New Reanimator Combo - Kairi, the Swirling Sky (NEO)

[eatbasics]

New Reanimator Combo - Kairi, the Swirling Sky (NEO)

In Kaigawa: Neon Dynasty (NEO) this beautiful dragon was spoiled: Kairi, the Swirling Sky (link).

Kairi, the Swirling Sky {4}{U}{U}

Legendary Creature — Dragon Spirit

Flying, ward {3}

When Kairi, the Swirling Sky dies, choose one —

• Return any number of target nonland permanents with total mana value 6 or less to their owners’ hands.

• Mill six cards, then return up to two instant and/or sorcery cards from your graveyard to your hand.

6/6

I can see an intersting combo in a reanimation shell with it:

Kairi, the Swirling Sky + Goryo's Vengeance + Culling the Weak is an infinite combo that mills your entire deck and generates infite black mana.
Explanation: Reanimate Kairi, the Swirling Sky with Goryo's Vengeance, sacrifice it to Culling the Weak, return both instants back to your hand and repeat.

As win option cards like Thassa's Oracle and Tendrils of Agony come to mind.
However, Collective Brutality might be the most versitly win option.
Here is how it works:
Once your deck is in your graveyard and you have infinite black mana you can return 2 Goryo's Vengeance with Kairi, the Swirling Sky's trigger, then splice Goryo's Vengeance to Goryo's Vengeance in order to return 2 Kairi, the Swirling Sky. 1 Kairi, the Swirling Sky dies to legend rule returning Goryo's Vengeance and Collective Brutality. Cast Collective Brutality to drain the opponent and repeat the 2 Goryo's Vengeance splice trick for another round of Brutality --> Fatality!

Here is a first rough draft how the deck could look like:

4 Kairi, the Swirling Sky

4 Goryo's Vengeance
4 Shallow Grave or Exhume

4 Entomb
4 Careful Study

4 Stitcher's Supplier
1 Hapless Researcher

4 Cabal Therapy

4 Brainstorm

4 Culling the Weak
4 Dark Ritual
4 Lotus Petal

1 Collective Brutality

2 Underground Sea
1 Island
1 Swamp
4 Fetchlands
4 Splash-color lands

Short card choice explanations:

Stitcher's Supplier and Hapless Researcher could be interesting in combination with Cabal Therapy for protection and Culling the Weak to hardcast Kairi.

Cabal Therapy can jump-start the combo if you do not have Culling the Weak in the hand or graveyard yet, by milling 6 cards with Kairi (lucky line).
I wanted to include at least 1 more Reanimate for a similar "jump-start" reason when you are short on mana, but it did not fit in the draft yet.

I chose blue as supporting color because of Brainstorm, but it also enables hard cast Kairi, which is not that irrelevant because it only costs 4UU.

Some thoughts:

Kairi, the Swirling Sky is amazing because it is supporting the engine on its own with its mill, and has a build-in protection against spot removel with Ward 3.

I had this deck idea basically some minutes ago and therefore the concept and draft decklist might not be perfect yet, but I think there is some potential here.

I would love to hear all your thoughts about Kairi, the Swirling Sky!

Best regards
eatbasics

Edit 29.01.2022: Considering Collective Brutality as win-con.

[eatbasics]

Edit 29.01.2022: Considering Collective Brutality as win-con.

[» Arcanis «]

Neat interaction!
First thoughts:

• With the inclusion of those instant reanimation spells, it looks a lot like TinFins
• Emrakul, the Aeons Torn shuffle trigger doesn't do any harm to Kairi's ability itself, unsure if it's possible to exploit something here without going into the non-deterministic "Four Horsemen" rule
• A viable sideboard plan might be the conversion into Doomsday
• Hapless Researcher and Stitcher's Supplier don't work well with Shallow Grave, because they might block better targets
• Collective Brutality is good, not just as a one-off
• Kairin's ability doesn't target the instant and/or sorcery cards
• Typical hate to expect : Surgical Extraction, Leyline of the Void,
• Some Hate that is weaker compared (compared to Reanimator) : Exile removal like Swords to Plowshares or Solidarity
• Some additional hate to fight against (compared to Reanimator) : Torpor Orb

[alphastryk]

If you're looking for redundant copies of Culling the Weak, Burnt Offering is an option here as well

Intuition is also a good candidate since it puts your reanimation target into your yard and puts combo pieces and/or cabal therapy there as well, and can always fall back to being demonic tutor for a 3x + card

[FTW]

If you're putting a creature in the graveyard to reanimate with Goryo's Vengeance/Shallow Grave, you can already do that with Griselbrand and win the game on the spot (Tin Fins.dec).

