Against the Odds: All-In Turn 3 Plot Combo (Pioneer)
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Pioneer to go all in on plotting our way to victory on Turn 3 with the help of Kellan Joins Up and Jace Reawakened to cheat something like Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor or, thanks to Bramble Familiar, Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger or Atraxa, Grand Unifier onto the battlefield as early as Turn 3! What happens if you go all in on cheating huge things into play with plot in Pioneer? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: All-In Plot Combo
The Deck
Today, we're all in on plotting our way to victory with Kellan Joins Up and Jace Reawakened. Either card can plot a card with mana value three or less, which doesn't sound all that exciting thanks to the mana value restriction. But we have a couple of tricks to turn this into a game-ending play.
The first trick is the obvious one: plotting Valki but choosing to cast Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor the next turn, giving us an almost unbeatable, huge, card-advantage and removal engine planeswalker. With our best draws, we can have Tibalt on the battlefield on Turn 3 with the help of a Turn 1 mana dork into Kellan Joins Up on Turn 2. And a Turn 3 Tibalt is incredibly hard to beat!
Our second trick has been less explored: plotting Bramble Familiar so we can cast the Fetch Quest side the following turn to mill seven cards and reanimate a massive creature from among them. Ideally, we'll hit one of our four copies of Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger or Atraxa, Grand Unifier, either of which will likely win us the game, Atraxa with a huge amount of card advantage (and a big lifelinking body) and Ulamog by indestructibility and eating away our opponent's library when it attacks.
Back to our two plot cards, they each have different upsides. Kellan Joins Up is by far the faster of the two options. As I mentioned before, with a mana dork on Turn 1, we can plot a finisher on Turn 2 and cast our big bomb for free on Turn 3. On the other hand, Jace is much slower since we can't even cast it until Turn 4, making it less exciting with Tibalt, although it does have one huge upside: its plot ability is repeatable. This works especially well with Bramble Familiar, which can return itself to our hand by us paying two mana and discarding a card. In practice, this means we can use Jace to plot Bramble Familiar, cast the Fetch Quest side for free the following turn, and then cast the Bramble Familiar side from its adventure. On the next turn, we can bounce Bramble Familiar back to our hand and plot it again with Jace, letting us cast Fetch Quest again for free the next turn. Essentially, the combo of Jace and Bramble Familiar lets us cast Fetch Quest every other turn, which means that even if we whiff on a big finisher the first time, we're likely to hit one sooner or later to close out the game.
Wrap-Up and Odds
Record-wise, Turn 3 Plot Combo was actually pretty busted. We played 15 total matches and won 11, giving us a 73% match-win percentage. While we've seen some people playing Jace and Tibalt in control decks, fully embracing the plot combo plan by adding in Bramble Familiar and big reanimation targets might just be the way to go. It's also worth mentioning that the reanimation plan doesn't actually care about graveyard hate because of how Bramble Familiar is worded, which means even if our opponent sticks a Leyline of the Void or Rest in Peace, we can still cheat our Atraxa or Ulamog into play. All in all, Turn 3 Plot Combo seemed really strong, like it might actually be a competitive deck in Pioneer / Explorer. If you're looking for something different to play, give plotting a shot. It's surprisingly strong!
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.
