Much Abrew: When Treasures Kill (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Today, we have our final early-access day video (thanks again to Wizards for hooking us up with the account), and it's a good one: Biotech Specialist Treasure Combo! For my money, Biotech Specialist is one of the most breakable cards in Edge of Eternities. Dealing two damage to our opponent whenever we sacrifice an artifact means that if we can get 10 Treasures on the battlefield, Biotech Specialist can kill our opponent on the spot from 20 life. And our deck is really good at making Treasures in some pretty funny ways! How good is Biotech Specialist? Can a Treasure Combo deck work in Standard? Let's find out!
Much Abrew: Biotech Treasures
Discussion
- Record-wise, we ended up just below a 50% win rate with Biotech Treasures, although I don't really put much weight on the record since we were playing during early-access day. Instead, I'm looking for how the deck and synergies feel, and in general, Biotech Treasures felt solid!
- Biotech Specialist is a pretty crazy card. Not only does the two-drop make a Lander token that we can sacrifice to Rampant Growth, but it also burns our opponent for two whenever we sacrifice an artifact. While the ability is designed to work with Lander tokens (and we do have a Lander package, with Sami's Curiosity joining Biotech Specialist to make Landers and Larval Scoutlander to sac a Lander to double ramp, which is super strong for three mana), we've got another plan for sacrificing artifacts: Treasures!
- Treasures are the perfect way to kill with Biotech Specialist because they are fairly cheap to make and we can sacrifice them for free. If we can get 10 Treasures on the battlefield, a single Biotech Specialist will win us the game on the spot. And we've got a couple of synergies to speed things up even more! So, how are we making Treasures? The two big Treasure producers in the deck are Hell to Pay and Goldvein Hydra, big X spells that, assuming we can dump a bunch of mana into them (which is why we are playing some ramp), can make enough Treasures to turn on the Biotech Specialist kill all by themselves! We've also got one copy of Hit the Mother Lode, which discovers 10 and then (if whatever we discover into costs less than 10) gives us Treasures to make up the difference. While it's a bit risky since we can't control exactly how many Treasures it makes, it does play well with our low-mana-value X spells like Hell to Pay and Goldvein Hydra, since if we discover into either, we'll make a massive nine Treasures!
- But our Treasure makers have one big problem: they make tapped Treasures. In practice, this means we can't win the game right away if we make a bunch of Treasures with Hell to Pay, Goldvein Hydra, or Hit the Mother Lode, even if we have a Biotech Specialist on the battlefield. Instead, we have to wait a turn for the Treasures to untap before we can win. Thankfully, we have a card that solves this problem in Magda, the Hoardmaster. Magda lets us sacrifice three Treasures to make a 4/4 hasty, flying Dragon token, which does two things in our deck. First, it lets us sacrifice our tapped Treasures to win with Biotech Specialist. Second, Magda's Dragons decrease the number of Treasures we need on the battlefield to win the game. With both Biotech Specialist and Magda on the battlefield, we only need five Treasures to win the game. We sacrifice three to make a 4/4 hasty flier and burn for 10 with Biotech Specialist, and since Biotech Specialist targets our opponent, this will also trigger Magda, the Hoardmaster's other ability to make a tapped Treasure. This will give us three Treasures, which we can sacrifice to make another hasty 4/4 Dragon and deal six more damage with Biotech Specialist, giving us a total of 20 damage!
- The rest of our deck is support pieces. Scorching Shot and Torch the Tower offer more removal, Overlord of the Hauntwoods backs up our Lander package as ramp, while Muerra, Trash Tactician and Hugs, Grisly Guardian offer card advantage. I was especially impressed with Muerra in the deck. Our x-spells make it pretty easy to expend 8 in the late game, giving us three life and two cards for free, and we can potentially be doing this every turn! While only a one-of, next time I play the deck I'm planning to add another copy.
- And that's basically the deck. Overall, I was super impressed with Biotech Specialist and Lander tokens, to the point where I'm starting to wonder if Sami's Curiosity might actually be a very good ramp spell in Standard. Sure, it technically costs one more mana than Rampant Growth. But it can still be a Turn 2 ramp spell since you can split it up over multiple turns, which is something we don't typically get in Standard. Meanwhile, Biotech Specialist is a super-explosive card. I think it has a lot of Standard potential, and I'm even more excited to try it in Modern as a finisher in an Academy Manufactor token deck. Whether in this shell or somewhere else, I have to imagine the card will be good somewhere.
- All in all, I really liked this deck. While its overall record was medium, out of all the decks I played during early access, this is the one that led to the most interesting matches, win or lose. We had some absurd wins, like flipping Magda, the Hoardmaster off Hit the Mother Lode for lethal, and also had some pretty wild losses. The biggest issue with the deck is that it can be slow since we're reliant on big X spells to make Treasures. Things can go bad in a hurry if we don't draw any ramp early, especially against aggro. But the deck can do some super-powerful things when everything comes together!
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.
