Took a list a few cards off this one to Legacy this week, it was a lot of fun and Harness Infinity won me a game.
Combo
3 Shigeki, Jukai Visionary
3 Colossal Skyturtle
Mana
4 Dictate of Karametra
4 Early Harvest
1 Turnabout
Ramp
4 Growth Spiral
4 Joint Exploration
1 Atarka's Command
Dig/Tutor
4 Grisly Salvage
4 Brainstorm
1 Forbidden Alchemy
1 Mystical Teachings
Graveyard
1 Noxious Revival
1 Bound // Determined
1 Harness Infinity
Lands
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Misty Rainforest
2 Wooded Foothills
1 Taiga
1 Bayou
1 Volcanic Island
1 Underground Sea
1 Tropical Island
4 Forest
3 Island
3 Swamp
1 Mountain
Sideboard
4 Endurance
4 Summer's Veil
4 Force of Negation
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Memory's Journey
The combo is pretty straightforward, Shigeki+Turtle+Harvest or Shigeki+Noxious+cantrip+Harvest for infinite mana and infinite recursion of every card.
+The entire deck is instant speed, including the land drops
+The wincon gets under hexproof and infinite life
+The actual combo is uncounterable and unaffected by cast restrictions
+Alternate wincon of flying turtles is pretty solid
+Most of the combo is self-resilient
+(Mostly) Basic manabase semi-blanks Wasteland
+You get to play beautiful $2 extended art foils of Harness Infinity
-You have to play bad cards
-You won't win any games
Lots of potential number shuffling and card choices; Force of Vigor is decent in the sb, Veils can be maindeck in a blue meta, Pact of Negation (and possibly Summoner's Pact) are very strong if you stay instant speed, whereas Uro is basically a must-include if you don't.
Deck is too slow to be competitive, but very fun and pleasant to pilot. Every card is beautiful and nature themed and you can build almost the entire maindeck for pennies in foiled special arts. My deck is almost entirely foil, extended/foil art when possible, Spiral and Brainstorm are each 4 different foil arts. Shocks are also very viable here, so that helps the budget immensely. There's tons of accidental tech and elegant overlap, and fully-instant decks have always been a soft spot of mine.
Very creative idea!Originally Posted by serenechaos
I wonder if there's a way to modify this to make it more viable.
I suspect it will involve making room for Veil of Summer and Force of Will. Maybe Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath as a ramp spell & backup plan.
You could also clean up the manabase with Prismatic Vista and then rework the remaining fetches & duals so that any fetch finds any dual. For example, Misty Rainforest finds all 5 of your duals while the others don't, making Misty better than any fetch other than Prismatic Vista.
I'm going to tinker around with this a bit and see if anything helps.
Edit: You can safely cut Red, simplifying your mana. I guess Atarka's Command is there as an instant wincon? You could play something on color like 1 Brain Freeze or Blue Sun's Zenith instead (both dodge infinite life, but not Hexproof).
Edit2: You can play 4 Cunning Wish main, put 1 Early Harvest SB, and then hide the wincon in the SB. You can Wish for it when needed. You can also then Wish for answers to strange problems.
Harness Infinity should be overkill most of the time. You could play 1 in the Wishboard or just cut it.
Last edited by FTW; 03-24-2023 at 02:30 AM.
Ok the following brew attempts the same plan, but with fewer colors, more interaction, and a lower curve.
The infinite loop requires 2G + 4GG + 1GG + 1 = 13 mana!! (Turtle + Shigeki X=2 + Harvest) That's a lot. It's impossible without Dictate in play (unless you play 13 basics). Even with Dictate, you need 7 basics in play. That is no easy feat. So I added Ice-Fang and Uro to stall and be a fair wincon.
//Spells: 24
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
2 Veil of Summer
4 Growth Spiral
3 Once Upon A Time
4 Cunning Wish
//Creatures: 13
4 Ice-Fang Coatl
4 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath
3 Colossal Skyturtle
2 Shigeki, Jukai Visionary
//Enchantments: 3
3 Dictate of Karametra
//Lands: 20
4 Prismatic Vista
4 Misty Rainforest
5 Snow-Covered Forest
6 Snow-Covered Island
1 Tropical Island
//Sideboard: 15
1 Early Harvest
1 Blue Sun's Zenith
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Noxious Revival
1 Flusterstorm
1 Cyclonic Rift
2 Force of Vigor
2 Veil of Summer
2 Run Afoul
3 Endurance
Once Upon A Time seems like an upgrade on Grisly Salvage, since you're not getting much value out of cards in the graveyard. Impulse is also possible. Uro profits off Grisly Salvage a lot more, though I don't know if it's worth the 3rd color.
