Much Abrew: Lonis's Token Factory (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Winning a game of Magic is great, but doing something truly absurd—like making the biggest board of tokens imaginable—is even better! As such, we're heading to Modern today to power up Lonis's Token Factory, a deck looking to make a ridiculous number of tokens with the help of Lonis, Cryptozoologist, Academy Manufactor, and Chatterfang, Squirrel General. When things go well, we can use this combo to draw through our deck, make hundreds of Squirrel tokens, wrath our opponent's board with Chatterfang, Squirrel General, and maybe even win the game with janky Squirrel tokens beats. But the real reward is creating an absurd board state! How many tokens can we make with Lonis's Token Factory? How many matches can we win? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Lonis's Token Factory
Discussion
- Record-wise, things are a bit complicated. Officially, we finished 2-3 with our league, although our first loss came in a match we were almost guaranteed to win, but we made so many tokens and created so many triggers we ended up running out of time before we could seal the deal, giving us an unofficial 3-2.
- Thankfully, Lonis's Token Factory is about more than just winning matches: it's about doing cool things with our weird token engine. And we managed to do that several times in our league. The main synergy of the deck is Lonis, Cryptozoologist so every creature we play makes a Clue token, alongside Academy Manufactor, which turns that Clue into a Clue, a Treasure, and a Food. Things get pretty bonkers if we ever get two copies of Academy Manufactor on the battlefield since every creature we play will make three Food, Clues, and Treasures, which lets us go semi-infinite by drawing through our deck with the Clues to find more creatures to keep replenishing our token supply. (With three Academy Manufactor, we should go fully infinite and be able to play through our entire deck, unless we get super unlucky.)
- Making a ton of Clues, Treasures, and Food is fun, but that doesn't actually win us the game. For this, we turn to Chatterfang, Squirrel General. With Chatterfang on the battlefield, every token we make will come along with a bonus 1/1 Squirrel, which is our main plan for winning the game. As we make piles of Clues, Food, and Treasures, we will get an equally huge pile of Squirrels. After we get a huge scurry, we will sacrifice some of them to Chatterfang, Squirrel General's second ability to kill all of our opponent's creatures and win by beating down with all the 1/1s!
- Oh yeah, one very important note on the combo: if we get Chatterfang and Manufactor on the battlefield, we'll have multiple replacement effects every time we make a Clue, Food, or Treasure: one from Academy Manufactor to give us extra tokens and one from Chatterfang, Squirrel General to make Squirrel tokens. While my brain is too smooth to explain exactly why, it's very important that we resolve Chatterfang's trigger last in this situation. If we resolve it first, we'll only get a single Squirrel token, even if we make a bunch of Clues, Food, and Treasures, but if we resolve it last, we'll get a Squirrel for each Food, Clue, and Treasure we make. If you know exactly why this matters, let me know in the comments because I'm super curious.
- As for the rest of the deck, it's mostly ramp, removal, and additional cards that make Food, Clues, or Treasures to support our token-factory plan. Cards like Tireless Tracker and Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer are obviously strong on their own, but they are incredibly busted when, rather than making a single Clue or a single Treasure, they are making a Food, a Clue, and a Treasure thanks to Academy Manufactor.
- Maybe my favorite card in the deck is the forgotten member of the Throne of Eldraine common land cycle: Gingerbread Cabin. We've seen Mystic Sanctuary be bannably good, and Dwarven Mine is a key part of Creativity Combo decks, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone play Gingerbread Cabin, even while it was in Standard. It's pretty absurd in our deck. We can wait until we have a Academy Manufactor on the battlefield and then fetch it out to make a Clue, a Food, and a Treasure when it enters the battlefield; plus, we end up with an untapped land too!
- By far the biggest drawback of the deck is that almost all of our cards are synergy pieces that are reliant on other cards to be powerful. Our engine pieces—Lonis, Cryptozoologist, Academy Manufactor, and Chatterfang, Squirrel General—are all pretty underpowered on their own. What this means in practice is that Lonis's Token Factory struggles against decks that are overloaded with removal and sweepers because we really need to keep multiple creatures on the battlefield for a couple of turns to do anything cool. We saw this in our last match where we had all the pieces we needed to go off but our opponent had multiple copies of Brotherhood's End to keep our engine off the battlefield, which lead to us losing the game.
- So, should you play Lonis's Token Factory in Modern? I think the answer is yes. While the deck is probably middling in terms of how competitive it is—it can go 5-0 with good matchups, but you could just as easily go 0-5 if you run into a bunch of removal-heavy control decks—it does incredibly cool things and is a blast to play. If your goal is to win as many matches as possible, I'm sure there are many better options in Modern, but Lonis's Token Factory is a great choice if you want to win a decent amount of the time while scoring a ton of style points!
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.
