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Against the Odds: Sorcerer Class Combo (Modern)


Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 302 of Against the Odds. Class is still in session. For the second week in a row, one of the Forgotten Realms Class enchantments came in first in our Against the Odds poll. This time, it was the Izzet Sorcerer Class! As such, we're heading to Modern today to try to not just win with Sorcerer Class but also combo off with the enchantment. How can we make Sorcerer Class into a combo engine? What are the odds of winning with it? Let's get to the video and find out in today's Against the Odds; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Against the Odds: Sorcerer Class Combo

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The Deck

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The plan of our deck is pretty straightforward: we play Sorcerer Class and get it to level two as quickly as possible (which isn't too hard since it only costs two mana), which allows us to tap our creatures for mana to cast instant or sorceries or to level up classes. Level two is key to our combo, which is built around putting an ever-increasing number of creatures on the battlefield as we cast spells, giving us more mana to cast more spells to make more creatures. Eventually, we'll get enough bodies on the battlefield that we can level up to level three. Then, Sorcerer Class becomes our finisher, burning our opponent out of the game as we cast a few more spells.

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Step two for our combo is a creature (or preferably, multiple creatures) that make a token whenever we cast an instant or sorcery spell. For this, we turn to Young Pyromancer and Sedgemoor Witch, both of which make a 1/1 whenever we cast an instant or sorcery spell. In conjunction with the second level of Sorcerer Class, these cards are incredibly powerful. Let's say we have a Young Pyromancer on the battlefield alongside a level-two Sorcerer Class. We cast a Serum Visions, which draws us a card and triggers Young Pyromancer to make a 1/1 token, which we can tap to add a mana, essentially making Serum Visions free. If we happen to have multiple Young Pyromancers and / or Sedgemoor Witches on the battlefield, Serum Visions actually generates mana, costing one and giving us two tokens that can each tap for a mana! There's only one problem with our plan: the tokens are summoning sick, so we can't use them for mana until the next turn. Thankfully, we have a plan for this...

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So, how do we allow our tokens to make mana immediately rather than having to wait a turn for them to lose summoning sickness? Mass Hysteria, of course, which gives all creatures haste for just a single mana. Going back to the synergies we were talking about before, we cast our Serum Visions and make a 1/1 token with Young Pyromancer. With Mass Hysteria on the battlefield, we can immediately tap the token to make a mana, which will allow us to cast another spell to make another token and keep the fun going. Ideally, if we can get a couple of Young Pyromancers and / or Sedgemoor Witches on the battlefield, this will allow us to chain together cheap cantrips and card draw until we play through our entire deck, eventually making a big enough board that we can get Sorcerer Class up to level three, cast a couple more spells, and burn our opponent out of the game with Sorcerer Class!

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For cheap card draw and cantrips, we have a bunch of good options. Serum Visions and Thought Scour are free when we are comboing with just a single Young Pyromancer or Sedgemoor Witch, and with two, they generate mana. Manamorphose is always a ritual during our combo, giving us back the mana we spend along with making at least one token that can tap for mana. Expressive Iteration is a bit more expensive, but it helps us to find our combo pieces in the early game by digging three cards deep and is often a two-mana draw two, which is pretty powerful.

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While chaining together Thought Scours and Serum Visions is nice, we have a few finishers that push the combo into overdrive. Flusterstorm and Plumb the Forbidden take advantage of the fact that Sedgemoor Witch makes a token whenever we cast or copy a spell. Let's say we cast five cheap cantrips during our combo and find a Flusterstorm. We cast another cheap cantrip and counter it with Flusterstorm, making a bunch of copies thanks to the storm mechanic. Each copy is going to make a 1/1 Pest, all of which will be able to tap for mana, assuming we have our combo set up, which turns Flusterstorm into a super-ritual that can also protect our creatures from our opponent's removal. Plumb the Forbidden allows us to sacrifice all of our tokens to draw a ton of cards, while Sedgemoor Witch will trigger a bunch of times to rebuild our board. This also generates mana in a weird way since we can tap all of our tokens for mana before casting Plumb the Forbidden, so that the new tokens from Sedgemoor Witch will be created untapped. Finally, our one-of Past in Flames allows us to recast all of the spells in our graveyard, making sure we have enough spells to burn our opponent out once Sorcerer Class hits level three!

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Rounding out our deck are Unholy Heat for removal and Unearth. One of the challenges of our combo is that we really need Young Pyromancer and Sedgemoor Witch to sit out on the battlefield, but both are small creatures that die to pretty much all of the heavily played removal in Modern. Unearth gives us a way to get them back on the battlefield once they die, for just a single mana. Plus, Sorcerer Class puts cards into the graveyard with its first level, which means we sometimes can loot away a Sedgemoor Witch or Young Pyromancer on Turn 2 and then reanimate it on Turn 3 to start the fun!

The Matchups

Probably the biggest issue with the deck is fighting through removal. Having a ton of cantrips helps us to find our combo pieces quickly and consistently, but our combo will fizzle if we can't keep Sedgemoor Witch, Young Pyromancer, and the tokens they make on the battlefield. This makes removal-heavy control and midrange decks our most challenging matchups—oh yeah, and also Tron, thanks to cards like Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, Oblivion Stone, and Ratchet Bomb offering easy answers to our board. Against creature-based decks, we have a decent chance because the tokens we can make with Young Pyromancer and Sedgemoor Witch make great chump blockers while we are setting up to go infinite-ish. Against combo, it mostly depends on how fast our opponent can go off. With our best draws, we can win around Turn 4, which is pretty fast...unless our opponent is winning on Turn 3.

The Odds

All in all, we went 2-4 with Sorcerer Class, giving us a 33% match-win percentage, although this was partly because we played against Tron twice, and I'm not sure we can ever beat Tron. The good news is that we did get to see the combo go off, and it was just as spectacular as we had hoped because we really did manage to play through our entire deck, making a massive board of tokens and eventually winning with level three of Sorcerer Class! We also had several games where we likely would have went infinite if we had one more turn to set up but fell just short, thanks to our opponent having an Ugin, the Spirit Dragon or something else to deal with our board. While the matchups and meta are a bit hostile to going wide with tokens (because a lot of decks are playing cheap sweepers like Engineered Explosives and Ratchet Bomb to deal with Urza's Saga, which leads to some blowout losses), the good games more than make up for it.

Vote for Next Week's Deck

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Jumpstart: Historic Horizons releases tomorrow, so let's try one of the whacky new digital-only cards next week, but which one? Click here to vote!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck! 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.



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