Cunning Wish lets you hide the wincon in the SB. I chose Blue Sun's Zenith because it can also draw your deck with infinite mana, then goes back to library (cast cantrip to redraw), then you can Zenith opponent to death. Brain Freeze could work too, but it doesn't draw your deck, it loses to reshuffles like Emrakul, and opponent doesn't actually lose until their next draw step. Wish can also find untaps (Early Harvest/Turnabout), removal, and recursion (Noxious).
Heartbeat of Spring is much cheaper to cast than Dictate, but is sorcery speed and could backfire before you can go off. Since you need 7 lands either way, Dictate seems fine.
Edit: Since Early Harvest is essentially useless until you have 13 mana, it can be hidden in the Wishboard. The maindeck now has 0 combo-only pieces. Every piece is either in the Wishboard or is viable without the combo. Dictate is the worst card left.
Edit2: Ponder is probably just better than Joint Exploration. Ponder is a sorcery and doesn't put more land in play, but it's much more mana-efficient at setting you up. Most of the deck is still instant speed. I think it's more important to lower the curve so you can actually do stuff. Thought Scour is another instant speed option at 1 mana.
You very rarely need that much mana or that many basics to begin the loop. Having a second Dictate or Harvest makes it trivial, using Turnabout instead of Harvest changes the requirements, and anything in the yard at the time is potential gas to keep going or find the piece you need like a second Harvest.
Harvest is quite fine on it's own, I've never found it to be in the way. Typically 5 or 6 basics is fairly easy and quick to achieve, at which point Harvests can give you huge bursts during setup and then be in your graveyard for when you can launch with Shigeki.
The point of Atarka's Command as the wincon is that it is completely free to include; it is a combo deck based around playing lands and filtering cards, so adding a single color for a wincon is free and it isn't even necessary to have any red lands when you go off since you can just draw your whole deck and Spiral one. If you want you can play a single basic Mountain or red dual to minimize it's impact.
It also does the instant speed land drop, has utility modes, beats hexproof, and beats infinite life, all without dropping the stack when you're going off (if, for example, you want to play Pacts and then go off in response to the trigger). Your list is going to struggle tremendously to find enough basics to combo off, since you have no way to get more of them out besides Uro, only 3 Dictates, and one of your Harvests costs 3 more. Any other wincon is valid since you just need to insert whatever card you want into the loop, there's just not really any good reason to change it and it has a lot of advantages I like.
Grisly Salvage is way better than Once Upon a Time because the entire deck is centered around manipulating the graveyard. Half of the infinite combo is instant speed uncounterable Regrowths, and Shigeki even does more milling and ramping for you. Hence also Alchemy and Teachings, which are only one-ofs but fairly reliable with heavy mill and cantripping. USZ will perform a very similar function in being a powerful draw spell while setting up, although it will be extremely expensive to do so at which point you can probably just go off anyway.
Ponder and Heartbeat are easy inclusions if you move off instant speed. If you get to play Heartbeat I would probably do 4 Heartbeat+1 Dictate.
Using Cunning Wish is an ok way to compact and centralize the combo, the downsides will obviously be the extra mana, and the fact that you can only use it for Harvest and your wincon (if it's an instant). Teachings performs a similar function while giving yard value and also fetching Dictate and any other card you decide to include in the instant speed version (like Snapcaster for example).
Harness Infinity is obviously silly, but not as silly as it looks. Mana cost means very little in this deck which means it is just an instant speed superior YawgWill. It has never been something I have been upset about drawing because the cost is relatively easy to reach and it means I have an ace waiting when I'm ready to go off. It's a very good cut if you are making room for actually good cards, but in a deck that makes mana and wins with the yard like this there's basically nothing more powerful you can do in a single card.
I would basically never move Noxious Revival out of the 60 if I already have reasons to play it, it is simply one of the best Magic cards available. My friends and I thought it was just a cute protection option when we started using it in Cheeri0s and now it's won me almost as many games as some of my wincons.
