Against the Odds: Ghost Vacuum Combo (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! At first glance, Ghost Vacuum looks like a graveyard hate card. But what if the one-mana artifact is actually a game-ending combo piece in disguise? That's what we're going to find out today when we look to turn Ghost Vacuum into a card that immediately ends the game with just a single activation by making a hilarious board of 1/1 Spirit versions of the creatures it exiles! How does the combo work? What are the odds of winning with it? Let's get to the video and find out on this week's Against the Odds!
Against the Odds: Ghost Vacuum Combo
The Deck
As I mentioned in the intro, Ghost Vacuum looks like a graveyard hate card along the lines of Relic of Progenitus or Soul-Guide Lantern, and it can work this way thanks to its first ability, which can exile any card from any graveyard. But it's Ghost Vacuum's second ability that we're built around today. For six mana, we can sacrifice Ghost Vacuum and get 1/1 flying Spirit versions of all of the creatures that we exiled with Ghost Vacuum. While this ability can offer some free value when played fairly, we're playing it very unfairly by trying to get the right combination of creatures exiled to Ghost Vacuum so that we'll win the game immediately when we activate it!
Of course, to get a card exiled with Ghost Vacuum, we first need to get that card in the graveyard. So, we have Cache Grab and Say Its Name to mill our combo pieces, while Cache Grab can also help us dig to find Ghost Vacuum itself.
So, what creatures are we trying to get under Ghost Vacuum? The most important is Enduring Courage, which gives other creatures +2/+0 and haste whenever they enter the battlefield. The biggest problem with Ghost Vacuum is that we can only activate it at sorcery speed, which means we can make a bunch of 1/1 ghosts only to have our opponent wipe them all out with something like Pyroclasm before they can do anything. Enduring Courage lets us avoid this problem. Not only will all of our 1/1 ghosts have haste, but they'll actually be 3/1s thanks to Enduring Courage's buff, which lets us smack our opponent for a bunch of damage on the turn we activate Ghost Vacuum.
Outside of Enduring Courage, our two best creatures to exile to Ghost Vacuum are Overlord of the Boilerbilges and Omnivorous Flytrap. Overlord works incredibly well with Ghost Vacuum and Enduring Courage. We can put it into play as a 1/1 (which will actually be a 3/1 with haste thanks to Enduring Courage) with Ghost Vacuum, hit our opponent for four damage with its enters ability, attack, hit our opponent for four more damage with its attack ability, and then get in for three combat damage. Basically, a single Ghost Vacuumed Overlord represents 11 damage, which means two of them (along with Enduring Courage) win us the game. Meanwhile, Omnivorous Flytrap depends on us having delirium (and, really, mega-delirium) to be good, but our deck is pretty good at filling the graveyard, and it can deal a ton of damage if we can get six card types in the bin. It will enter as a 1/1 but can put two counters on itself and then double them, making it a 5/5. Thanks to Enduring Courage, we can then immediately attack, trigger Omnivorous Flytrap again to put two more counters on it, and double those counters again, making it a 13/13. Add in the +2/+0 from Enduring Courage, and with a full graveyard, a single 1/1 Flytrap can attack for a massive 15, which means that much like Overlord of the Boilerbilges, two Flytraps under Ghost Vacuum with a Enduring Courage should win us the game on the spot!
Rounding out our creatures are Trumpeting Carnosaur, Overlord of the Hauntwoods, and a Tranquil Frillback. Trumpeting Carnosaur is another creature that works incredibly well with Ghost Vacuum. We can discard it to kill something, exile it to Ghost Vacuum, and eventually get a ghost version of it when we activate Ghost Vacuum, which will be a 1/1 but still discover 5, giving us a way we can spin into an Enduring Courage if we don't have one in the graveyard. Meanwhile, Overlord of the Hauntwoods ramps us up to six mana to activate Ghost Vacuum, and Tranquil Frillback is just a one-of catchall that can gain life against aggro, blow up artifacts or enchantments, or nuke our opponent's graveyard.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Ghost Vacuum combo was solid. I played 18 matches with the deck and won 11, giving us a 61% match-win percentage. While our deck can certainly win without Ghost Vacuum just by hard-casting our creatures, Ghost Vacuum itself was incredibly strong! Not only does it work like a main-deck hate card against graveyard decks, but we also managed to combo kill a bunch of times. A lot of decks really struggled to interact with the one-drop. Against control or midrange, we can sneak it into play on Turn 1 while our opponent's shields are down, and odds are it will eventually win us the game.
Overall, my main takeaway from this deck is that I really need to play more Ghost Vacuums. While the combo is hilarious and surprisingly effective, the artifact seems strong enough that we can just jam it in regular decks for value, if not in the main deck then at least in the sideboard. While Ghost Vacuum might look like Relic of Progenitus or Soul-Guide Lantern, in reality, it's so much more as a graveyard hate spell that can actually win the game all by itself, which is wild! If you're looking for something different to try in Standard while we wait for Foundations to be released, give Ghost Vacuum Combo a shot! The deck is super hilarious and also super fun!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. 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.