Kairi + Goryo + Culling is a combo win

But Griselbrand + Goryo is already a combo win

Kairi is a fun idea for casual or EDH. For Legacy, it's trying to do the same thing as Tin Fins, with the same vulnerabilities, but using more pieces to go off.

If you want to reduce the variance of the extra conditional cards you have to run (Culling the Weak), you could play Grief for disruption. Evoke Grief + sac to culling for BBBB seems like a nice interaction. You can also reanimate Grief for more disruption.

[eatbasics]

If you're putting a creature in the graveyard to reanimate with Goryo's Vengeance/Shallow Grave, you can already do that with Griselbrand and win the game on the spot (Tin Fins.dec).

Kairi + Goryo + Culling is a combo win

But Griselbrand + Goryo is already a combo win

Kairi is a fun idea for casual or EDH. For Legacy, it's trying to do the same thing as Tin Fins, with the same vulnerabilities, but using more pieces to go off.

If you want to reduce the variance of the extra conditional cards you have to run (Culling the Weak), you could play Grief for disruption. Evoke Grief + sac to culling for BBBB seems like a nice interaction. You can also reanimate Grief for more disruption.

At first it looks like Tin Fins with extra hoops to jump through, as pointed out by » Arcanis « as well, and I totally agree with that.
However, if we take a closer look it might hold some advantages over Tin Fins that are not apparent at first.

• Not dependant on life total and this could open up the possibility of a more "controlling" or rather slow game plan with more setup time and hard-cast option (see list below)
• Deterministic win, even though Tin Fins rarely fizzles
• Not weak to cards like Narset, Parter of Veils or Hullbreacher, even though they are not that common and Tin Fins is faster most of the time

I am not saying that it is better than Tin Fins, but maybe just different enough to justify running Kairi over Griselbrand (with the correct setup).

A slower shell that is not a bad Tin Fins impression could look like this:

//Combo
4 Kairi, the Swirling Sky
4 Goryo's Vengeance
4 Culling the Weak

4 Entomb

4 Collective Brutality

4 Cabal Therapy
4 Force of Will

4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder

4 Dark Ritual

4 Stitcher's Supplier
2 Snapcaster Mage

2 Underground Sea
1 Island
1 Swamp
4 Polluted Delta
4 Fetchlands
2 Splash-color lands

The numbers are way off and the list is probably really bad, but I wanted to convey an idea with the list.
It could pivot into the direction of "older" UB Reanimator decks that were not trimmed on T1 like Tin Fins and RB Reanimator, but with a deterministic combo kill.

[alphastryk]

It definitely feels like moving towards the old slower UB Reanimator type plan might make sense.

Another thought - this will likely play out similar to the various WordGorger Dragon decks so that's another good starting point

Last tidbit - another cute interaction is that you can use the other dies trigger to bounce hate pieces sometimes.

[eatbasics]

It definitely feels like moving towards the old slower UB Reanimator type plan might make sense.

Another thought - this will likely play out similar to the various WordGorger Dragon decks so that's another good starting point

Last tidbit - another cute interaction is that you can use the other dies trigger to bounce hate pieces sometimes.

You are right, World Gorger is kind of similar and we could adapt elements from those lists.

For now I will be using this list as starting point for maximal redundancy to see if the combo at least functions smoothly in a gold-fish scenario.

//Instants
4 Brainstorm
4 Culling the Weak
4 Dark Ritual
4 Entomb
4 Goryo's Vengeance

//Sorceries
4 Cabal Therapy
2 Careful Study
2 Collective Brutality
4 Exhume
4 Ponder
2 Thoughtseize

//Creatures
4 Kairi, the Swirling Sky
4 Stitcher's Supplier

//Lands
1 Island
2 Misty Rainforest
1 Phyrexian Tower
4 Polluted Delta
1 Swamp
3 Underground Sea
2 Verdant Catacombs

Thoughts so far:
Stitcher's Supplier seems great with Culling the Weak and Cabal Therapy.
Cabal Therapy seems great to start the combo at times and can be tutored by Entomb.
Exhume into Kairi T2 or T1 does not win on the spot, but 6/6 fyling ward 3 dragon is hard to answer and every sacrifice effect might start the combo later-on.
Most probable trimmings: Collective Brutality and Careful Study - might not need them as a 4-of, maybe 2-2 split to make room for more protection or fast mana.