Ice Fang is a very solid option and free to include since it already checks every box and there is no real difference in snow lands. If you are facing a lot of creature decks, Coatl and/or Subtlety will help immensely on top of Turtle's bounce ability and the rare Turnabout tapout on your opponent. Creatures are a very severe weakness since the only maindeck interaction is block-fogging with Shigeki and bouncing with Turtle.
An obvious possibility would be to switch from Early Harvest to Reset, and from Dictate of Karametra to High Tide with a mana base full of island duals. With that it's possible to go off with 4 lands.
Early harvest is neat, but for a combo that can go off at instant speed, the lower cost and non-basic support on reset make a big difference. High tide is a double improvement over dictate since it both costs less to cast and can be doubled with the recursion effects.
You could definitely go a straight High Tide route, although if you do I strongly strongly recommend using Turnabout instead of Reset. Possibly even 4 Turnabout 1 Harvest. Reset's timing restriction is worse than having Ponders in your instant speed deck.
The primary advantage Dictate has over High Tide is that you can basically have an extra half a turn of economy by dropping Dictate eot and spending as much mana as possible. Being permanent also isn't trivial, although as you pointed out High Tides can just be Regrowth'd. Harvest also means being resilient to Wasteland.
Overall I would say High Tide+Turnabout is probably superior for comboing and consistency, while Dictate and Harvest offer some niche advantages.
Yeah, that's the obvious boost. But then you're just High Tide.
Once you're on that mana engine, there's no reason to keep green. The remaining green cards just let you play extra lands (unnecessary since Tide needs 4) and regrowth things (blue has Snapcaster Mage), so you're either a bad multicolor version of High Tide or just slowly morph into regular High Tide. It's more interesting to build in a different design space, even if Early Harvest is hard to work with.
Maybe I missed something big. How many lands and resources do you usually need to start going off?
Do you usually wait until you resolve 2 Dictates so you only need 5 lands? (still means committing 10 mana on earlier turns)
If you have just 1 Harvest + 1 Dictate + 5 lands, do you start trying to chain off cantrips hoping to hit another Harvest or Dictate? Do you commit to casting the 1st Harvest before knowing if you'll hit 7 lands or another Harvest? Does that usually work? I didn't try that line because the fizzle risk seems high. For example, Growth Spiral is a neutral play. It draws 1 card & plays 1 land (netting 0 mana & 0 cards). Joint Exploration can scry but nets -1 mana & 0 cards. Both only replace themselves (probably a land if you didn't have enough & want to take advantage of the free land drop). They can't get both another land and another spell. The deck doesn't have anything like Meditate to accumulate resources while digging. So I didn't try the risk of non-deterministic digging. Is that how the deck usually plays?
I guess if you "fizzle" you can pass and continue next turn, unlike a storm deck or High Tide. But then that makes it riskier to do the whole "go off in response to opponent winning" thing that instant speed combos want to do.
4 Growth Spiral + 4 Uro does as much as 4 Growth Spiral + 4 Joint Exploration. The only difference is you can Joint Exploration on the combo turn to add lands at instant speed, while Uro is sorcery speed. But Uro is overall such a stronger card. The lifegain keeps you alive. The potential threat forces them to keep removal in the deck, otherwise you just win with Uro.
I worked on the premise that you need 6-7 basics and a multi-card combo to safely execute the loop (Dictate + Early Harvest + regrowth effects). That takes a while to set up. So then I wanted most of the cards to not be bad pre-combo on the set-up turns. The game plan was not to goldfish the combo fast, but to be able to curve out smoothly with low internal variance, interact with opponent, and also present fair threats they have to deal with before you get the critical mass of combo pieces. It can just cantrip, play an Uro game, and amass lands. At some point you get to 6 lands + Dictate + Shigeki/Turtle + Wish, with Turtle/Shikegi in hand or graveyard. EOT Dictate on 6 lands (can hold up Force and/or Veil). Untap. Play 7th land & go infinite (Wish -> Harvest -> float mana & untap -> Channel Shigeki X=2 -> Return Harvest & Turtle -> Harvest -> ... ). If you don't have a 7th land, there's enough spare mana to Channel X=3 returning a fetch. Spending mana on Wish doesn't really obstruct the combo turn if you have enough resources to loop, since you're still +6 mana after Wish+Harvest. You could also Wish on an earlier turn. If opponent kills Dictate or counters Wish/Harvest, it's not a big deal because you haven't committed many resources. The other cards have a "fair" mode, so you can pivot back into Uro or Skyturtle beatdown.
