Mycosynth Golem, Affinity and Combo Aggro

[serialjester]

This is something I've been playing for a few months now. It abuses the wave of disgustingly powerful aggro-combo artifact/artifact creatures that have come out of Mirrodin block. It is by no means honed and perfected, this is the decklist I have been testing in the time I have, but I can say from experience playing it that the draw/mana engine is explosive and powerful, and the ability to win via enormous beatdown or with the combo gives it a dual gameplan, depending on the particular situation you find yourself in during the game.
I'll explain each section, the various little nuances and ideas surrounding the specific card choices.

DECK: Golem Affinity

Engine
4 [card]Mycosynth Golem[/card]
4 [card]Skullclamp[/card]
3 [card]Krark Clan Ironworks[/card]
3 [card]Genesis Chamber[/card]

The Golem, thus far overlooked and unappreciated, takes the entire spectrum of Magic artifact creatures and gives them to you at a reduced price, or in most cases for free. Now fully one half of the creatures in this deck already have Affinity, so why is he necessary? With the Golem in play, each creature with Affinity is basically treated as having double Affinity. Between artifact lands, moxes and the such it is not too hard to setup a situation where every creature in your deck is free. The Chamber gives you Myr artifact creature tokens whenever you play a creature, more than likely for free, and thus gives you Clamp fodder as well as upping your Affinity count if necessary, and the Ironworks simply allows you to use all that stuff you spent 0 mana on to actually generate you mana, as well as acting as a sacrifice outlet to trigger Clamp driven card draw.

Affinity for Artifacts
4 Frogmite
4 Myr Enforcer

Pretty obvious, the Affinity creatures can act as early beats and accelerate a combo rush towards a dramatic finish, or through interaction with the Engine can act as little injections of push towards dumping a massive amount of creatures onto the board. Essential.

Other Creatures
4 Su Chi
2 Darksteel Colossus
2 Myr Retriever

All 3 of these creatures act as combo enablers as well as fulfilling their natural beatdown role, with the exception of the Myr, because if you're beating down with that you've probably lost.

Su Chi: He is a house with a Golem in play. Dropping him into play for free, and subsequently Clamping him and sacrificing to the Ironworks gets you SIX colourless mana, as well as 2 cards drawn per equipped Clamp.

Darksteel Colossus: When building the deck initially I already knew I was going to have Tinker in it, so I figured that besides the Golem(who I figured would in alot of cases be Tinker target number 1) what other artifact creature would be broken to Tinker into? Well, A+B=yadayada, and the Colossus can sometimes seal a very early win with a quick Tinker. The fact that he can be dropped into play via Golem Affinity for cheap, or free is awesome. When I first saw the Golem I knew that Wizards were trying to tell us something by making both it and the Colossus cost 11 to play. Then to top it all off, you have the reshuffle ability of the Colossus, which allows you to be able to cycle your deck until you clean it out of nothing but Colossus with the Clamp/Ironworks engine. Seriously, I have Affinity dropped the Colossus, quadruple Clamped him, sacrificed it for 2 colourless, drawn eight cards and then shuffled it back into My library. When a creature has that much potential for engine abuse, you can't help but grin.

Myr Retriever: Acting as another way to cycle the deck with Clamp/Golem or generate mana with Ironworks/Golem, running 2 of these is enough. More would presumably make it a large part of the deck, while running only 1 wouldn't give you the loop potential you get with 2. Also it's pretty annoying to have your combo win countered or discarded or whatever, so being able to get it back is pretty helpful.

Combo Win
1 Goblin Cannon

Well, you are playing T1, competing against fast combo decks and control decks that want to disrupt your creatures so they cannot do lethal damage in the attack phase. Why not combo off in their face? Since this deck can get an insane amount of mana, and sometimes have little or nothing to do with it but Clamp and get more things which are going to be free, I figured I needed a dump for all that mana, and at the same time give Me a combo win against ultra fast combo decks which could go off before I could swing for lethal damage.
At the same time this isn't the primary win condition of the deck. It is at heart a beatdown deck, but should the need arise for the Cannon, the Cannon is there. The Cannon is also foil as well. Playing this deck totally foiled out is pretty sweet, I recommend it.

