Much Abrew: Web-Slinging, but Infinite (Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week we're heading to Standard to do some web-slinging, but infinitely! If we manage to pull it off, our reward is infinite creatures and potentially infinite mana and power as well! How do you web-sling infinitely? Can the plan actually work? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Infinite Web-Slinging
Discussion
- Record-wise, infinite web-slinging was pretty mediocre. We went 9-16 with the deck, good for a 36% win rate, which isn't the worst, but also isn't especially competitive.
- When you actually look at what we need to go infinite, this record makes some sense. To go infinite, we need four cards: first, we need a creature that makes more creatures when we play a creature (Silk, Web Weaver or Oltec Matterweaver), second we need Supportive Parents which lets us tap two creatures to make a mana, and then, third and fourth, we need two creatures that we web-sling into play for one mana (Arachne, Psionic Weaver and Spider-Man, Web-Slinger). With this setup, we can web-sling a creature into play, which will trigger Silk, Web Weaver (or Oltec Matterweaver) to make a token, we can then tap the token and the web-slinger to make a mana with Supportive Parents, which then lets us web-sling our second web-slinger into play, picking up the first. The end result is infinite 1/1 tokens, which we can then pump a bunch of times with Silk, Web Weaver's ability to make them infinitely-ish powerful to win the game the next turn. If we happen to have both Silk, Web Weaver and Oltec Matterweaver in play, then we also get infinite mana since each time through the loop we'll make two tokens instead of one, giving us an extra token we can tap to Supportive Parents.
- If this sounds like a lot of pieces to get on the battlefield, it is, although we have some tutors to help increase consistency. The biggest pinch in the deck is Supportive Parents, partly because it's our only combo piece that doesn't have a redundant backup version and in part because we can't tutor up Supportive Parents with Radioactive Spider, which finds all of our other combo pieces for just two mana once it's on the battlefield. To help find Supportive Parents specifically we're also playing the full four copies of Nature's Rhythm, which can tutor up any combo piece we need (and potentially two thanks to Harmonize), although it can be a bit expensive to get going.
- The good news is that the combo is pretty sweet when it works, and perhaps more importantly, some of the individual cards in the deck were impressive. Some of our best games didn't involve the combo at all, but just dumping our hand and making a ton of tokens on turn three with Silk, Web Weaver and Supportive Parents. Arachne, Psionic Weaver is also just a really strong stand-alone card, which should see a bunch of Standard play.
- Now for the bad news, which comes in threes. First, finding four different combo pieces, even with our tutors, it's tough, and doubly so since they are all creatures. Even if we find all four, we also need to keep at least three of them on the battlefield, which is tricky, especially against removal-heavy decks, which goes a long way towards explaining the mediocre record. Second, we had a couple of games where we went infinite, but still lost, which is a drawback of a combo that essentially wins with suspend 1 (since we need to wait for our infinite creatures to lose summoning sickness to attack). We could fix this by adding something like Impact Tremors so we win immediately, but [doing so means] when we need to find five combo pieces rather than just four, which would reduce consistency even more. Finally, the third problem with the deck is a Magic Arena thing - it takes an absurd amount of clicks - while the combo is click-intensive no matter what since we need to keep manually making mana with Supportive Parents, Arachne, Psionic Weaver makes it even worse, since each time we play it we need to look at our opponent's hand and choose a card type. In reality, going infinite with this deck on Arena actually means making something like 40 tokens, which is still enough to win the game most of the time, but is also a huge time sink.
- So should you play Infinite Web-Slinging? I think the answer is no, especially in digital. In paper when you can shortcut the combo, it's fine, but on Arena the amount of clicks it takes makes it hard to recommend, especially with its meh record. While I do think the web-slinging cards have potential, at least in Standard playing them fairly for value might be a better plan than trying to go infinite, unless you really love playing a click simulator.
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.
