Much Abrew: Tree of Perdition Combo | Pioneer
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Tree of Perdition is an infamously janky mythic. Even with its weird life-swapping ability, the four-mana 0/13 defender just isn't especially powerful in most decks. Its best-case scenario is that you play it, untap with it, and set your opponent's life total from 20 down to 13 while growing Tree's toughness, which is a lot of work for what is essentially a seven-damage burn spell.
As such, I was shocked to see Tree of Perdition showing up in competitive Pioneer decks! While Tree of Perdition itself is still back, what if we could give its ability to a creature with much lower toughness, like Voldaren Epicure? That's the goal of our deck today: get Tree of Perdition in the graveyard, exile it to Agatha's Soul Cauldron to give a small creature like Voldaren Epicure its ability, and then tap the 2/2 Voldaren Epicure to set our opponent's life total down to two (while also giving Epicure a hilarious amount of toughness). This by itself is often enough to win us the game over the course of a couple of turns. But we can win immediately if we add Voldaren Thrillseeker to the mix. We exile Tree of Perdition to Agatha's Soul Cauldron and then do the same with Voldaren Thrillseeker, which will give us a Voldaren Epicure (or whatever small creature we happen to have on the battlefield) that can tap to set our opponent's life total down to two with Tree of Perdition's ability and then sacrifice itself to deal the final two damage with Voldaren Thrillseeker's ability! The best part? With a good draw, we can do this as early as Turn 4!
Is Tree of Perdition real now? Check out the video to find out!
Wrap-Up
So, is Tree of Perdition real now? Record-wise, the answer seems to be yes-ish. We played 15 total matches with Tree of Perdition Combo and ended up winning eight, giving us a 54% match-win percentage, which is pretty solid. The combo itself is hilarious. At a quick glance, our deck looks like Rakdos Vampires, so many opponents think they know what we are up to, only to suddenly die out of nowhere from 20 life to the Tree of Perdition combo! While graveyard hate can shut us down, our backup plan of beating down with random Rakdos dorks isn't that bad.
As far as the deck itself, the only real issue I ran into is that we occasionally would half-combo by getting a Tree of Perdition under Agatha's Soul Cauldron and drain our opponent down to two or three by giving a small creature its ability but not be able to close out the game by getting in the last few points of damage. This made me think that maybe a bit more direct damage could be worthwhile, or at least that we should play the fourth copy of Voldaren Thrillseeker to help increase our chances of making the combo lethal. This didn't happen super often—most of the time when we got a Tree of Perdition exiled with Agatha's Soul Cauldron, we won in short order—but the few times it didn't happen were awkward.
One of the weird upsides of the deck is how it lines up with the meta, especially Amalia Combo. Amalia Combo can easily end up with hundreds of life thanks to its combo, but Tree of Perdition doesn't care. One activation will get our opponent's life total back down to whatever its toughness happens to be, which is a pretty hilarious way to get around the absurd amount of life Amalia can gain (assuming we can keep from dying to Amalia itself).
It's also worth mentioning that while we played the deck on Magic Arena, it originally came from Magic Online. The only change I had to make to the deck for it to work on Arena was to replace Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth with Castle Locthwain. If you decide to play the deck on Magic Online, you might as well toss the Urborg back in—it's basically a free roll, and being able to tap Mutavault for black mana is sometimes relevant.
All in all, Tree of Perdition Combo felt solid. Is it better than the more traditional Rakdos Vampire deck? Maybe not, but it's certainly good enough to rank up on Arena or win a league on Magic Online, especially right now when the combo itself tends to catch opponents by surprise. If you're looking for something different to try in Pioneer, give Tree of Perdition Combo a shot! It's hilarious and more competitive than you probably think!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, put your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