Broken Cards
1 Memory Jar
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker

No real explanations here. Tinker targets are few. Jar, Golem, Colossus, depending on the situation and what you're playing against. A topdeck Tinker most of the time is best directed towards Jar, while a fast Tinker towards Colossus. Only to enable a combo win or to setup a situation where you're going to draw half your deck should you go for the Golem. Not that it's weak in the deck, but of the Tinker targets and their presumptive situational use, it is the 3rd likely candidate.

Mana
4 Mishra's Workshop
4 Seat of Synod
4 Darksteel Citadel
3 Glimmervoid
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault

Standard T1 mana. The artifact lands are really good, especially the Citadel. Running into strip effects tends to hurt the deck in a so so fashion, since everything is having it's cost reduced, but sometimes it will through a wrench into what you're doing, so the ability to have a land in play that is Wasteland proof and adds to your Affinity count is huge

No established sideboard, since I work too much and rarely get to play against a 'metagame' which would let Me develop one. I've used Sundering Titan, because dropping him into play via Affinity is great, and this deck is immune to his effect. Beyond that it's been Stifles and various other junk to hose.

Problems this deck has are as follows:

Null Rod: A pain in the ass, but not backbreaking like it can be against other artifact decks. Affinity is somewhat of an anti Null Rod mechanic, since you don't have to spend mana sometimes to drop out more and more threats. Regardless it can shut off your card/mana engine, which can be a serious problem if your threat base isn't all that menacing.

11 mana creatures: There are 6 of them in the deck. Sometimes you get 5 in your opening hand. Makes it kind of hard to do something. The Golem will naturally preceed the Colossus into play, making it easier to play the Colossus and everything else but until you can get him into play, a hand full of 11 casting cost stuff and not much else sucks. The inevitable Golem into opponent's Mana Drain is a real bitch too. Just grin, bear it and go off next turn, provided you get one.

No Disruption: This is a pure speed combo deck. I'd like to think that after I draw the first 10 cards of the turn My opponent will just scoop, feeling the end but sometimes they don't. Sometimes they insist on fighting till the end, and of removing My stuff. Running disruption would be good, except that it clumps up in your hand when you don't need it, and in order to dedicate a fair share of disruption to the deck I'd have to dilute it past the point where I'm comfortable with it. Perhaps a build is possible with disruption, it is something I have shied away from though.

[AngryPheldagrif]

Good post, and it's a deck idea I've toyed with more than once. A couple key questions, though.

What is your fundamental turn? You say you're playing a combo, but this doesn't look like it can win in the first few turns with any degree of consistency. If you want to play a decent combo in T1, you should be able to win by turn 2 at least some of the time. Could your deck do this? Not that I can see. But if it can (or just when it does) I'd like to know, since I could be wrong.

What is the point of running both aggro and combo? If you want to combo out then fine, but your deck seems geared to power out a face-smashing finish. The Ironworks could probably be excused as acceleration, but the Myr Retrievers and Genesis Chambers are of extremely questionable use, and would probably be better off as more threats or something. Goblin Cannon is just 100% jank, and is wasting a space in your deck that would be better served by something that isn't dead in your opening hand. If you want to race combo, this is not the way to do it. By the time you can combo out and win with this they're going to be packed up and half way to the TO booth reporting their win for match results.

How can you possibly justify an utter lack of disruption in something that does not goldfish by turn 2? This won't hurt you as much in most matchups, but you never know when you're going to run into a Belcher or TPS/Draw-7 holdout, and those matches are practically auto-losses for you.

What's the point of playing Glimmervoid? You've got only 3 cards that even have a colored mana cost, they're all of the same color, and they're not color-intensive. You could just pull these for basic Islands, but I think you'd be better off pulling them for a pair of Ancient Tombs and a Grim Monolith. I know Grim Monolith is single use, but at very least it nets you an extra mana and an extra artifact for Affinity.

Where's your sideboard? This is often times a good thing to have.

Where's your testing? No/little testing + new idea - tournament reports = Newbie Forum!

[serialjester]

I'll say first that this deck is very experimental, and for the moment is built more to see what is possible within the engine rather than be all tuned and diverse to handle specific decks. Some of the card choices reflect this, and are not be all end all slots. Also note that a change in My work schedule has not allowed Me to play in any tournaments in a couple of months, so alot of this deck has been theory in practice, though I do have a fair amount of playtime with it, so it isn't just a fishbowl deck.

