The sudden announcement and implementation of Arena Anthologies 3 and 4 brought a lot of extremely powerful MTG cards to the client. It’s no understatement to say that these cards will completely warp the Historic and Timeless metagames. Some cards are so powerful that they were banned in Historic before players even got a chance to use them.
Despite the bundles for these cards being available on September 23rd, players can already craft some of the cards being offered. So, instead of doing what most players would and crafting with some cool cards to play with, I set out with the aim to destroy all of my opponent’s lands as quickly as possible. You could technically do this before the new Arena Anthology cards were viable, but the strategy was a lot slower and not really viable. Now, you can blow up all of your opponent’s lands on turn three at the earliest.
Scapeshift Combo Comes to Arena
This Historic-legal brew uses a Scapeshift combo shell to set up Aftermath Analyst loops to win the game. While this isn’t unheard of in older MTG formats, it is something very new to MTG Arena. Scapeshift allows you to sacrifice all of your lands and replace them with new ones. They enter tapped to prevent any shenanigans from occurring, but this is very fixable with some enchantments. Spelunking from The Lost Caverns of Ixalan and Vigorous Farming from Alchemy: Bloomburrow both allow all of your lands to enter untapped. Not only does this allow Scapeshift to generate a ton of mana, but it also means that the lands recurred by Aftermath Analyst and Lumra, Bellow of the Woods enter untapped.
So, with Aftermath Analyst, Scapeshift, and an untapped land enchantment, you can go infinite. While this is straightforward enough, the actual loop is anything but. While this deck offers infinite land destruction, bounce, and more, we first need to understand how to generate infinite mana for this combo to work:
- To start with, have four lands in play and an untapped land enchantment. Sacrifice your four lands with Scapeshift and grab the following: 2 Lotus Field, Tree of Tales, and Shifting Woodland.
- Your Lotus Field triggers will cause you to sacrifice all your lands. Float all of your mana in response. You should have eight green mana and no lands.
- Cast Aftermath Analyst from your hand and mill three cards. Then, use Analyst’s activated ability to bring all of your lands back into play untapped. You should have two mana left over.
- Assuming your other four lands only tap for one mana, float all of your mana to get 14 green mana total. With your Lotus Field triggers, sacrifice both of your Lotus Fields and Tree of Tales. The last land doesn’t matter, but you cannot sacrifice Shifting Woodland.
- Use Shifting Woodland to copy Aftermath Analyst. You should have Delirium active in your graveyard with Aftermath Analyst as a creature, Scapeshift as a Sorcery, and Tree of Tales as both a land and an artifact.
- Activate Aftermath Analyst’s ability to bring all of your lands back. You should be able to generate nine mana with each loop, and you need eight mana to turn Shifting Woodland into Aftermath Analyst and bring all of your lands back, netting one mana each time. Remember to tap your Shifting Woodland for mana before copying Aftermath Analyst.
This combo was possible beforehand, but in order for it to be pulled off quickly enough, you needed a near-perfect sequence of events to occur. Now, the addition of Exploration from Arena Anthology 3 makes this deck a lot more consistent, inside and outside of the combo. You can easily combo on turn three now, and can blow up tons of your opponent’s lands even outside of pulling Scapeshift off.
Crumbling Vestige is another important addition from the recent MTG Arena update. Once you have an untapped land enchantment in play, you can tap this land for two mana. Considering how Lotus Field and your other Bounce Land play awkwardly with Scapeshift, this can help close the gap in weird spots.
Endless Armageddon
Once the loop is established, destroying all of your opponent’s lands is pretty simple. Just make sure you have a Ghost Quarter untapped when you start looping with Aftermath Analyst. Ghost Quarter may allow your opponent to search for a Basic Land after it blows a land up, but, unlike the Field of Ruins in this deck, Ghost Quarter can also blow up Basic Lands. As long as you don’t need to tap Ghost Quarter for mana, you’ll have infinite land destruction when you set up the Aftermath Analyst Loop. Just destroy a land every time Ghost Quarter comes back. Your opponent will run out of lands eventually. I’ve managed to blow up 24 basic lands in one turn, but I had multiple Ghost Quarters when doing this. The timer is a bit fickle with this loop, but most Historic decks don’t run a lot of Basic Lands.
While this combo does blow all of your opponent’s lands up in one fell swoop, there are other ways to blow up lots of lands without going infinite. Icetill Explorer and Ghost Quarter are generally enough to cripple your opponent’s manabase. This will allow you to destroy two lands per turn while milling cards to find your land-based combo pieces. Thanks to Exploration, you’ll generally be able to blow up more than just two lands.
This explains how to blow up all of your opponent’s lands, but there are even more ridiculous combos you can do with this brew.
Looping Channel Lands
Once you set up the Aftermath Analyst loop, you also have access to an infinite number of Otawara, Soaring City effects, and Boseiju, Who Endures. In order to set these up, you need another land to put them back in your hand. While the Bounce Lands that fuel Modern Amulet Titan are not available on MTG Arena, there is still a land that does something very similar.
Arid Archway from Outlaws of Thunder Junction can bounce your Channel Lands for repetitive use. Just make sure you sacrifice it with Lotus Field so you can keep bouncing the Channel Lands back to your hand. It generates two mana as well, which will help with the rest of the loop. Just note that, in order to maximize your mana, you need to have full control on to tap your mana before Arid Archway bounces a land. Lotus Field gives you a pause, but Archway does not.
As a fun note, you can also combine multiple land drops with Arid Archway to generate tons of mana with an untapped land enchantment. Just play your Archway, tap it for mana, and bounce it back to your hand. This can help you ramp out late-game cards way ahead of schedule.
Once you’ve removed all of your opponent’s pesky permanents, you just win the game by slowly swinging in with your various creatures. Shifting Woodland can copy Lumra, Bellow of the Woods, another way to bring all of your lands back, and win that way. Alternatively, you can choose to pursue a Primeval Titan build of the deck, but because Amulet of Vigor is not available on MTG Arena, what you can do with this creature is limited.
How Does it Perform?
As far as this Scapeshift Combo deck goes as a metagame contender, it’s definitely there, but it needs refinement. This hybrid variant of the deck is probably not the best version of the archetype. I think you should either go all-in on the Land Destruction element or all-in on the Scapeshift Combo.
This deck is capable of taking on a ton of Historic’s best decks and outspeeding them. The one exception to that rule seems to be Auras. That deck can consistently race you, and doesn’t need a lot of mana to function properly. Sheltered By Ghosts is also very good at breaking up your combos. While you have some number of Dismembers in your sideboard to contest Auras, it’s probably not enough. A Land Destruction variant with Kozilek’s Command and Primeval Titan will probably find more success against this deck. You could even try adding Wrenn and Six to kick things up a notch.
You have all the land-based tools to make a land control deck work. Mystifying Maze and Blast Zone should be able to deal with most aggressive strategies, and Hanweir Battlements allows your Titans to attack on entry, so long as you have an untapped land enchantment. All of those ideas are in the sideboard at the moment, as the deck is very much a brew and not optimized.
The potential here, however, is insane. If you’re looking to play with something totally different or want to try something similar to Strip Mine in Historic, look no further.
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