We are less than a week away from the release of Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, and with so many new cards coming to the game, brewing new decks is going to be a really fun task. Today we have a spicy new combo deck created by Twitter user @WillErker, and he put together an Abzan Collected Company Aristocrats combo deck. He thinks that this deck might break Historic wide open, so we’ll break the deck down and predict how good this deck can be in Historic.
The Combo
Our 2 card combo involves 2 copies of
Vesperlark
Vesperlark
Flying
When this creature leaves the battlefield, return target creature card with power 1 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.
Evoke {1}{W} (You may cast this spell for its evoke cost. If you do, it's sacrificed when it enters.)
and Davriel’s Withering. If we can resolve 2 Davriel’s Withering on 2 different Vesperlarks, we can infinitely loop the two copies, getting an infinite number of enter the battlefield and death triggers. As long as we have another creature to grab in our graveyard to close the loop, we can stop the combo at any point in time.
Win Conditions
Getting nearly infinite enter the battlefield and death triggers by itself doesn’t do us any good. We have a few different win conditions to help us win the game. We have infinite drain with the help of
Blood Artist
Blood Artist
Whenever this creature or another creature dies, target player loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.
and
Cruel Celebrant
Cruel Celebrant
Whenever this creature or another creature or planeswalker you control dies, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.
, and infinite life with
Prosperous Innkeeper
Prosperous Innkeeper
When this creature enters, create a Treasure token. (It's an artifact with "{T}, Sacrifice this token: Add one mana of any color.")
Whenever another creature you control enters, you gain 1 life.
.
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Getting to the Combo
With the help of
Collected Company
Collected Company
Look at the top six cards of your library. Put up to two creature cards with mana value 3 or less from among them onto the battlefield. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
and
Fauna Shaman
Fauna Shaman
{G}, {T}, Discard a creature card: Search your library for a creature card, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle.
, we have a bit more consistency and reliability to find our combo, as well as our win conditions and ancillary creatures. Collected company hits all of our creatures, and Fauna Shaman will actually let us get a creature in the graveyard to stop our loop.
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Support Cards
Our support cards are mostly ways to either sacrifice creatures to help our aristocrats plan, or are 1 power creatures that will allow us to help stop the loop, assuming we don’t just win the game. Davriel, Soul Broker is a powerful addition to the deck as a great removal option, but also his offers can help us get to our combo while his conditions are mitigated by the fact that we’re comboing off in one turn.
Woe Strider
Woe Strider
When this creature enters, create a 0/1 white Goat creature token.
Sacrifice another creature: Scry 1.
Escape—{3}{B}{B}, Exile four other cards from your graveyard. (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its escape cost.)
This creature escapes with two +1/+1 counters on it.
helps us scry through our deck as well which can help us locate pieces of our combo a bit easier.
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This combo deck seems quite powerful and I think that there’s some refining to be done here, but it’s really close. While this strategy folds to graveyard hate, we can build a sideboard to account for this. This could be a dead ringer for a top tier Best of 1 strategy, but that mostly hinges on if the rest of the metagame has graveyard strategies and if main deck graveyard hate is prevalent.
Jumpstart: Historic Horizons is a Magic Arena only set. The set will be only legal for the Historic Format. It releases on August 12, 2021 on Magic Arena and contains 782 cards, comprised of 31 new Arena Only cards. You can check out our preview gallery to stay up to date with all the cards!