So, Illusionist's Bracers falls into that camp of the best combo enablers that have somehow seen zero play. This is perplexing, since the card is astounding, the art is astounding, it's good with many creatures, and it's dirt cheap. Well, whatever, we're gonna make a deck with this monstrosity today.

For those who have not considered the absurdity of this card before, here's how it works. First, you dress your Aphetto Alchemist or Seeker of Skybreak in these fancy mittens. You are now in touch with the infinite. You tap the card to untap a permanent, probably a mana source or another card with a tap ability. Then, the Bracers doubles the effect, and you point the duplicate back at the original Alchemist or Follower. Rinse and repeat to untap everything as much as you want.


Two brothers, seperated from us by decades of reverse power creep.

How do you turn this into a win? Well, if you have a mana-producing creature, then Seeker generates infinite mana. Alchemist does the same thing, though he needs an artifact to go bonkers. In both cases, any creature that taps to ping the opponent will also get the job done. Pinging creatures also happen to wear metal mittens quite nicely; ramping from 1 damage to 2 damage means Tim and his children will finish off a very large swath of creatures.

So, the next question is, do we want to be in blue, in green, both, or branch out? Well, if we stay in those colors, our choices of pingers are actually pretty limited. In blue we have a variety of terrible creatures costing 3 or more, a surprising number of which have protection from Red.


This is not the combo piece you are looking for.

The moment we branch into Red, however, our options get insanely better because Wizards decided, somewhere around Lowryn block, that this effect should be better in Red than Blue. Poor Tim. Once we add Red, we get some effective cheap creatures that can come down and do work before we try to combo off AND some effective high-range cards that work well in the late game. Now, one big point I think that needs to be true of all creatures in a deck like this: they need to be able to hit creatures AND players. That's because, unlike in a Machine-Gun style list, we're not looking to race towards blasting the opponent away by chaining spells as fast as possible. We need to exercise some kind of board control while we wait until we assemble the combo and go off that way. We want pingers that both function as removal and also turn into win conditions when we combo.

On the low end, we have Granger Guildmage and Razorfin Hunter. These guys do an amazing job of filling your low curve and interfering with an opponent who tries to play early game creatures. Sadly, Granger does not go infinite with the combo, but since he turns into a walking Fireball once you're going off, that might be good enough. And, it's not like there's any competition on the low end of the Tim Family Tree. I mean, you are not going to run Kris Mage and while Fireslinger exists, it seems like a bad idea to bet that you'll have a higher life total than your opponent when you combo off if your removal was also pinging you in the early game.

On the higher end we have Cunning Sparkmage, which is really nice because he can come down out of nowhere and combo off immediately if you have the rest assembled. [cards]Vithian Stinger[/card] combos off if it started the turn in your graveyard or in play. Vulshok Sorcerer works, but it's harder to cast, so there's that. Niv Mizzet, the Firemind is back with his pingy bretheren, and he also wins handily if you are going off while being a nice fat body and a source of card advantage on top of that.

We could push this into solely R/G or U/G, but I wanna go full on Timur. Why? Because I've been looking for an excuse to be able to run Sarkhan the Bad Ass and this seems like as good a place as any.


Why hello, awesome walker that is actually not playable in any format. Why don't we dust you off?

You'll never use his ultimate, of course, but that should not be necessary. Depending on the sate of the game, Sarkhan will either be dumping Dragons into play or accelerating you towards the kill. Either way, he's attacking a different angle than the rest of your deck, and with a horde of weenies to hide behind, that might be good enough.

Lastly, any deck with a high concentration of pinging creatures really wants Basilisk Collar and Keen Sense/Curiosity, and this is no exception!

Tim's Bracers

Combo (10)
4 Illusionist's Bracers
4 Aphetto Alchemist
2 Seeker of Skybreak

Pingers (14)
4 Granger Guildmage
4 Razorfin Hunter
4 Cunning Sparkmage
2 Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind

Ping Support (6)
3 Basalisk Collar (or Gorgon's Head if you don't have Collars laying around)
3 Keen Sense (because you used up all your Curiosities on the Machine Gun deck you also have)

Useful Stuff (2)
2 Blue Sun's Zenith (The last word in incidental combo kills with infinite mana)
2 Nature's Claim (As a hedge against hexproof nonsense)

High End (2)

2 Sarkhan, Unbroken

Mana (24)
4 Birds of Paradise (Because infinite mana is nifty)
4 Frontier Biovac
4 Terramorphic Expanse
2 Yavimaya Coast
2 Karspluan Forest
2 Shivan Reef
2 Forest
2 Island
2 Mountain