My Food Makes Rats - My Rats make Food | Brewer's Kitchen
Well, hello there! Brewer’s Kitchen here and today our Rats make Food and our Food makes Rats. But wouldn’t that create an infinity of Rats? What’s next? Will Arena break in the process as well? In a Brewer’s Kitchen video of all things? No way…
The Gameplan
The gameplan is pretty well explained in the title. We’re gonna assemble a board state that loops Rats creating Food and Food creating Rats. The core engine are Peregrin Took and Experimental Confectioner. The synergy between the two is almost too on the nose:
Once we have these two and three food tokens, we can sacrifice them to Peregrin too draw a card. Each of these foods will trigger the Confectioner to create a rat token, in turn creating an additional food token. This will end us up with having three rats and three fresh new food tokens to sacrifice and restart the loop. This alone can win you the game if you can untap with your army of rodents.
But Historic is not a format known for letting you untap with your lethal board state so we need a way to convert this engine into an instant victory. Here’s another card that seemed to be designed specifically to break this combo: Night of the Sweets' Revenge
It allows us to tap our food tokens for mana, meaning we can now create infinite green mana with our infinite rats. Since the combo doesn’t create an infinity of food, the activated ability of the enchantment itself is usually not the way to finish the game. Instead we will just draw through our deck, creating heaps of rats and mana along the way until we find Finale of Devastation, cast if for X=Overkill and swing in for an absurd amount of damage.
The rest of the deck is just pieces to set up and support the combo. Delighted Halfling and Gilded Goose accelerate us into our three-drop combo pieces, Samwise Gamgee creates us the food to get the party started and Chatterfang, Squirrel General creates an additional army of Squirrels if our rats aren’t enough to finish the job.
Finale of Devastation and Beseech the Mirror help us find our combo pieces and make the deck incredibly consistent. Since we’re playing these tutors we have some room for toolbox targets to grab.
Pitiless Plunderer goes infinite with Chatterfang to kill everything our opponent owns and loves while creating infinite treasure tokens. Yawgmoth, Thran Physician can dominate a board with removal and card advantage if we need to grind out value to beat our opponent.
The deck can feel unfair at times if the opponent isn’t quick enough to kill us and doesn’t interact with our combo. Luckily, we have Prosperous Innkeeper to keep our life total nice and healthy for the aggressive matchups. It get’s a little tricky if you run into midrange/control matchups. A lot of hate cards specifically punish our combo, mainly Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Orcish Bowmasters. Both are just generically good cards that see a lot of play in Historic; Bowmasters even made it into our deck as a two-of. All of this is to say that this deck is pretty much like all the other combo decks in Historic: Very effective if you can’t stop them, but kept in check by interaction and hate pieces.
Edit: Halfway through the production of this video, Orcish Bowmasters got the Alchemy hammer. I still don’t know why Alchemy should affect Historic and it sucks big time… I’d suggest replacing it with Gala Greeters or something.
Wrap up
At this point I’ve made many videos with various combination of creature/token/combo decks similar to this one, and all of them were a blast to play. I can also promise that this is not gonna be the last one. Just wait until we get Academy Manufactor on Arena. If you like synergies and a lot of clicking and triggers, give this deck a shot. But be aware that Sheoldred and Bowmasters can not stay on the board when you’re going for the combo.
If you have questions or ideas for this or any other deck, you can reach me on Twitter @Brewers_Kitchen or at brewerskitchen@mtggoldfish.com.
