Much Abrew: Godfather Song Combo (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. During preview season, I mostly thought of An Offer You Can't Refuse as a bad version of Swan Song since giving your opponent two Treasures is generally worse than giving them a 2/2 Bird token. What if An Offer You Can't Refuse is actually a weird ritual that you're supposed to use on your own spells to generate extra mana? That's what we're going to explore in Modern today, with a new take on Song of Creation combo—Godfather Song—that is looking to counter a ton of its own spells with An Offer You Can't Refuse and Pact of Negation to draw through its entire deck with Song of Creation, generate a bunch of mana, and eventually win with a huge Grapeshot storm! Is An Offer You Can't Refuse actually a good ritual rather than a bad counterspell? Let's get to the video and find out on this week's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Godfather Song Combo
Discussion
- Record-wise, we finished a Modern league 2-3 with the deck, and our overall record was 2-4 when you add in an extra loss in the two-player queues, which isn't super exciting. Godfather Song Combo is a weird deck. When things go well, it's really good at comboing off, drawing its entire deck, and winning on Turn 4 (or, at worst, Turn 4). But it often does quite literally nothing when things go wrong.
- To start, the deck is all about Song of Creation. We can't really win without finding Song and getting it on the battlefield. If we do find Song of Creation, there's a really good chance we're going to win the game immediately. The hardest matchups for the deck are—by far—control and also Thoughtseize-heavy decks with counterspells (like various Death's Shadow and Murktide Regent builds) because these decks make it super hard to actually get a Song of Creation on the battlefield. While we can certainly beat these decks, in part thanks to our own counterspells Pact of Negation and An Offer You Can't Refuse, which we can use to force our Song of Creation through disruption, and in part because of a playset of Veil of Summer in the sideboard, they are still super tough. On the other end of the spectrum, we have creature decks, aggro, and midrange, which we mostly just crush because we can combo off with Song of Creation before our opponent can kill us. Somewhere in the middle is other combo decks, where it's mostly just a race to see who can win faster. While winning on Turn 3 is often fast enough, it is possible that we can lose the combo race if our opponent can win on Turn 2 (or wins the die roll and kills us on Turn 3).
- The primary plan is simple: play Song of Creation with at least one free spell in hand to start drawing cards, keep chaining free spells together until we eventually draw our entire deck, and win with Grapeshot (or Thassa's Oracle after sideboarding, which lets us beat things like Leyline of Sanctity).
- The most interesting aspect of the deck is its plan for generating mana: An Offer You Can't Refuse. The idea is that once we start comboing with Song of Creation, we can cast a free spell like Mishra's Bauble, Everflowing Chalice, or Engineered Explosives and then use An Offer You Can't Refuse to counter it, which will give us four cards thanks to Song of Creation and also two Treasures. This extra Treasure mana is key because it gives us the mana we need to finish the game with Grapeshot even if we start our combo turn with zero extra mana available. (We can make the extra land drop from Song of Creation to make the one mana we need for An Offer You Can't Refuse, and then it because really difficult to fizzle once we start countering our own spells to make Treasures.) It's also important to keep in mind that Pact of Negation can also be used to counter our own spells and draw more cards with Song of Creation.
- When I first started testing the deck, I played it pretty badly because I didn't realize how important interacting with our own stack was to the combo. It's easy to think of Pact of Negation and An Offer You Can't Refuse as protection for Song of Creation. While they are in some cases, more often than not, they are actually weird rituals and card-draw spells during our combo turn. If you decide to give the deck a shot, it's important to keep this in mind. If you aren't countering a bunch of your own spells, you're doing it wrong and will have a hard time winning.
- Mulliganing is super important for the deck. In general, we don't want to keep a six- or seven-card hand without a Song of Creation or a Glittering Wish to find a Song of Creation. Once we have a Song, the other important pieces we are looking to have in our opening hand are a least one zero-mana spell that isn't a counterspell (something like Engineered Explosives, Everflowing Chalice, or Mishra's Bauble) and then a way to ramp into Song of Creation (Everflowing Chalice, Strike It Rich, or An Offer You Can't Refuse). Oddly, An Offer You Can't Refuse is often our best ramp spell as well, and with a nut draw, it can let us win the game as early as Turn 2. If we can cast a zero-mana artifact like Everflowing Chalice on Turn 1, we can keep priority and counter it with An Offer You Can't Refuse to make two Treasures, which will give us enough mana to cast a Song of Creation (and hopefully win the game) on Turn 2!
- A huge percentage of the time, we'll win the game on the turn Song of Creation hits the battlefield. If we fizzle, we can always use Strike It Rich's flashback to restart the combo the next turn after discarding our hand on our end step.
- Oh yeah, the other thing to be aware of when playing the deck is hate cards. Storm hate like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben is super strong against us, as are artifact hate (like Stony Silence, which cuts off our Treasure mana, making it hard to combo kill) and Teferi, Time Raveler, which keeps us from countering our own spells with An Offer You Can't Refuse to make mana. We have answers to all of these cards in our sideboard—Boseiju, Who Endures, Abrupt Decay, and Wear // Tear—and its important to sideboard these cards in aggressively if there's a chance we'll have to deal with hate cards because if we don't, we can end up drawing dead to something like a Thalia or Stony Silence.
- So, should you play Godfather Song Combo in Modern? While it certainly could be that I didn't play the deck perfectly (the deck is surprisingly hard to play because it has so many weird, counterintuitive lines), in general, the deck still mostly felt like a funny Against the Odds brew rather than a truly competitive option. That said, the deck has really good and really bad matchups, and Godfather Song Combo has the ability to 5-0 a league if you hit five of the good ones in a row. On the other hand, it also seems possible to 0-5 if you hit five control decks or tax decks in a row. Basically, Godfather Song Combo is a high-risk, high-reward combo deck that can win in a really unique and fun way when things go well. But when things go wrong, you're mostly left drawing a hand full of Everflowing Chalices and not doing much of anything at all.
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.