The point of lowering the curve and reducing the colors was so that you can consistently curve out and cast things on turn 1, turn 2, turn 3, etc. Drawing opening hands with a mismatch between colors of basics and draw spells (UG + Grisly Salvage, UB + Growth Spiral, RGB + Joint Exploration, UGB + Atarka) can make those early turns stumble. I wanted to minimize that. Grisly Salvage and Atarka are amazing when you have the right mana, but what about when you don't draw mana in the order you want? Nonbasics also slow down your progression (-1 land drop), since they don't work with Early Harvest. Reducing colors means both more stable early mana and not wasting land drops on nonbasics. Atarka is great, but if there's any suitable wincon in colors, isn't that smoother? Splashing is never free. It's "free" for the combo turn, but it affects the variance and dead cards in the early turns.
I also wanted to avoid having too many unwanted combo pieces in hand before ready to go off. That's why I went down to 3 Dictates and put Harvest in the SB. Dictate is expensive and symmetrical, so I didn't want them clogging my hand until ready to go off. You could cast Dictate earlier to cantrip faster, but opponent can use the mana to do nasty things like hardcast Griselbrand or sculpt into a ton of disruption. Seems risky. Heartbeat of Spring comes out sooner, but then you risk giving opponent boosted mana for even more turns, so is that better? Do you ever get punished by boosting opponent's mana and not going off that same turn?
If you're able to go off consistently on 5 lands, that does make a difference. I built under the assumption that you need more lands, and therefore need to be able to curve out and survive the early turns to even get there. Redundant combo pieces aren't as bad to have if you can go off earlier. I guess you can use Early Harvest as a ritual to play cantrips faster, like you said.
What decks did you play against? How did you do? Were there any obvious strengths and weaknesses from those matches?
I apologize, I thought your list had also dropped the Spirals and only had Uro.
I think the reason you are feeling like you need so much mana is that you are not taking the sequence into account, just the raw numbers required. 2x Dictates can come down fairly easily on the same turn. Assuming 4 basics 2 shocks and Turtle in hand, you go Dictate-->tap out (4)-->Harvest (1)-->9-->Turtle for Harvest (6)-->Harvest (3)-->5-->Dictate (0)-->9-->Shigeki loop begins. A fifth basic in hand, second Harvest in hand or yard, or second Turtle in hand makes the loop even easier. A second Harvest instead of a second Dictate, a Harness Infinity, or any extra combo pieces in yard that can be accessed the turn before, all serve the same function.
My weekly Legacy meta is rather quirky, but I played against Shadow, Elves, and Lands. Vs Shadow the deck itself did ok, but there's just no way to handle fast creatures efficiently enough. Elves was much closer, about a half turn difference between us each game.
Lands I drew with but g3 was a wild toss up because of several misplays I made. Turtle bouncing Marit Lage was great though.
Edit: I should also say the deck felt basically impervious to all of the hate I saw. I played through aggressive discard, spheres, Glacial Chasm, yard hate, and WasteLoam. It was always just dying before I quite got there.
Edit 2: I'm really liking a lot of your input on this, and I'm glad people like the concept. If you'd be interested we could write up a proper primer; this has a lot of very good directions to go, from semi-viable extreme budget deck (playing shocks or even full basics and Vistas, cheap near-replacements like Autumn's Veil, etc) to relatively competitive brew to fun art piece.
True. I guess that is a reason in favor of running the full set of Harvests and Dictates, because the 2nd copy is useful. If you're going for lines like that, I see why using Cunning Wish to get Early Harvest would hurt. I'm not punished for it in the line I was going for.
Wouldn't that all work even better if you had 6 basics and 0 shocks? How much value are you really getting from the black and red splashes?
Interesting. Thanks for sharing the result!
Turtle bouncing Marit Lage is a great line. I like how it also stalls Murktide, Emrakul, and Saga tokens. At worst it can get back Brainstorm. It's never dead early.
Good to know. I was worried about graveyard hate. I guess you dodge it well enough?
Consistent speed was my #1 concern looking at your list, which is why I was trying to lower the curve.
e.g. Ponder & OUAT let you cantrip earlier, Ice-Fang stalls creatures, Uro life stalls. Even in a full instant speed version, Ice-Fang seems useful to keep you alive.
You have a lot of cool tech like Mystical Teachings and Bound/Determined, but I fear those may be too slow for Legacy. Lands is a very slow deck, slow enough to get to use tech like that, but most Legacy decks are too fast. The core combo is expensive enough. It helps if your support cards are cheap and relevant early.
