I Killed My Opponent by Giving THEM Infinite Goats!
Goats have a surprisingly long and glorious history in Magic. But recently, I was playing Magic Arena and did something with Goats that I'm pretty sure had never been done before: I killed my opponent by giving THEM infinite Goats!
Discussion
Killing an opponent by giving them infinite Goats isn't easy—it takes a lot of combo pieces—but it's hilarious when it works! To actually kill someone by giving them infinite Goats, we need about five combo pieces, although a two-card synergy is at the core of the deck...
The most important part of our deck is the two-card combo of Luminous Broodmoth and Solemnity. Solemnity makes it so things can get counters, while Luminous Broodmoth has a unique ability: when one of our non-flying creatures dies, it returns to the battlefield with a flying counter. The idea of Luminous Broodmoth is that it can save our non-flying creatures one time because they'll have flying once they return to play, so when they die, they'll die forever. But once we add Solemnity to the mix to keep our creatures from getting counters, our team can keep dying forever and returning to the battlefield.
Of course, we can't just trust that our opponent will kill our creatures so we can generate some Luminous Broodmoth value. In fact, once our opponent realizes what we're up to, they'll probably try to avoid killing non-flying creatures since the creatures will just come back into play anyway. So the next piece of the puzzle is a free sacrifice outlet. Our best option is Woe Strider, which flavorfully makes a Goat token but, more importantly, lets us scry whenever we sacrifice something. This means that if we have Luminous Broodmoth, Solemnity, Woe Strider, and any other non-flying creature, we can sacrifice that creature a bunch of times to scry infinitely until we find our out combo pieces. If that creature happens to be something like Callous Bloodmage or Spirited Companion, we can also draw our entire deck, which is pretty sweet! Yahenni, Undying Partisan is our backup sacrifice outlet. While it doesn't do the cool things that Woe Strider does, like letting us scry through our deck, it works just as well with our combo.
Next up, we need Clackbridge Troll, which is how we give our opponent infinite Goats. The 8/8 has an enters-the-battlefield trigger that gives our opponent three 0/1 Goat tokens, which means if we go through the same loop we were just discussing—sacrificing Clackbridge Troll to Woe Strider and having it come back into play thanks to Luminous Broodmoth but without the flying counter because of Solemnity—the end result will be that we can give our opponent as many 0/1 Goat tokens as we want (well, up to 250, which is the creature limit on Magic Arena)! While being able to give our opponent infinite 0/1s is funny, it is fair to wonder why we would actually want to do this if our goal is to win the game. How does it benefit us to give our opponent an infinite number of 0/1 Goats?
The answer to this question is our final combo piece: Massacre Wurm, After we give our opponent 20, 100, or 250 Goats, we simply play Massacre Wurm, which will give all of our opponent's creatures –2/–2 and massacre all of the Goat tokens we gave our opponent. This will trigger Massacre Wurm's second ability—making our opponent lose two life whenever one of their creatures dies—enough times to kill our opponent on the spot! While it's rare that we will actually go all the way up to the token limit by giving our opponent 250 Goats (mostly because eventually I start to feel bad making our opponent sit through all the clicking once we already have a lethal amount of Goats on the battlefield), Massacre Wurm represents a massive 500 damage if we do!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Have you ever killed your opponent by giving them things? Let me know about it in the comments! Thanks for watching, and as always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
