Sideboard cards in MTG are a bit like vegetables in real life. They’re rarely exciting, but they’re 100% necessary for a healthy competitive play experience. It’s pretty rare for a sideboard card to end up in a main deck, and even rarer for one to become a win condition in its own right. That’s exactly what we’re seeing happen right now, however. Ghost Vacuum, a card which has been everywhere in Standard sideboards since Duskmourn launched, is now an enabler for its very own MTG combo deck. If bustin’ makes you feel good, then this is a list you’ll definitely want to check out.
Ghost Vacuum Combo In MTG Standard
This wild new Ghost Vacuum combo deck comes to us from MTGGoldfish’s SaffronOlive, who piloted the list on a recent episode of Against the Odds. The idea behind it is fairly simple. You use Ghost Vacuum to exile a few key creatures from your graveyard, then pay six mana to bring them back as 1/1 Fliers and win the game on the spot.
Which creatures are these exactly? The three main ones are Enduring Courage, Overlord of the Boilerbilges, and Omnivorous Flytrap. Courage is perhaps the most important of all of these. With this on the board, or exiled with Vacuum and returned, your other 1/1 Spirits will enter with Haste and two extra power. This gives you a fairly threatening air force for one thing, but it also lets you get immediate value from attack triggers.
Overlord of the Boilerbilges, for instance, deals four damage on entry and four more when it attacks. Bring this back with Vacuum while Courage is out, and you’re looking at 8-11 damage from that alone. With two copies you can end the game on the spot against an opponent with no air defense.
Omnivorous Flytrap does something similar. Assuming you have Delirium active, this can add four extra power to your Hasty flying alpha strike when returned with Vacuum. If you have six card types in your graveyard, it can add eight power instead.
The deck’s game plan, then, is to get multiple copies of these critical cards into your graveyard, exile them with Vacuum, and then vomit them out for six mana to end the game. It may sound far-fetched at first, but this strategy actually has a lot of support in current Standard.
Setting Up For Spookiness
The Ghost Vacuum combo deck wants a lot of cards in its graveyard fast, and MTG Standard has a few excellent ways to achieve that. Both Cache Grab and Say Its Name are all-stars here, milling a lot of cards while still letting you keep up card advantage. The deck also runs Trumpeting Carnosaur, which serves as both an excellent Vacuum target and a card that can get itself into the graveyard with its discard ability.
That’s the graveyard part sorted, but what about getting to the six mana required to activate Vacuum in the first place? To that end, the deck runs a full playset of Overlord of the Hauntwoods. It’s a great early ramp piece, a solid midrange creature, and a double-type card for Delirium all in one. There’s probably an argument for subbing this out for Fear of Missing Out, the Delirium super-staple that’s showing up pretty much everywhere. Overlord does make sense here, however.
So that’s the Ghost Vacuum combo. Simple, but very effective in practice. The secret best part about it? How easily you can slot the combo into an existing Gruul Delirium shell. These decks already play Ghost Vacuum, Flytrap, Overlord of the Boilerbilges, and the self-mill spells. All you need to do is cut the Carnosaurs and Overlord of the Hauntwoods for the likes of Patchwork Beastie and Wildfire Wickerfolk, and you have a proven Standard deck with a fun combo finish.
That may well be where this combo eventually ends up landing. As the focus of a deck, it’s a bit slow to win games reliably. As an inevitability engine for an existing aggressive deck, however, I think it shines much more brightly.
The Coolest Kid In School
Fans of Ghost Vacuum have more to celebrate than this potent MTG combo coming to light. Based on recent MTGGoldfish statistics, Vacuum is actually the most popular individual card in Standard right now, narrowly beating out all-timer Negate. MTGDecks tells a similar story, with Ghost Vacuum currently sitting at the top of their Standard staples list.
This is a very unusual situation. Meat-and-potatoes sideboard cards like this often rank high in terms of overall play rate. For what initially seems like a narrow graveyard hate piece to totally dominate the rankings is a different story, however. What exactly is propelling Vacuum to these levels of success?
For one thing, there are a ton of graveyard strategies in Standard right now. Gruul Delirium is the most obvious example, but there are also other decks like Azorius Tempo and Sultai Reanimator that fold without their ‘yard, too. A one-mana artifact that can eat away at key cards every turn is a great deal, even without the Spirit-summoning feature.
That feature is still very important, however, and likely the biggest reason behind the card’s success. Normally graveyard hate cards exist to exile the graveyard and nothing else. If you’re lucky, they’ll also draw you a card. Ghost Vacuum goes above and beyond that, presenting a very real threat in its own right. There’s no real opportunity cost here, either; the card is still very efficiently costed despite this extra utility. It’s also totally colorless, which keeps its options wide open in terms of deck inclusion.
For that reason, Ghost Vacuum is occupying slots in a ton of Standard sideboards. The way things are going, it might be in every main deck before long. Maybe some more combos will emerge if that happens.
