Against the Odds: Self-Burn Combo (Brawl)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, for the first time in a while, we're doing some Brawling, and we've built around a commander that I thought sucked during spoiler season: Raphael, Ninja Destroyer. When I first saw Raphael, it looked like a bad card, but it does have a unique enrage ability which allows us to make red mana equal to the amount of damage dealt to it. After thinking about it more, I realized that maybe rather than being a bad card, Raphael, Ninja Destroyer was actually a combo piece, and that's what we're exploring today. The goal of our deck is simple: make Raphael, Ninja Destroyer indestructible and then damage it as much as possible in a weird self-burn storm plan which, when everything comes together, should allow us to make infinite mana and impulse draw our deck before winning the game somehow! Can the plan work? Is Raphael, Ninja Destroyer a bad card or a sneakily powerful combo engine? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Self-Burn Combo
The Deck
Since we're playing 100 singleton cards today, I'm not going to try to go through every spell and synergy in the deck, but I did want to cover the basic plan. Everything starts and ends with our commander Raphael, Ninja Destroyer. As I mentioned in the intro, Raph looks pretty jank, but its unique enrage ability can actually generate an absurd amount of value if we build around it. Step one for our plan is to get Raph on the battlefield, which shouldn't be too difficult since it's our commander, which means we'll have access to it each and every game.
Once we get Raphael, Ninja Destroyer on the battlefield, our plan is pretty simple: damage it as much as possible to make as much mana as possible, but this plan has one big problem - since Raph only has four toughness, it can't take that much damage without dying. As such, our real goal is to not just get Raphael, Ninja Destroyer on the battlefield, but to make it indestructible with something like Darksteel Plate or Mithril Coat (which we can tutor up with Gamble, Reckless Handling, or Cool but Rude). Once we get an indestructible Raph on the battlefield, the real fun can begin!
The true power of Raphael, Ninja Destroyer is that, once we make it indestructible, it turns burn spells into rituals. Take Lightning Bolt for example. For one mana, it deals three damage, which means if we target our own Raphael, Ninja Destroyer with a Lightning Bolt, we'll end up spending one mana to make three mana, turning Lightning Bolt into a literal Dark Ritual. Our deck is overloaded with cheap burn spells that we can use to kill our opponent's creatures early in the game and then later turn into rituals for our big combo turn. Cards like Chandra's Defeat become especially broken, letting us generate five mana for a single mana, which means once we start comboing, we should be able to make functionally (but not truly) infinite mana by chaining burn spells targeting Raphael, Ninja Destroyer.
Once we start generating mana, our big burn spells come online, and these turn into something like a Mana Geyser. Once we have a bunch of mana floating in our mana pool, cards like Crackle with Power, Purphoros's Intervention, and Shatterskull Smashing can generate truly ridiculous amounts of mana.
We even have a two-card infinite mana combo with Raph and Chain Lightning. Chain Lightning is a weird card. It's basically a sorcery speed Lightning Bolt, but once it damages something, its controller can pay two red mana to copy it. Assuming we start with three mana (we need one to cast Chain Lightning and another two to pay for the first copy), this goes infinite with an indestructible Raphael, Ninja Destroyer. We target the Raph, hit it for three damage, and pay the two to copy Chain Lightning. At this point, Raph's mana ability will resolve to make three mana, which we can then use to pay for the next copy of Chain Lightning. Basically, every copy we cast costs two mana but generates three mana, which means we net one mana each time through the loop, giving us infinite mana, although thanks to Magic Arena's warning system (that really doesn't like it when you target your own creatures with removal spells) in practice we can usually generate 30 or 40 mana before the clock becomes an issue.
So far we've seen how Raphael, Ninja Destroyer can generate a lot of mana, or even infinite mana, but this plan has one major problem: even with all the mana in the world, we'll eventually run out of cards to cast. Thankfully, there is one card that solves this problem and lets us draw our entire deck with the combo in Expedited Inheritance. The two-mana enchantment lets us impulse draw equal to the amount of damage dealt to our creatures, which means that once we get it on the battlefield alongside an indestructible Raph, all of our Lightning Bolts are not only Dark Rituals but also Ancestral Recalls, impulse drawing us three cards. Virtue of Courage is our backup card draw engine, although not nearly as strong because it requires burning our opponent's creatures, but still with cards like Blasphemous Act and Star of Extinction, we can potentially still use it to impulse draw our deck during our big turn. At this point, we should be able to generate functionally infinite mana and impulse draw our entire deck, which means we should be able to win the game somehow...
As far as actually killing our opponent, in all honesty, most opponents end up scooping somewhere in the middle of our big combo turn, but if we do need our opponent's life total to hit zero, we have a few plans. My favorite is Fire Nation Turret, a card I've wanted to win with ever since it was spoiled. As we combo, we can easily make fifty extra mana which we can dump into Fire Nation Turret and then burn our opponent for 50 Aetherflux Reservoir style to win the game. Electro, Assaulting Battery does the same thing. We get a bunch of mana floating and then kill it with a burn spell and use its leaves the battlefield trigger to burn our opponent out of the game. We can also do something like stick a Terror of the Peaks or Warstorm Surge alongside a Young Pyromancer and slowly win by burning our opponent for one every time Young Pyromancer makes a token as we're comboing off.
Wrap Up
Overall, we won 47% of the time with the deck, which I thought was pretty decent, considering the jank level of our commander and our game plan. The biggest issue with the deck is consistency. We were pretty good at getting an indestructible Raph, but also finding the Expedited Inheritance for infinite card draw proved tricky since red isn't especially good at tutoring up individual non-artifact cards (if this deck was Rakdos it would be even more busted since we'd have way more tutors to find our combo pieces). As a result, we had a lot of mini-combos with the deck where we made a bunch of mana and used it to win the game, but the literal infinite mana/infinite card draw combo was relatively rare.
Overall, I was surprised at how strong Raphael, Ninja Destroyer felt. Of course, this required building heavily around it, but if you do, the reward is high. We've never had a commander like Raph before, the enrage ability is both super unique and super powerful, and it seems worth exploring more. Just keep in mind that if you decide to build a version of this deck in Commander proper, when you combo off, your opponents are going to be sitting there doing nothing for quite a while, which isn't ideal, but as a once-in-a-while option, Raphael, Ninja Destroyer can actually do some super fun and very unique things!
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.
