With every new Magic: The Gathering set come new wacky combos for players to unearth and abuse. Final Fantasy has given us a fair few already, including a sneaky Sensei’s Divining Top loop and a way to deal over 9,000 damage in one go. One card in the set in particular, Ancient Adamantoise, was always destined for MTG combo potential. It’s the first non-errata’d card to ever reference the cleanup step, after all, which opens a huge can of worms right away.
As you’d expect, a powerful interaction has been discovered with the card already. By combining it with a top-tier land from Modern Horizons 3, and exploiting some very far-flung corners of the rules, it’s possible to shrug off huge chunks of damage every turn. While it isn’t a game-ender like some of the other Final Fantasy combos, it is easily splashable. This may give the interaction legs in a surprising number of Magic formats.
The MTG Ancient Adamantoise Combo
The Ancient Adamantoise combo we’ll be looking at today was discovered by Craig1287. They’re the host of Magic: The Gathering YouTube channel This Is A Commander Channel. They took to Reddit to share the interaction, after publishing a video on it earlier.
Essentially, this combo exploits the interaction between Shifting Woodland and Ancient Adamantoise. If you have Woodland transform into Adamantoise via its ability, it’ll absorb damage for the turn as normal. Where things get thorny is the cleanup step. The rules for said step read as follows:
“Second, the following actions happen simultaneously: all damage marked on permanents (including phased-out permanents) is removed and all “until end of turn” and “this turn” effects end. This turn-based action doesn’t use the stack.”
MTG Comprehensive Rules, Section 514.2
By this logic, a Woodland that becomes an Adamantoise would have its damage removed at the same time as turning back into a land. Because of this, damage on Woodland will actually carry over into the next turn. If you transform Woodland into another creature next turn, it’ll start with last turn’s damage already marked on. This has applications of its own, but for now the next part is what’s really interesting.
If you let Woodland lie for a turn instead, its damage will be removed in the following cleanup step, thus resetting the slate. You can then transform it into Adamantoise again to keep absorbing damage. This gets around Admaantoise’s intended weakness of building up damage over time, in exchange for four mana every other turn.
In one-on-one formats, you can easily transform Woodland on your opponent’s turn, then let it rest on your own. In most cases, this will blank your opponent’s entire combat step each turn, buying you a ton of extra time. If your opponent is dealing more than 19 damage per swing, things are likely over anyway. Things are even better in Commander, where you can shut down two turns’ worth of damage per cycle.
A Mighty Modern Manoeuver?
By regular MTG standards, this Ancient Adamantoise combo isn’t the most exciting. It doesn’t win you the game, and it requires a consistent investment of resources to keep going. What this combo does have going for it, however, is its splashability. Shifting Woodland is a land a lot of decks run anyway, since it’s a generically useful land. If your deck can also get Ancient Admantoise into the graveyard consistently, then it’s not much of a stretch to run the full combo.
While it sounds like a long shot, there could be applications for this combo in Modern. Yawgmoth decks are probably the best fit, frequently running Woodland as well as a number of ways to get Adamantoise into the ‘yard. Once it’s in there you can essentially start skipping your opponent’s turn for four mana, assuming they don’t have hard removal that can deal with Adamantoise.
The combo could also see use in other Modern decks. Neobrand runs a bunch of chunky creatures and ways to tutor them out, so it could easily find room for a line like this to hold off aggressive opponents. Both Amulet Titan and Gruul Eldrazi Ramp are also possibilities, albeit more distant ones.
While both lists regularly run Woodland, they lack good ways to get Adamantoise into the graveyard. Eldrazi Ramp can power it fairly in most games, and Amulet Titan can use its early burst mana to do so. In both cases, however, it’s probably not worth derailing your core game plan for. In Amulet’s case, decks more focused on the Aftermath Analyst half of the deck could have some ways to mill it over.
Taking Command
As fun as it is to speculate on the Ancient Adamantoise combo seeing use in Modern, it’s far more likely that it shines in the MTG Commander format. There’s a lot more room to breathe here, and a lot more tools to help you set things up.
There are countless ways to tutor both Woodland into play and Adamantoise into your graveyard. There’s also a ton of mana dorks and ramp, to pay for the transformation cost each turn. A lot of green decks also run self-mill synergies, which are ideal for this combo. Blossoming Tortoise alone goes a long way towards enabling it. Honestly if you’re a green deck playing Shifting Woodland, as most of them do, then there’s little reason not to include Adamantoise as well to enable this combo.
There are also some extra interactions you can lean into in Commander. If you want to absorb damage every turn and not just every other turn, you can make Woodland Indestructible via Daring Fiendbonder or That Which Was Taken. This works well on Adamantoise itself too, but going through Woodland makes your combo more resilient. You can also copy Adamantoise with temporary clone effects like Mirage Mirror for a similar effect, though it does need to be in play in that case.
Stalling out is also a much more powerful tactic in Commander than in other formats. If your opponents know you have the combo up, they’ll attack each other and leave you to your devices, as they often do when staring down Maze of Ith. In the ensuing chaos, you should easily be able to find a route to victory.
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