Magic’s Final Fantasy crossover gave a lot of support to card types that are a bit on the weaker side. Despite all the support, traditionally less powerful card types, such as vehicles, are commonly overlooked. That said, as we’ve seen with past Vehicles, if the payoff is good enough, players will find a way. For this reason, many MTG players may want to consider The Lunar Whale. Despite getting very little hype during spoiler season, this card can create some infinite combos in Commander.
The Lunar Whale
The Lunar Whale offers a ton of card advantage for four mana, as long as you’re able to attack with it. Not needing to connect makes The Lunar Whale a lot more viable than a lot of high-payoff combat triggers, but it does give your opponent a chance to remove it.
If you have the opportunity to attack with The Lunar Whale, you can suddenly start playing the top card of your library. While this grants an obvious opportunity for major card advantage in decks built to go the distance, it also opens up the possibility of infinite combos.
While playing with the top of your deck is always generally useful, the best infinite combos start with one card. Once you have The Lunar Whale turned on, and Sensei’s Divining Top, a whole series of infinite combos can win the game.
Sensei’s Divining Top Combos
Sensei’s Divining Top, a card that’s banned in both Legacy and Modern thanks to miserable play patterns, wreaks havoc alongside a number of cards that unlock the top of your deck. The Lunar Whale is no different.
Divining Top is best known for optimizing your draws by rearranging the top of your deck, but the card is also capable of drawing a card by placing itself on top of your deck. If you can manage to supply the mana to cast Sensei’s Divining Top repetitively, you can draw your entire deck.
Notably, The Lunar Whale is, ultimately, just a Future Sight on a stick. This means that, when performing this combo, you can replace The Lunar Whale with the other card.
The simplest form of this combo is to have The Lunar Whale, Sensei’s Divining Top, and Glaring Fleshraker. Fleshraker will create an Eldrazi Scion whenever you cast Sensei’s Divining Top, and will deal a damage whenever the Scion comes into play. Thanks to the mana from the Eldrazi Scion token, you can keep recasting Sensei’s Divining Top, allowing you to burn out the table easily. There are other win conditions you can use, like Aetherflux Reservoir, but this demonstrates the idea.
Outside of Sensei’s Divining Top and friends, The Lunar Whale plays well in a variety of Commander decks that have a low curve. Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain seems like a particularly strong place for the Vehicle. Since this deck naturally wants to cast cheap Historic spells to draw cards, The Lunar Whale can make your longer combo turns a lot more consistent. Unlike Future Sight, The Lunar Whale is also a Historic permanent.
Outside of Commander
While Commander does have Future Sight to use, some competitive formats don’t currently have an effect like this.
While Pioneer has some Future Sight-esque effects, The Lunar Whale is a lot more straightforward than cards like The Reality Chip. For current archetypes, the only place that this might see play is in the sideboard of Blue Greasefang decks. While this synergizes with Greasefang itself in a pinch, The Lunar Whale does a better role of allowing your other discard-threats to turn into card advantage machines. Because of this, you need to be able to cast The Lunar Whale without using Greasefang in order for it to work properly. This could help the Mono White Tokens and UW Control matchups, but blue Greasefang decks are incredibly unpopular in Pioneer, and The Lunar Whale might not be enough to sway players.
In Standard, The Lunar Whale is completely outclassed by Enduring Curiosity. The cards would play similar roles, and Enduring Curiosity not only has built-in protection but also requires significantly less work to use. Pioneer has some board states that cannot properly take advantage of the card, but in Standard, that’s just not the case. That said, if, for whatever reason, you want a Future Sight effect with no restrictions, The Lunar Whale is the only one that’s legal in the format.
If anything, The Lunar Whale might see most of its play in Brawl and Historic Brawl. Future Sight doesn’t exist on MTG Arena, which allows the Whale to fill a unique niche. Like Commander, Brawl tends to go longer, which gives The Lunar Whale more time to create value.
Even if Lunar Whale is just a Future Sight on a stick, another version of the effect can increase the consistency of Future Sight Commander decks significantly. It’s surprisingly refreshing to see a vehicle that’s interesting to try.
