I Made 8.83414E+71 Tokens (but Arena Wouldn't Let Me) | Standard Magic: the Gathering
The other day, I was playing Magic Arena and ended up breaking the game by going infinite in a bunch of different ways with the forgotten Phyrexia: All Will Be One equipment Blade of Shared Souls, and today, I'm going to show you exactly how I did it!
Discussion
The idea for today's deck actually started during a Twitch stream where a viewer mentioned that they noticed an interesting synergy between Ratadrabik of Urborg and Blade of Shared Souls. The idea was to use Blade of Shared Souls to keep making copies of Ratadrabik, which will cause us to sacrifice one of the Ratadrabiks because of the legend rule and give us an ever-increasing number of 2/2 token copies of Ratadrabik. Basically, with Blade, Ratadrabik, and any other creature on the battlefield to get the fun started, we can pay two mana to equip Blade of Shared Souls and make a number of 2/2 token copies of Ratadrabik of Urborg equal to the number of Ratadrabiks we already have, minus one and then doubled! While the combo was really sweet and made a hilarious number of Ratadrabiks, it left me wanting more. The main issue with the combo is that it's limited by the amount of mana we have access to, which made me wonder if there was a way to make the combo go fully infinite. It turns out that with a couple of other key additions, we can build a deck that doesn't just make a ton of token copies of Ratadrabik but also makes infinite mana and gives us infinite card draw, which in turn lets us win the game immediately!
The first huge addition is Mondrak, Glory Dominus, which isn't technically necessary for our deck to go infinite, but doubling up the number of tokens we make lets us do some spectacular things and greatly reduces the number of clicks needed to win the game on Magic Arena. It's worth mentioning that if one Mondrak isn't enough, once we get the combo set up, we can do the same Blade of Shared Souls trick to make a bunch of token copies of Mondrak with the help of Ratadrabik of Urborg, although be warned: making too many Mondraks too quickly is actually problematic because Arena only lets us have 250 total tokens on the battlefield at any one time, and with several Mondraks on the battlefield, each token we make will bring us to the token limit, potentially making it difficult to make what we need to win the game.
While Mondrak is fun, the card that lets us go fully infinite is Atsushi, the Blazing Sky. The problem with our Ratadrabik plus Blade of Shared Souls combo is that we're limited by the amount of mana we have access to because it costs two mana to equip Blade of Shared Souls. Atsushi is the solution to this problem. If we do the same combo—copying Atsushi with Blade and making copies with Ratadrabik of Urborg—we'll spend two mana to equip Blade but can make three mana each time Atsushi, the Blazing Sky dies, in the form of three Treasure tokens, giving us infinite mana, which in turn lets us make a truly infinite number of token copies of all of our legends with Ratadrabik (well, as infinite as it's possible to go on Arena, thanks to the token limit). Once we make a ton of tokens, we can start using Atsushi's other ability to draw cards, which means we not only get infinite mana and tokens but also can draw our entire deck, meaning we're guaranteed to find one of our finishers!
While making hundreds of copies of Atsushi, the Blazing Sky, Ratadrabik of Urborg, and Mondrak, Glory Dominus should win us the game, there's always a chance that our opponent will untap and cast something like Farewell to undo all of our hard work. As such, we have a plan to win the game on the turn we combo so our opponent won't get a chance to untap and wrath our board. In fact, we have two plans to win the game right away. The simplest is Goro-Goro, Disciple of Ryusei, which we'll draw into eventually thanks to our infinite card draw from Atsushi, the Blazing Sky and which we can use to give our infinite-ish tokens haste and attack for an absurd amount of damage. The second plan is to find our one copy of Junji, the Midnight Sky, which we can copy and legend-rule a bunch of times with our Blade of Shared Souls trick to burn our opponent out of the game, two life at a time!
And that's the deck. It is awesome and absurd and hilarious, although sadly, it is somewhat limited by Magic Arena's token limit. At one point, we had 239 copies of Mondrak, Glory Dominus, which means that technically, every time we made a token, we'd actually make 8.83414E+71 tokens. Obviously, that number is way, way too big for Magic Arena's brain (or my brain) to handle, which is why the token limit is a thing. Even with just 250 tokens on the battlefield, Arena barely functions—it was taking 30 seconds to resolve a single action, and we had one game where we went infinite but ended up losing because the Arena lag was so intense we couldn't actually finish the entire combo without timing out. The good news is that getting 250 copies of something like Mondrak on the battlefield is still super impressive, even if we technically should have more Mondraks than there are stars in the sky or Commander precons printed in the past year, if only Magic Arena would let us!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's how I broke Magic Arena with Blade of Shared Souls! 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.
