Much Abrew: Infinite Leyline Combo (Modern)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to Modern to play another wild combo deck: Infinite Leyline Combo! The primary goal is to make infinite mana with the help of Freed from the Real and a mana dork along with a Leyline of Abundance on the battlefield. This lets us win by making our creatures infinitely large with +1/+1 counters from Leyline or win by drawing our entire deck with Kenrith, the Returned King until we find Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. If we can't go infinite, we can also make oodles of mana with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and Leyline of the Guildpact to Storm the Festival into our combo pieces. How many leylines does it take to go infinite in Modern? Let's find out on today's Much Abrew!
Much Abrew: Infinite Leyline Combo
Discussion
- Record-wise, Infinite Leyline Combo was middling. I went 2-3 in a league and then jumped into another one and went 1-1 before calling it a wrap, giving us an overall record of 3-4, which sounds about right for the deck. The upside of Infinite Leyline Combo is that the deck is incredibly explosive and can win super quickly (literally on Turn 2 with our best draws), but it's also fairly inconsistent and disruptable. The end result is a very Against the Odds–style deck, offering some epic wins but also some brutal losses.
- The core of our deck is two leylines: Leyline of the Guildpact and Leyline of Abundance. We'll mulligan fairly aggressively to find these cards because they offer the super-explosive starts and fast combo kills. Leyline of the Guildpact is the simpler of the two. Its primary purpose is to add four green mana symbols to the battlefield for Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, although it does sometimes help our infinite-combo plan by letting Dryad Arbor tap for blue mana. But more on this in a minute.
- Meanwhile, Leyline of Abundance is our combo leyline. The enchantment makes it so when we tap a creature for mana, we generate an extra green mana, which allows our endless stream of mana dorks—Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarch, Dryad Arbor, and Sanctum Weaver—to go infinite with Freed from the Real. Freed from the Real lets us pay a blue mana to untap the creature it enchants, which lets us tap our mana dork for two mana and untap it for one. This gives us infinite mana, which we can then use to dump our hand, possibly draw our deck with Kenrith, the Returned King, hard cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, or just win by using Leyline of Abundance itself to put an infinite amount of +1/+1 counters on our creatures! With our best draws, we can be doing this all on Turn 2! A free Leyline of Abundance on Turn 0 into Birds of Paradise or Noble Hierarch on Turn 1 gives us exactly enough mana to play Freed from the Real on the mana dork and untap it to start the combo on Turn 2!
- A couple of quick notes on our mana dorks in the combo. Sanctum Weaver is the easiest dork to combo with since we don't even need Leyline of Abundance on the battlefield. It makes enough mana all by itself to go infinite with Freed from the Real. On the other hand, Birds of Paradise and Noble Hierarch need a Leyline of Abundance alongside Freed from the Real to make them infinite. Finally, Dryad Arbor is our worst combo piece since it requires us to have both Leyline of the Guildpact and Leyline of Abundance on the battlefield to go infinite, although it helps make up for this by being fetchable, which sometimes allows us to combo off by surprise from an empty board.
- As for the rest of the deck, our backup plan is to generate a bunch of mana with our leylines and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, which we can then use to cast Storm the Festival to find our combo pieces. Storm the Festival is also great if we have infinite mana since we can use it to dig for a Kenrith, the Returned King to close out the game.
- Finally, we have a bunch of ways to try to protect our combo. By far the biggest drawback to Infinite Leyline Combo is that we need to keep a low-toughness mana dork on the battlefield to be able to go infinite, which means everything from Fatal Push to Lightning Bolt to Solitude can ruin our day. As such, we have Teferi, Time Raveler to Silence our opponent during our turn, Veil of Summer to fight through discard and removal, and Pact of Negation as a free counter during our combo turn. While paying for Pact of Negation is incredibly painful, in theory, we should be winning the game on the turn we combo off, so if we're using Pact as combo protection, odds are we'll never have to pay for it because the game will end before our next upkeep.
- If you decide to pick up the deck, my biggest piece of advice is to mulligan aggressively for a hand that does something explosive early in the game. This can be Leyline of Abundance with mana dorks (or, if we're really lucky, mana dorks and Freed from the Real) or multiple leylines with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and Storm the Festival. Don't keep hands that are just a bunch of mana dorks and protection spells, odds are we'll end up dying before we draw the right pieces we need to combo off and win the game.
- One possible improvement to the deck is some surveil lands. If our opponent can deal with our initial combo attempt, we often spend several turns doing nothing relevant while we wait to draw what we need to reassemble the combo. Being able to fetch out a surveil land or two could help us dig for our combo pieces and ideally speed up the reassembly. While there is a cost—we really need untapped lands on Turns 1 and 2 for the combo—playing one or two is probably worthwhile.
- So, should you play Infinite Leyline Combo in Modern? From a competitive perspective, probably not. The deck is very much a glass-cannon-style combo deck. It's hilarious and awesome when it works, but it fails just as hard when it doesn't work (or when our opponent has interaction). That said, I do think there's some potential here: literal Turn 2 kills are hard to come by in Modern, and this deck offers one. With some more tuning and brewing to improve the consistency, we might be able to improve the deck enough to make it legit! If you have some ideas on how to improve it, make sure to let me know in the comments!
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.