For an instant-speed version, what about something like this?
//Instants: 23
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
4 Growth Spiral
4 Joint Exploration
4 Early Harvest
3 Cunning Wish
//Creatures: 13
4 Ice-Fang Coatl
3 Snapcaster Mage
3 Shigeki, Jukai Visionary
3 Colossal Skyturtle
//Enchantments: 4
4 Dictate of Karametra
//Lands: 20
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Prismatic Vista
6 Snow-Covered Forest
6 Snow-Covered Island
//Sideboard: 15
1 Turnabout
1 Blue Sun's Zenith
1 Noxious Revival
1 Flusterstorm
1 Force of Negation
1 Run Afoul
1 Cyclonic Rift
2 Force of Vigor
3 Veil of Summer
3 Endurance
Edit: This was OK but clunky without Grisly Harvest
This has the full set of ramp spells, Early Harvests, and Dictates. Except all lands are basics, so you should be able to go off even faster, with just 5-6 total lands in play.
Snapcaster can target Early Harvest to ramp, Growth Spiral to ramp, Brainstorm to sculpt, or other things. Both it and Ice-Fang add blockers to keep you alive.
I wish there was another turn 1 play other than Brainstorm though. Is Search for Tomorrow worth it? You can suspend it turn 1 (for +1 land) or you can cast it later for +1 land that turn (same effect as Joint Exploration). Only drawback is it's a sorcery. Maybe Consider?
Last edited by FTW; 03-26-2023 at 05:47 PM.
Snapcaster is extremely strong as a 2 mana option to recur Harvest, since Turtle being 3 and Shigeki being 4 (or 6) do place relevant limits on what lines are possible; the only issue is that he exiles it, and that's a real problem if it was your only Harvest and you needed the extra mana for a Shigeki channel. I do like him a lot here though, there's already yard value built in and he is another cheap value body on the ground.
Yard hate is scarier than anything else, but there are a lot of small things that can be done; Endurance and possibly Memory's Journey in the sideboard (trying out rn), Regrowth effects, or if it's a Bog type effect it's fairly quick and easy to refill.
The more I think about it, the more I really like a full-basic manabase and 4 Vistas (maybe +2 dual fetches). The flexibility of being able to swap Snow lands and use Coatl for free is very nice as well.
Isn't Early Harvest counterable?
I guess it ends up being a totally different deck concept but a Raise Dead effect like Urborg Repossession instead of the turtle would also makes the shigeki / harvest combo a bit leaner at the cost of requiring black and being sorcery speed.
Early Harvest is counterable, but there is no opportunity for them to counter it without leaving you able to continue the combo, provided you have 3 extra mana to spare and they don't use an exotic answer. It is affected by casting restrictions unlike the channel abilities, but those are much more rare.
Turtle has the advantage of returning anything at all, and being an alternate wincon without using extra slots, but if you wanted to use sorcery speed options, cheaper effects would be very effective in making the combo faster and more reliable. Every extra one mana needed per loop means needing more land out before you can go.
Edit: Also I can't remember the name, but the fixed Harrow is an instant and can turn a nonbasic into two basics on the combo turn; with a single Dictate out it's +1 mana, otherwise it gets you to your combo turn easier.
The Coatl variants should be called Snow Tide
Last edited by serenechaos; 03-25-2023 at 12:08 AM.
If you go off at sorcery speed, you could play actual Regrowth in colors for 1 less mana than Turtle. Turtle's better for not being bad outside the combo though. Raise Dead effects would be very narrow and only saves 2 mana in the loop.
The bigger mana suck is Shigeki. If there's a way to return 2 cards for less than 4GG, it would speed up the combo turn. Restock and Bond of Insight and Recall have exile clauses to prevent loops like this.
Shadow of the Grave randomly has a funny interaction returning all channeled cards, and it works at instant speed. Probably too narrow though. It doesn't return Early Harvest, so you'd need 2 Turtles or 1 Shigeki X=2, which means it only saves 1 mana.
Regular Harrow is an instant. It might be a better way to go +1 land for 3 mana than Joint Exploration, but it gets blown out badly by counters. The reason I was eyeing Search for Tomorrow is getting another turn 1 play.
Funny option to blow out aggro: Jaheira's Respite. 5 mana isn't unrealistic, it's just the next part of surviving to get Dictate down. Fog+fetch X basics seems pretty game ending for us. Also randomly gives you a last chance against attack-based combo decks like Elves.
