2007 Commentary:The combo revolved around using Provisions to choose Red Dragon/Emperor Claudius based on what color my opponent was playing and then playing infinite enhancements as the EC was immune. To get the combo off, I needed 7 cards: Ship to Cyprus, Search, Coat, Highway, Provisions, green Hero, Claudius/Red Dragon. I had to first provision the hero before I could attack.
Ship to Cyprus banded in an additional hero, Coat allowed me to play other colors and then I played Third Heaven to get rid of a pesky Christian Martyr, Searches grabbed everything, and Coat and Highway allowed me to return the one hero to hand. Then I would play Coat again, Moses and Elders to recur Highway, and add in additional heroes via Courage or Ship to Cyprus and play more Searches until I had everything I needed. Angelic Advice shuffled artifacts to keep HHI or Writs from hurting later. Commissioned grabbed more souls. Battle Prayer (wa) grabbed Love of Money and Besieging the City from my deck/discard pile. I would play Sword of the Lord for a side battle and play Love of Money and Besieging the City to keep my opponent for drawing or rescuing the next turn. I would finish it off by playing Plague of Frogs to grab a soul.
The next turn I would go with Claudia + ET + Obedience of Noah to choose again. I could either go with that band or set up additional turns of Provisioned heroes. Rinse and repeat for the win.
The way to beat the deck is to win before I get all the pieces or have enough defensive artifacts to slow me down where I have to be able to play defensive artifact killers before I can get the combo off. Or just play Angel of the Lord in the middle of the combo so I lose all my enhancements (namely Coat of Many Colors) or play Christian Martyr before a 2nd hero is banded in, although that only delays the combo for a little bit.
As I built the deck in secret, only looking to Ben Arp for advice and playtesting help, I realize that there is a fair amount of inefficient build in the deck. I should have used 5 Provisions and there was no need for any good dominants. Another King Rehoboam would have been great.
I used evil side battles to help get rid of pesky KotW or other choose the blocker counters by playing Vengeance, Trumpet Blast, or Angelic Advice in that side battle. False Peace helped me get set up off the defense.
You may wonder why I had AoC promo x2 in the deck. It was there as a distraction in the case of Gabriel (wa). It worked perfectly because Tyler Stevens didn’t know what he was looking at and discarded AoC. Had he gone for Coat, Tyler would have probably won.
2008/2009 Commentary:Unfortunately I cannot find a record of the exact deck list I ran the next two seasons. It was a more efficient version of the above deck with the same basic cards.
I played the deck again at 2008 Nats and started 3-0, sitting next to Matt Brinkman at the top table, who also built a version of the deck and was also 3-0 at that point. However, we both tanked from there. Ben Arp played Matt and from his time helping me playtest my deck he knew when to play Angel of the Lord. Ben ended up taking 3rd using his awesome Choose the Blocker deck. While I watched Matt lose out of the corner of my eye, Chris McCravy stopped me by drawing Wall of Protection and Kingdom’s of the World in the first couple turns of the game to keep me from being able to choose any blockers with Provisions to get set up. He didn’t know exactly what I had up my sleeve but he is a great player and knew I had something devious in mind so he slow played me, not attacking while I had Holy of Holies up to counter his gathered TSA to Phinehas/Joshua bands but rather waiting for more copies of Captured Ark to surface before attacking. He also kept re-using Passover & Unleavened Bread to shuffle my Naamans so I couldn’t block him.
I didn't play the combo again for the last two rounds. I switched decks for the next 2 games, in which Sam Nurge had enough numbers with Fallen Angels/Leviathans/Mid Attacks/Captured Arks to stop my ANB reset deck (which I won SE Regionals with) and then I switched again for my Teal/Silver/Desolate Gateways deck only to make several mistakes against Nathan Voigt and Nathan made me pay.
I knew it was risky to play the same combo deck 3 years in a row as enough top players knew I was playing it. So I built 2 other main decks for the 2009 season (which I will post separately). However, I threw a curveball at the 2009 EC Regionals by playing my old trusty combo deck to throw Tyler and Clift off scent of what I would use at Nationals and won the tournament.
All in all, this combo deck would set up by turn 7 at the latest. That was a turn too slow against Jon Potter but was usually fast enough.
Read about 2009's adventure
here.
God bless,
Kirk
