Thanks to their massive metagame implications, the Pro Tour is often the most anticipated competitive event in MTG. Causing the rise of decks like Rakdos Vampires in Pioneer, or the Dimir Excrutiator deck in Standard, the Pro Tour is directly responsible for many breakout decks across Magic.
While this past weekend’s Pro Tour Amsterdam didn’t have any breakout strategies that took the event by storm, there were a few brews that went somewhat unnoticed despite performing quite well. One player, for example, brought an extremely innovative take on the Grinding Emry combo, going 7-2-1 by using a forgotten Legend to fix the combo’s most glaring weakness.
Oswald Fiddlebender Joins the Fight
Similar to its predecessors, this Grinding Emry list wins by assembling a combo that uses Emry, Lurker of the Loch, Grinding Station, Sewer-veillance Cam, and one of your two Moxen. Because Sewer-veillance Cam can untap Emry when it enters and leaves, you can use Emry’s ability to continually cast the Cam and a Moxen, sacrificing them with Station to put them back in the graveyard. This grants you infinite mill to your opponent, winning the game.
Thanks to this combo being doable as early as turn two, the Grinding Emry combo is exceptionally powerful, but it comes with a massive drawback. Outside of comboing off for the win, Sewer-veillance Cam and Grinding Station are awful MTG cards.
To fix this issue, MTG Pro Tour Competitor Gaetan Bossy has turned to white, using Oswald Fiddlebender as an ingenious artifact-tutoring creature. Thanks to Sewer-veillance Cam untapping Oswald on entry and when leaving play, a zero-drop artifact lets Oswald get Sewer-veillance Cam into the graveyard and Grinding Station into play.
With enough mana, Oswald can even assemble the combo with Emry in your graveyard. Instead of finding Grinding Station, Oswald can find Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, giving Oswald Emry’s ability. Since Oswald will be untapped thanks to Sewer-veillance Cam, you can then recast the Cam, untapping Oswald, and use it to find Grinding Station. So long as you have a Mox somewhere in the grave or in play, you win the game from here.
Maximizing Interaction
Thanks to using Oswald as a tutor engine, Gaetan Bossy only needs to run one copy of Grinding Station and Sewer-veillance Cam to take advantage of the combo. This creates room for a ton of interaction in the deck, appearing primarily in the form of Portable Hole.
On top of removing key threats like Basking Broodscale, Portable Hole takes care of most of the common hate pieces that stop your combo. If that weren’t enough, Portable Hole even triggers Loki, God of Mischief, allowing the card to replace itself. In fact, by utilizing Oswald’s tutor package, this variation of the deck has more synergy with Loki than any past variants, using cards like Mishra’s Bauble and Relic of Progenitus.
Using Oswald’s tutoring capabilities, this deck also runs a series of Stax engines as well. Tutoring a Damping Sphere into play, for example, can stop fast combo decks like Storm and Amulet Titan in their tracks. Alternatively, finding Vexing Bauble to stop Affinity in its tracks, or Pithing Needle to mess with Fetch Lands.
Even if you can’t assemble the combo against a controlling opponent, this deck also utilizes the lethal plan B of Urza’s Saga. Sometimes, just finding a Skateboard and attacking with two Constructs is enough to close the game out.
A Strong New Contender
Between the mountains of interaction and Oswald’s versatility, this new Grinding Emry list can easily find a place in the Modern metagame. The deck has quite a strong matchup against Modern’s two top decks, Boros Energy and Izzet Affinity, while having enough removal to keep up with the rise of fast combo decks.
That said, due to how wide Modern’s metagame truly is, there are a few bad matchups that are extremely uphill battles for this deck. Boros Land Destruction, for example, is an absolute nightmare for this deck, easily removing all of your creatures and rendering your plan B useless. Similarly, Eldrazi Tron can also be difficult thanks to using multiple hate pieces that Portable Hole cannot answer.
While these bad matchups will stop Grinding Emry from breaking the Modern format, the game plan can compete with a wide variety of different decks while taking advantage of tricky combo lines that your opponents may miss. So long as you have the cards to build it, this could be a great offbeat option for your next Modern event.
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