Edit: Put into effect my last point by adding 2 Thoughtseize and 2 Dark Ritual

[alphastryk]

If we're going the "Worldgorger" control angle, that's a definite starting point (and Phyrexian Tower could be a thing). Here's a few disorganized thoughts:

I think 15 lands is too few considering we need 1BB on the combo turn

4 Kairi feels like a ton since its so bad to have in hand even if Plan B is to just wait and cast it - we're not very good at it.

Stitcher's Supplier is basically our Baleful Strip from those lists (dragon needs an ETB cantrip or loot effect, we need initial milling), or we could include a single dredger that we could Entomb for to kickstart things (that's probably too cute though)

Dark Ritual is powerful but doesn't help us go off since it isn't a sacrifice outlet, still leaning towards Burnt Offering there but neither is super appealing. Maybe something like Village Rites?

Rather than playing Careful Study in multiples since it's card disadvantage, there are a few other options:

Hapless Researcher we've already discussed and the fact that it is a creature means we can use it with Therapy alternatively as well as potentially using our existing graveyard tutoring + reanimation targets to "build our own self discard" in a pinch.

Intuition is a little slow but it can be Entomb 5-8 with the alternate plan of "Tutor for a 3-of"

If we're going down the Intuition route, Gigapede can be used as a discard outlet that we can either tutor directly with Entomb or use as a part of our Intuition package to ensure whatever cards we need end up in the graveyard (Easy sample pile is 2x Kairi & 1x Gigapede = Entomb Kairi).

If we're willing to splash a color, Faithless Looting could be appealing given it is an "Entomb-able" Careful Study (even if it is slow). Alternately, you could lean hard into it since we can essentially setup our whole combo by self-milling, similar to the Hogaak decks

[FTW]

At first it looks like Tin Fins with extra hoops to jump through, as pointed out by » Arcanis « as well, and I totally agree with that.
However, if we take a closer look it might hold some advantages over Tin Fins that are not apparent at first.

Yes, there are some minor differences. I only brought it up because in the other thread you wanted to explore a unique archetype and stay away from being a "worse version of Reanimator" or "worse version of TES". Those "worse versions" had some minor play differences too, but overall you wanted to avoid being too close to other archetypes. Kairi offers some unique lines but this does tread on "worse version of UB Reanimator" or "worse version of Tin Fins". Completely up to you if you want to build in that direction.

For this game plan, Grief deserves a look. Even if you don't want to be all-in like BR Reanimator (0 Unmask), Grief adds a lot of synergy with your combo pieces that are otherwise dead draws. For example, conditional cards like Stitcher's Supplier and extra Culling the Weaks can be pitched to Grief if you don't need them. Or you can Evoke Grief + sac for BBBB mana to get extra value (hardcast fatty). Or you can sac Stitcher's Supplier to Culling the Weak (mill trigger + BBBB) then cast Grief (discard + threat). You can also cast it with Dark Ritual or reanimate with Exhume. It has synergy with many pieces while also protecting the main combo.

You may also want a back-up reanimation target, otherwise you could have many games where you don't find a wincon. Reanimator usually runs more than 4 Entomb + 4 targets. Since you're on Goryo it would have to be Legendary and have value as a 1-shot: Griselbrand, Nicol Bolas (discard + pitches to FoW and Grief!), Jin-Gitaxias Core Augur (discard + draw + pitches to FoW).

Drown in the Loch seems good. If you're on a slower plan, you might want interaction with the opponent's board.

Burnt Offering is risky. Culling the Weak already has a low floor in a deck with few creatures. Adding more of that effect increases the risk you'll have a dead ritual without sac fodder. Especially without Grief.

Hedron Crab is probably better than Hapless Researcher and maybe even better than Stitcher's Supplier.