Unlike Harrow, Roiling Regrowth puts the lands on the battlefield tapped.
Ah yeah, my bad, I forgot about that.
Went ahead and ordered 4 Respite to test out because it's yet another $2 full art foil with beautiful nature art. If I picked up foil Vistas right now I will still have spent less on this deck than a playset of a single dual.
Edit: Sorry, less than a single dual.
I tested a few games. It's still slow and needs a lot of moving pieces to come together.
One cool thing I noticed is that you don't have to go infinite or draw your deck.
Dictate + Early Harvest + 7 basics (0 nonbasics) = 25 mana!
After that
2nd Early Harvest is +11 mana
Twincast is +12 mana
Snapcaster is +9 mana (but you lose an Early Harvest)
Regrowth is +9 mana (no losing Early Harvest)
Turtle is +8 mana
Shigeki is +7 mana (or +5 mana and return a 2nd card)
2nd Dictate is +6 mana (with just 1 Early Harvest, but it scales much faster with more)
Even with just 6 lands in play instead of 7, you get a lot of mana.
The deck can generate crazy amounts of mana without infinite loop or needing to play more lands on the combo turn. You just need an efficient way to convert that mana into a win.
So what do you do with all that mana? I found spending it on a bunch of 2-3 cmc "Draw 1" was not very effective. Instead I've been using Cunning Wish immediately for Blue Sun's Zenith to draw 15-30 cards, then use those cards to generate more untaps, maybe go infinite, then dig for the reshuffled Zenith and Zenith for lethal. I found that line easier to pull off than trying to assemble the 4-card combo of Dictate+Harvest+Turtle+Shigeki.
Is there a better way to convert mana into win? (X damage effect?)
Also I found Growth Spiral very unreliable. Sometimes it just cycles and you don't gain a land drop. Spending UG to cycle is pretty bad (when it doesn't come with a flash deathtouch flying creature). In a sorcery speed version Sakura-Tribe Elder or Coiling Oracle might be better. There's of course Veteran Explorer too...
I've had trouble making Spiral consistent under 21 lands, I'm currently on 23.
Spirals are also the answer to your question; if you have most of the combo, you can just dump resources into digging. Exploration is really good here, 1 land=Preordain, if you happen to have a land in hand, it sort of only costs 1 mana, and if you're using Shigeki you can spend a few mana early to get lands back because they end up paying for themselves. Then your recurred Harvests are stronger, the next pass around the loop is much better, and you can start dumping all the cantrips and Salvages until you find the pieces or a bomb like Harness. This should also help solve your speed issues. I would recommend trying 21-23 lands and comboing much more aggressively when you have a huge pool of mana. At the very least you can end your turn massively up on your opponent so that they will get 4 extra mana and you will untap and win.
The speed problem was not lack of lands, but lack of resources. I could get 6 basics on turn 4 or 7 on turn 5, but then didn't have enough combo pieces. Sometimes I did, but draw variance was big over many reps, because you need to assemble multiple cards. Getting enough lands wasn't a problem.
I tried that the first few times. I found it an inefficient way to convert mana into digging. 2-3 mana draw 1 (without guarantee of a land to drop).
Then in one game after chaining 5 cantrips and still failing to find an untap or Shigeki, I desperation Cunning Wished for Zenith to keep drawing. At that point I could only draw a few cards. But had I just Zenithed earlier, I would have drawn much more cards and dug much deeper. After that, I realized Wish for Zenith was always better if I had Wish. Think about it. 2-3 mana spent on Growth Spiral or Exploration draws 1 card, while it would draw 2-3 extra cards with Zenith. I started regretting every mana I wasn't dumping into Zenith, unless it was for Brainstorm.
Sure, you could play more lands to make the next Harvest even bigger. But is that necessary? 7 basics is already enough to make a lot of mana. At that point the bottleneck was cards/resources, not mana.
I'm now wondering if we even need to play more lands on the combo turn. Ramp to 6 or 7 -> Dictate + Harvest -> draw cards -> untaps & more mana -> infinite loop -> draw deck -> wincon.
The bottleneck is still mana, because if you have enough you can just use dump a bunch of mana into Shigeki to get back lands and cantrips. I also strongly suggest the black for Salvage and Alchemy, because they basically say "Draw 4/5" if you're attempting to go off.
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