Against the Odds: Icetill Explorer Shreds Hedges (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds. Hedge Shredder is a super-unique card, with the Vehicle essentially converting any lands that we mill into ramp by putting them on the battlefield. While we have played the Duskmourn rare once before, right after it was released, we've gotten a couple of cards over the past few months that work incredibly well with Hedge Shredder in Icetill Explorer and Elemental Teachings. As such, today, we're going to put these pieces together into what might be the hilarious Doppelgang deck yet! How many lands can Hedge Shredder ramp, and how can we use this ramp to win the game? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Icetill Shredder
The Deck
Our plan today is a little bit convoluted, so we're going to walk through it step-by-step.
We're built around the power of Hedge Shredder, a four-mana Vehicle that puts any lands that go to our graveyard from our library onto the battlefield tapped, essentially converting lands that we mill into ramp. We can also turn it into a creature, attack for five, and mill a couple of cards (and ramp any of the lands that we mill), although this isn't especially important to our plan. We'd be perfectly happy with Hedge Shredder just being a non-Vehicle artifact with its "turn mill into ramp" static ability.
So, how do we turn Hedge Shredder into the most insane ramp engine in Standard? Here, we have a couple of plans. First, we have Spelunking, which makes all the lands that Hedge Shredder puts into play untapped rather than tapped, which leads to some really explosive turns. But the real secrets for powering up Hedge Shredder are Icetill Explorer and Elemental Teachings. Teachings is pretty straightforward: for five mana, it essentially Gifts Ungivens for lands. It's pretty mid without Hedge Shredder, ramping two lands for five mana. But it's absurdly strong with Hedge Shredder, ramping four lands of our choice (including non-basics!) for five mana. Thanks to Arid Archway making two mana, Elemental Teachings quite literally becomes free if we have Hedge Shredder and Spelunking on the battlefield: we can spend five mana and ramp out four lands (that make five mana thanks to Arid Archway), letting us increase our resources for essentially no cost.
While Elemental Teachings is sweet with Hedge Shredder, Icetill Explorer is even better. Not only does the four-drop let us play an extra land each turn (and play lands from our graveyard), but its landfall ability also mills cards. Crazy things can happen if we can get Icetill Explorer on the battlefield with Hedge Shredder since every land we play will mill a card. And if that card is a land. Hedge Shredder will put it into play, which will trigger Icetill Explorer to mill another card and repeat the process. We also have 12 surveil lands in the deck, which are essentially double hits with the combo since if we hit one, we'll mill a card from Icetill Explorer and another from the surveil land, giving us multiple shots at milling a land to keep the chain going. When things go well, it's very possible that we can ramp 10 or more lands on the turn when Icetill Explorer hits the battlefield!
The biggest problem with our turbo mill Hedge Shredder plan is that we might accidentally mill most of our deck once we get going since neither Icetill Explorer nor Hedge Shredder has "may" abilities. But we've got a plan for this in Spirit Water Revival. We can make so much mana that we simply ramp up to nine and cast it fairly with its waterbending cost to shuffle our graveyard into our library and draw us seven new cards. Since we're playing the full four copies of Spirit Water Revival, we can do this up to four times, which will eventually be important to our win conditions.
We'll talk win conditions in a minute, but let's get some boring nuts-and-bolts stuff out of the way first. Accumulate Wisdom gives us more card draw and takes advantage of the fact that Elemental Teachings and Shared Roots (which joins Glimpse the Core as an early-game ramp spell to speed up the deck) are both Lessons. Meanwhile, Summon: Leviathan is our defense. We don't have any actual removal in our main deck, so we're mostly hoping to ramp into the Saga creature and use it to repeatedly bounce our opponent's board while we are getting the win set up. It also gives us a backup plan for winning the game. Sometimes, you can just chain together three copies of Summon: Leviathan and win the game by beating down with the 6/6s.
Okay, now it's time for the fun part. Let's say we do our things: we ramp a ton of lands with Hedge Shredder and Icetill Explorer, and draw a ton of cards (and avoid milling out) with Spirit Water Revival. How do we actually kill our opponent? The answer, of course, is Doppelgang but with a twist.
As we loop through our deck, we'll eventually end up with literally all of our lands on the battlefield, including Ba Sing Se and Restless Vinestalk. To actually win the game, our plan is to cast two massive Doppelgangs in the same turn (which is where shuffling our graveyard back in with Spirit Water Revival helps). The idea is that we can cast a Doppelgang for something like X = 6, copying Ba Sing Se, Restless Vinestalk, and four random lands, all of which will come into play untapped because of Spelunking. Then, we can cast the second Doppelgang, this time for somewhere around X = 10, copying all six of the Ba Sing Ses and four of the Restless Vinestalks. This will give us 100 new untapped lands, and then we simply use our 60 Ba Sing Ses to earthbend a bunch of our 40 Restless Vinestalks. (Technically, we can do this with any lands, but Restless Vinestalk offers the most damage.) When we attack with all of the Restless Vinestalks, they'll pump each other into 5/5s, and we win the game on the spot!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, this one was rough. I spent days trying different builds of the deck—Simic, Bant, and Sultai. And while they all could do spectacular things, none of them had a very good win rate. Overall, we won 15% of the time with the deck, so you should probably look elsewhere if your goal is to rank up.
The good news is that the wins we did get with the deck were spectacular. (Well, assuming we didn't Doppelgang too hard and crash Arena, which did happen on occasion!) The combo of Hedge Shredder and Icetill Explorer is absurdly good at milling, and beating down with hundreds of Ba Sing Ses is hilarious! Sadly, all of our combo pieces cost four or five mana, which is the deck's biggest issue: the curve is just super clunky, especially against aggro. But thankfully, the wins were so fun that they made up for all the losses and clunkiness along the way!
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.
