It’s now been over a month since MTG Spider Man cards became tournament legal, and it’s become clear that one of the most impactful cards from the set is Arachne, Psionic Weaver. The card quickly gave rise to a sweet combo deck in Pioneer that has been consistently putting up results ever since. As it turns out, this was just the beginning of the card’s success story.
At SCGCon: Baltimore this past weekend, MTG player Chris Henderson earned a qualification for the Regional Championship piloting a unique mono-white Standard combo shell centered around Arachne. This brew may be new, but it has a lot of powerful lines available to it that may help it break out in a big way.
The Combo
Alongside Arachne, this deck’s combo revolves around the power of Dazzling Theater. By giving your creature spells Convoke, Theater easily enables Arachne’s Web-slinging ability. All you need is another white creature in play, and you can cast Arachne without investing any mana.
With this in mind, if you have access to two copies of Arachne, you can use one to Convoke out the other. This allows you to continuously loop them since you have to return one to your hand to cast the other. Plus, with one copy of Arachne in hand alongside Nurturing Pixie, you can execute a similar combo by just Convoking out Pixie and using its enters ability to return Arachne to your hand.
While neither of these combo lines accomplish anything by themselves, there are a multitude of ways to take advantage of them. Any of your life gain payoffs like Aunt May will net you infinite life. If you manage to land Oltec Matterweaver unscathed, it will generate infinite Gnome tokens. These tokens don’t have Haste, but they can be used to grow your copy of Warden of the Inner Sky already in play to set up a lethal attack.
As cool as this kill condition is, it does require finding a lot of different cards to pull off. There are no replacements for Theater, and closing games without it isn’t always easy. Fortunately, this deck has some tricks up its sleeve to help you find your missing combo pieces.
Improving Consistency
One of the strongest tools this deck has access to is Collector’s Cage. Even though Cage has primarily been featured in go-wide shells with some big pieces of top end, like Overlord of the Mistmoors, its ability to churn through your library for Theater and then cast it on a discount is crucial to the archetype’s success.
What really sets Cage apart here, however, is the presence of Pixie. Bouncing Cage back to your hand and resetting Hideaway is a great play to make, especially if you aren’t under a ton of pressure. This shell is chock full of efficient creatures with varying stats, which makes it trivial to play the cards you exile with Cage.
This deck even utilizes a full playset of Starfield Shepherd to tutor up Pixie on command. Of course, once you have your combo cards rolled up, getting to grab one of your life gain payoffs or Warden of the Inner Sky instead is a nice luxury to have.
An Intriguing Position
Overall, Mono-White Combo has a lot of positive matchups, making it a very interesting metagame choice. Many of the top archetypes in the format struggle to interact with your combo cards. Mono-Red Aggro, for example, is incapable of removing Theater once it sticks. Afterwards, landing Voice of Victory or Crystal Barricade will shield your combo creatures from opposing removal spells. All you need to do is keep your head above water until you piece together your combo, and your life gain creatures help in this department.
Dimir Midrange suffers a lot of the same problems, which get further exacerbated by the deck’s general lack of early pressure. Over time, the value that Cage and Pixie generate will bury the opponent, and you have plenty of time to relish the card advantage Shepherd and Novice Inspector provide.
As much as this deck has going in its favor, though, the Izzet Cauldron matchup is far from ideal. First of all, you’re very weak to a quick combo kill from the other side in game one since you have very little in the way of interaction. At the same time, your opponent will have tempo elements like Into the Flood Maw at their disposal that set you back even more. This shell’s sideboard cards can come in clutch, but a well-timed Annul can do the same for Izzet.
Luckily, bans are coming in less than two weeks that should make Vivi Ornitier combos a thing of the past. It’s impossible to predict how the metagame will shake up in the weeks that follow, but we wouldn’t be shocked if this deck starts to pop up a lot more. Arachne continues to prove that it’s one of the best cards that MTG Spider Man had to offer.
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