Much Abrew: Airbending Might Be a Little Broken (Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Out of all the mechanics from Avatar airbending was the one was I least sure about, but now that I've gotten a chance to play with the cards a bit (thanks to Wizards for the early access account), it turns out that airbending might be the most broken Avatar mechanic of them all because it's surprisingly easy to airbending infinitely, maybe as early as turn four, in Standard! Do we have another fast infinite combo deck on our hands? Is airbending the new Vivi? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Infinite Airbending
Discussion
So yeah, it turns ou that airbending is actually pretty wild and shockingly easy to combo with. If you didn't pick it up from the video, the basic idea of the deck is this: get a Doc Aurlock, Grizzled Genius on the battlefield so cards we cast from exile cost two less, which means that anything we airbend can immediately be cast for free! Next we need Appa, Steadfast Guardian, which can airbend any of our non-land permanents when it enters and also makes a 1/1 Ally token when we cast something from exile, which makes Appa not just a combo piece, but also our primary finisher. With this set up all we need is one more airbending cards, either Aang, Swift Savior or Airbender Ascension, and we can go infinite. We cast the Aang, which triggers Appa to make a token and then airbends the Appa, thanks to Doc we can cast Appa for free, and airbend the Aang. We can then cast the Aang again for free, make another 1/1 Ally, and airbend Appa again, and if we do this a bunch of times we end up with infinite 1/1 tokens that we can use to win the game in a single attack! Since Aang has flash, we can do this all on our opponent's end step, which should allow us to untap, attack and win immediately!
Things get even better if we have two airbenders, for example an Aang, Swift Savior and Airbender Ascension, because then we can also airbend our opponent entire board, making them recast each of there creatures for two mana a piece. If we happen to have Quantum Riddler when we go off, we can also draw our deck (Riddler is also just great with airbending, since we can warp it into play and then use something like Airbender Ascension to airbend it to recast later for just two mana), while Spyglass Siren can make infinite map tokens. And that's essentially the plan of the deck, although it is worth pointing out that other than perhaps Doc Aurlock, Grizzled Genius, all of our combo pieces are good cards on their own which lets us win fairly if we don't have our combo pieces. Airbender Ascension and Aang can airbend our opponent stuff to slow them down while we're looking for combo pieces, while Appa, Steadfast Guardian is basically a Restoration Angel.
While the deck felt surprisingly solid, and I will not be surprised to see it end up a real deck in Standard, it does have one issue: the mana sort of sucks. While it is usually good enough, we only get a single shockland, and it's Breeding Pool, which is probably the weakest shock for our deck, since some of our important combo pieces are double white. Sometimes we do end up stuck on colors, which can be frustrating, although thankfully this problem will fix itself in a couple of months once Lorwyn Eclipsed drops and we get the rest of the shocks. While I think the deck should still be able to compete in the meantime, it will get even better then.
While I hate reading too much into early access day because the meta is weird and people are trying new brews, the synergies in the deck felt really strong. It turns out that being able to cast things for free repeatedly is pretty broken, who would have guessed? While it will probably take some testing, tuning and brewing to come up with the optimal list, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some version of Airbend Combo is a very real deck in our new Standard format!
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.
