WTF Arena, Just Let ME Do The Thing... | Brewer’s Kitchen
Today we’re gonna play a deck that could technically casts the entire library on turn four… If Arena would let us.
Gameplan
This deck is structured around the interaction of Lonis, Cryptozoologist or Samwise Gamgee, Urza, Lord High Artificer and Shrieking Drake.
Once we have all three of these creatures on the battlefield, we can enter a loop where we can use Urza to tap our food/clues for mana, cast Shrieking Drake, trigger Lonis or Sam for another token and bounce the Drake to its own trigger.
Did that sound like a bunch of triggers and clinking just to generate a tapped food/clue and end up with the same board state as before? Well, turns out, Arena agrees. While it is relatively easy to assemble this combo, especially once we add the extras to win the game with it, it becomes almost impossible to actually resolve it before the Arena timer ends our turn.
That said, let’s assume we had all the time in the world to resolve it. This loop alone either creates (technically) infinite Food with Samwise Gamgee or Clues with Lonis, Cryptozoologist. They both have ways to use them as a recourse. Sam could return all our historic cards from our graveyard to our hand and Lonis taps to look through the opponent’s deck an put any nonland permanent on our battlefield. Sadly, none of this wins the game by itself. Since Urza, Lord High Artificer comes with a construct that’s as powerful as there are artifacts on our battlefield, we have an insanely lethal attacker without any form of evasion. To really seal the deal, we need another piece. Once we have Lonis AND Sam, we create two artifacts with every Drake loop. That’s infinite blue mana to activate Urza’s second ability for every card in our deck, effectively casting our entire library.
Other pieces to generate extra mana with every loop are Peregrin Took to create an additional Food with every token or Delney, Streetwise Lookout to double up the triggers. In the case of Delney, we’ll need to also have a Prosperous Innkeeper since we’ll have to pick up two creatures with every Drake entering. Then, we recast Innkeeper for a food/clue and one of its Treasures, and create two new treasures upon it entering again. This combo will also generate (technically) infinite treasures and gain infinite life. Again… you see how none of this sound convenient to resolve on Arena.
Now since we’ll have to accept that we are bound by Arena’s restrictions, we have some ways to speed up the win. Sarinth Steelseeker will trigger off every Artifact we create, allowing us to quickly mill our library without having to cast everything. At this point it’s probably a good time to mention that the actual way to win the game is gonna be Laboratory Maniac. Once we’ve milled or cast our entire deck, we’ll just crack a clue or activate Peregrin Took to draw a card and end it.
The other win condition is Finale of Devastation it doubles up as a tutor to find our combo pieces but becomes a Craterhoof style finisher once we create tons of mana.
Another less obvious win condition is a loop where we control Samwise Gamgee, Urza, and enough enablers to create three food with every creature entering. Then, once we have another copy of Urza in our graveyard, we can use Sam to sacrifice three food to return Urza to our hand, cast it, sacrifice one Urza to the legend rule, tap the three food and the new construct token for mana, sacrifice the food to return Urza, repeat. This will let us untap with an army of gigantic constructs.
Wrap up
If Arena wouldn’t make us manually tap for Urza mana, this deck would we way stronger then it plays in practice. Luckily, most opponent just scoop once they see us spinning the wheels so in the end we actually had a pretty positive record. The tutors and accumulating value makes this deck very resilient and consistent. I might be bias since this is pretty close to what I love to do in Magic and especially in commander, but this is definitely once of the decks that I kept playing after I got done with this video.
