are two different approaches that can be taken to sideboarding for this deck: responsive or transformative, depending on how you like to play and your metagame. An example of a Responsive Sideboard:
4 Abeyance
4 Seal of Cleansing
4 Orim’s Chant
3 Metagame Choices (Academy Ruins, Shattering Spree, Extract, Whatever)
The point here is that you do NOT have to worry about creatures. If you fear things like pithing needle (which is NOT detrimental, but can be a pain) or Chalice of the void, you’ll need some artifact destruction, especially some that can deal with Chalice. Lot’s of counterspells running around? Go for Orim’s Chant/Abeyance type place (Abeyance being perfect since it’s a 1cc cycler that stops counters cold).
An example of a transformative sideboard:
4 Brainstorm
4 Intuition
4 Force of Will
3 Disrupt
This is the type of sideboard to use if you fear combo that’s faster than you (not much running around) or if you want to run a slower ship. As another note, this deck can be built around blue fairly simply if you want it to be slower.
I hope you will all understand that this is my first post and actually my first deck construction. I tested the deck over 50 goldfish games, on the play every time, with the following results (counting turn 4 wins as losses, which I assume they would be. Other losses were due to Spoils of the Vault, which cast Turn 1 will, I believe, cause a loss 8% of the time naming a 4 of):
NO MULLIGAN
Turn 1: 3 times
Turn 2: 18 times
Turn 3: 8 times
Loss: 7 times (some of these should have been mulliganed)
SINGLE MULLIGAN
Turn 2: 6 times
Turn 3: 1 time
Loss: 2 time
DOUBLE MULLIGAN
Turn 3: 3 times
Loss: 2 times
TOTAL
Turn 1: 3 (6%)
Turn 2: 24 (48%)
Turn 3: 12 (24%)
Loss: 11 (22%)
At this point I don’t think the deck is quite viable and would like some help. I have tried variants with only 8 lands (the double lands), replacing the Underground Sea and Polluted Delta two more Infernal Tutors. I have also tried Dark Ritual to make it faster (which it does, but fizzles out a bit more) and Brainstorm to add another cantrip.
Your ideas and testing are appreciated. I will not be able to attend the Legacy tournament in Columbus this May, so my goal is just to make a cheap legacy deck a lot of people can use if they want to join the format. Feel free to make expensive additions, but the cheaper the better.