I Make 200 Mana and Draw My Deck on Turn 4...in Standard!
The other day, I was playing some Magic Arena and ended up making hundreds of mana, drawing my entire deck, and winning the game on Turn 4. And then I figured out how to make the deck even better! Today, I'm going to show you exactly how I did it!
If you've been playing Magic for a while, you might remember an infamously janky combo from a few years ago involving Marwyn, the Nurturer, a three-drop that taps to make mana equal to its power. The idea was to play a bunch of pump spells that can untap Marwyn in order to let it tap for an increasing number of mana and eventually use that mana to win the game somehow. Basically, it was like a Standard version of Twiddle Storm!
I recently realized that we have all the pieces to revive the Marwyn combo in our current Standard. Actually, we can make an even better version in our current Standard, with Kami of Whispered Hopes replacing Marwyn, the Nurturer. Kami is basically Marwyn but with one massive upgrade: it makes mana of any color rather than just blue mana, which is key since it allows us to use the mass-card-draw spells that blue has to offer.
The deck's plan is surprisingly simple: mulligan aggressively to find Kami of Whispered Hopes. Play it, and pray really hard to the Magic gods that it survives our opponent's turn so it loses summoning sickness and we can start tapping it for mana. (We also have cards like Shore Up and Slip Out the Back to protect it from removal if we are willing to wait an extra turn to play it so we can leave up a mana.) Once we untap with Kami, we have a ton of spells that can untap it while also growing its power...
So, we tap Kami of Whispered Hopes for a mana and then use something like Boon of Boseiju to untap it and give it +3/+3. Now, we can tap Kami for four mana and then use another untapping pump spell to untap it and grow its power. Now, we can tap it for six or seven mana (depending on the specific pump spells we have in hand). We keep doing this until we run out of pump spells, which should leave us with a pretty big Kami and somewhere between 10 and 20 mana floating.
The next step is to cast a mass-card-draw spell to refill our hand. Our X spells [[Silver Scrutiny] and Even the Score are the best. We can dump all of our floating mana into them (minus two, which we'll need to cast another untapping pump spell once we refill our hand) to draw something like 15 cards. This should find us more untappers and hopefully another card-draw spell so we can repeat the process of tapping Kami of Whispered Hopes for an absurd amount of mana, untapping it with pump spells, and eventually casting another card-draw spell to refill our hand.
As we draw through our deck, we'll eventually find a Lier, Disciple of the Drowned, which guarantees we'll win the game. Lier lets us flash back all of the instants and sorceries in our graveyard so we can reuse all of our untapping pump spells. At this point, Kami of Whispered Hopes should be tapping for 20 or 30 mana each time we activate it, which means we'll soon have hundreds of mana floating. We then flash back a [Silver Scrutiny]] or Even the Score to draw literally our entire deck—every single card—which will find us our finisher...
To close out the game we have two Explosive Singularity, which deal a massive 10 damage each. As a bonus, they are also uncounterable because of Lier, Disciple of the Drowned's other ability, so we cast them both, hit our opponent for 20 damage, and win the game on the spot. If our opponent managed to gain some life, we can always flash back the Explosive Singularitys to deal another 20 damage to make sure the game ends, hopefully on Turn 4!
While the deck is spectacular and wins in a hilarious way, it also has one massive problem: consistency. Since we only have one Kami of Whispered Hopes, we won't find one in some games, and other games, we will find one and our opponent will kill it before we can combo off. Our deck does nothing when this happens. Like, literally nothing. As such, the challenge for the deck isn't winning the game—it has that covered in an epic fashion—but how to make these amazing wins happen more often.
There's technically another Kami of Whispered Hopes–type creature in Standard in Cradle Clearcutter, but it only makes green mana so we can't use it to cast our card-draw spells, which is a huge problem. I briefly considered adding it to the deck alongside Energy Refractor to turn its green mana into whatever color of mana we need to combo off. But this would mean we'd need to draw an extra combo piece to win, which would make the deck less, rather than more, consistent. Eventually, I realized that maybe the solution to our consistency problem simply didn't exist in Standard. But what if we tried the deck in Pioneer or Explorer?
The Explorer version of the deck solves pretty much all of its consistency issues. In Pioneer, we can play OG Marwyn, the Nurturer alongside Kami of Whispered Hopes to have eight copies of our key combo piece, which means we should have one in our opening hand in most games, and if the first one dies, the odds of drawing another one aren't that bad. Sure, Marwyn only makes green mana, but that's fine since Explorer has mass card draw in green thanks to Return of the Wildspeaker and Rishkar's Expertise, which draw cards equal to the massive power of our Marwyn or Kami. In fact, the entire deck can be mono-green in Explorer, minus Lier, Disciple of the Drowned, which isn't 100% necessary but is pretty sweet in the deck. And technically, we don't even need blue mana to get Lier on the battlefield since Rishkar's Expertise can put it into play for free!
The other thing Explorer offers is a spectacular new plan for closing out the game thanks to the random Adventures in the Forgotten Realms common Bull's Strength. Bull's Strength is literally the perfect card for the deck. It's another untapping pump spell, so it supports our tap and untap combo plan, but it also gives trample! Now, rather than trying to draw Explosive Singularity and burning our opponent out of the game, we can simply draw our deck and win by attacking! The other big addition is Tyvar's Stand as a way to protect our creature, which maybe should have been in the Standard version as well. For one mana, Tyvar's Stand protects our combo creature with hexproof and indestructible. Later, mid-combo, we can dump all of our mana into it to grow our Kami or Marwyn to hundreds of power (which also means they'll tap for hundreds of mana). So, we combo off, make a thousand-power Kami of Whispered Hopes or Marwyn, the Nurturer with trample thanks to Bull's Strength, and smash our opponent for a few thousand damage to close out the game...on Turn 4!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's how you can tap and untap your way to hundreds of mana, draw your entire deck, and win the game on Turn 4 in both Standard and Explorer! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
