A strange but viciously quick new combo deck

[walkingdude]

A strange but viciously quick new combo deck.

The inspiration for this deck comes from extended.
Pro Tour New Orleans: Twiddle Desire
Osamu Fujita
4  Ancient Tomb
2  City of Traitors
4  Saprazzan Skerry
4  Seat of the Synod
 
14 land
4  Brainstorm
3  Burst of Energy
4  Chrome Mox
4  Diminishing Returns
4  Dream's Grip
3  Gilded Lotus
4  Grim Monolith
2  Meditate
4  Mind's Desire
2  Mystical Tutor
2  Tendrils of Agony
4  Tinker
2  Trade Secrets
4  Twiddle
SB
2  Baleful Stare
3  Chain of Vapor
4  Defense Grid
1  Platinum Angel
2  Rushing River
1  Tendrils of Agony
2  Thirst for Knowledge

The wonderful thing about this deck is the way it turns nonmana cards into a mana engine. Once you have a gilded lotus on the table every twiddle you draw is an uber dark ritual that gives you 3 mana of any color. Since fast mana is the weak point for many combo decks getting to play 11 dark rituals is a big plus. Also each twiddle boosts your storm count.

But in type one gilded lotus is just way too slow and you can’t tinker it out reliably so the deck won’t work. However, the idea of setting up an engine to allow you to play more rituals still appealed to me. Then I saw the card ritual of restoration in darksteal.

ritual of restoration
W
Return an artifact from your graveyard to your hand.

There was an old card called argivian find that does the same thing. So you take 8 of those and black lotus and you have duplicated the extended engine. Each of the finds is a dark ritual for any color of mana. But, its better than that because they do double work for your storm count. Finding the lotus gets you one and replaying the lotus gets you a second. This means that the mana engine has the side effect of sending your storm through the roof.

I threw together a few decks based around this engine and messed around with them to see what would happen. I wasn’t seriously testing them, but was mostly just gold fishing for fun.
One of my builds started to get very fast though and started to kill very consistently. Lots of turn one kills were coming up fairly easily and without requiring particularly complex play decisions. I’d say this is probably a touch faster than belcher and similarly consistent with decent mulliganing. That said though, its still a much worse deck. Belcher can fight though multiple counters wish up creatures to handle hate, weld back countered belchers and do all sorts of things. This deck is more of a one trick pony that doesn’t really have anyway to deal with hate other than win before they play it.

The deck list

16 Rituals

// white
        8 Argivian Find
// black
        4 Duress
        4 Rhystic Tutor
        1 Vampiric Tutor
        1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
        4 Infernal Contract
        1 Necropotence
        1 Spoils of the Vault
        1 Demonic Consultation
        1 Demonic Tutor
        4 Tendrils of Agony
// artifact
        1 Memory Jar
// mana
        10 Swamp
        1 Black Lotus
        1 Mox Sapphire
        1 Mox Jet
        1 Mox Ruby
        1 Mox Emerald
        1 Mox Pearl
        1 Lotus Petal
        1 Mana Vault
        1 Mana Crypt
        1 Sol Ring
        1 Chrome Mox
        4 Cabal Ritual
        4 Dark Ritual
   
I’m fairly sure this list is not optimal. As I mentioned before this is a highly tuned fun list but not a rigorously refined one. The spoils of the vault should probably be something else; I’ve never cast it and never wanted to.

Likewise, I’m not sure about the contracts. 4 cards for 3 mana was the best I could think of in black.
The rhystic tutors are one of those cards where I feel there absolutely must be something better out there. They get the job done. They find lotus and they get cast on the first turn so people rarely have the mana to shut them down, but I still wince every time I cast them. What the deck really needs is a reliable way to fetch lotus for 2 mana. (if only fabricate cost 1 less…)

The play is fairly simple. You get lotus. You play it and find it a few times. Play your rituals, draw cards, then tendrils when you can. The main trick of this deck is managing your floating mana to make sure you try to keep both white and black available so you can either find or ritual depending on what you draw into. If you can, play the cabal rituals last to get the threshold bonus. Sometimes you get odd hands where the right thing to do is set up a 2nd turn bargain or something like that, but you should notice those when you have if you’re experienced with combo.

I have a ton of logs of first turn kills, I picked this one because its fairly simple and doesn’t rely on crazy broken luck like lotus find ritual bargain.

Walk is setting up cards.
Walk has a 12 card sideboard
Walk has a 60 card deck.
Walk's life is now 20.


-- Walk's Security Code: 145135

Walk is shuffling library...
Walk is shuffling library...
Walk is shuffling library...
Walk is shuffling library...
Walk draws a card. X7

Walk plays Swamp.
Swamp is tapped. Storm 0 b
Walk moves Dark Ritual from Walk's hand to Walk's graveyard. Storm1 bbb
Walk moves Rhystic Tutor from Walk's hand to Walk's graveyard. Storm 2
Get lotus
Walk plays Black Lotus. Storm 3
Black Lotus is tapped.
Walk buries Black Lotus. Www
Walk moves Argivian Find from Walk's hand to Walk's graveyard. Storm 4 ww
Walk moves Black Lotus from Walk's graveyard to Walk's hand.
Walk plays Black Lotus. Storm 5
Black Lotus is tapped.
Walk buries Black Lotus. Bbbww
Walk moves Infernal Contract from Walk's hand to Walk's graveyard. Ww Storm 6
Walk's life is now 10. (-10)
Walk draws a card. X4
Walk plays Mox Jet. Storm 7
Mox Jet is tapped. Wwb
Walk plays Cabal Ritual. Wbbb
Walk moves Infernal Contract from Walk's hand to Walk's graveyard. W Storm 8
Walk's life is now 5. (-5)
Walk draws a card. X4
Walk moves Duress from Walk's hand to Walk's removed from game pile.
Walk plays Chrome Mox. Storm 9 wb
Walk plays Dark Ritual. Storm 10 wbbb
Walk plays Tendrils of Agony.
Note: I also drew into another find off the contract so the w in my pool could have been converted to bbb and used to play the ritual if I hadn’t had the mox.

So that’s the deck. The engine probably supports a deck that’s a lot better than one I presented since I haven’t been working too hard on this one.
 
I’m posting here in order to allow anyone who wants to respond.

[M.Solymossy]

Okay, you should probobly test this multiple times, and also, test it against something esle, so we have an idea

[walkingdude]

I’ve gold fished this particular build well over 50 times (and previous builds that were a few cards off got tested a bunch too). So I’m fairly confident in my assessment of its speed (though there is always the chance that the apprentice shuffler is giving me better draws than I deserve and skewing results).
As to more testing against other decks, it really isn’t worth it. I can tell just by the deck list that this isn’t tournament viable. If they go turn one shop and either chalice, sphere of resistance, or trinisphere you can’t win. And in black there is no solution to that. Any deck that can’t put up at least decent numbers against workshop isn’t worth my time to test seriously since most of my playing is at tournaments. I primarily posted to
1. Alert people a fairly easy/cheap combo deck to play if they are somewhere without workshops.
2. Bring the lotus find engine to people’s attention since they way it fuels storm while simultaneously giving you a bunch of mana is powerful enough that it should be on the radar.
Think of the deck that generates fairly consistent and easy turn 1 and 2 kills as a case study to demonstrate the power of the engine rather than a deck that you would actually play in a tournament.