Fundamental turn is 3-4, quite honestly, 5 if I get an absolute ass hand. I have gone off on the 2nd turn a couple of times, it's not something I feel that the current incarnation of the deck can do regularly, which is part of the reason I made the thread initially.
This deck plays sort of like an artifact version of a Storm deck. Play a bunch of stuff. Draw more cards, play even more stuff, and start chaining Affinity into a place where everything you draw is basically free, either through natural Affinity or through Golem induced Affinity or Ironworks mana gotten from stuff you played for free.
As to whether it can race combo, I do have some testing against it. I got rocked by 1 land Belcher, though if I had gotten another turn I would have won the 2nd game, which is where I look to the Cannon to allow the deck to win before they can. It just didn't happen. I've also played against Draw7, won the first game and was swinging for lethal in the 2nd before a Hurkyll's stopped that. I lost the 3rd game to bad draw and pretty insane combo. I have yet to play Dragon, so I wouldn't know how it'd go except to say that with maindeck Colossus it is going to take an Ambassador mill plus an Ancestral to deck Me, so Sliver Queen would be the better route, which entails an attack phase. I played Dragon for quite awhile, so I'm comfortable playing against it and I'd think with tuning, which the deck needs, I could handle it.
Unfortunately, that's all the combo experience I have with the deck. I have alot of experience against Food Chain, which has proven favourable as long as they don't get the Sharpshooter, I've lost a few games to him but never an entire match to Food Chain.

The issue of running both aggro and combo isn't one that can be dissected so plainly. It IS an aggro deck, pure and simple. The draw/mana engine gives it a combo feel, much like the Ringleader/Recruiter trick that Food Chain has, except that I end up with a huge amount of excess mana, and like Food Chain I can't always be certain of getting an attack phase to swing for lethal.

Myr Retriever is definitely the most questionable card in the deck. The ideas behind it are:

With Golem it is free, and with the 2nd one allows for a recursive mana engine with the Ironworks with no fear of drawbacks. Also with Clamp you create a cycling card draw, which is the weaker of the two primary effects.

It's the card I'm least comfortable with, but have still been happy with the results when it's been used.

Genesis Chamber is huge in this deck. It makes free artifact tokens, thus feeding Affinity and with a Clamp or a Ironworks(or both, in best case scenario) starts the downhill rush that signals the end. Chamber tokens are often times instrumental in lowering Affinity to the point where I can dump My hand, refill it and dump it again. This is Decree of Justice in this deck, totally amped up. 3rd turn and 46 tokens against Tog is some good I hear. For shame that they do not run enough counters to stop everything.
But anyway, it's huge. It's key in getting Affinity count to the point where I can quickly cast the Golem, which is where I want to be. I don't think the deck would be fast enough without them.

I can't justify the lack of disruption, I won't try to. I haven't found the form of disruption that I feel comfortable with, that is going to be effective and yet won't dilute the deck. In the various sideboards I've built I've used things like Defense Grid to act as disruption, while still adding to Affinity count. The hard part is anything that is truly disruptive is going to disrupt Me just as much. I can't run FOW. Duress has been marginable, hardly worth using. The sideboards I've tried are also the reasons for the Glimmervoids which you weren't sure about. One thing worth noting is that I've managed to combo through disruption many times, so this has also made the use of disruption something I haven't taken seriously.

Running an artifact deck, the choices of disruption that are actually synergistic with the deck are few and far between. Were I running Ravager Affinity, it'd be easier. I'm not.

Ancient Tomb is definitely good, and was considered. Another reason for the Glimmervoids is I didn't want to lose blue mana when the Seat gets nailed by the Shaman, which has been a problem many times.

I mentioned cards I have sideboarded, but since I had no definite 15 cards I didn't post one. I see these cards as being sideboard worthy:

Sundering Titan
Stifle
Defense Grid
Tormod's Crypt
Platinum Angel
Chain of Vapour/Echoing Truth

Hope that spells things out a little better than My first post.

[Colossus]

Sol Ring.  Ancient tomb.  What about those for more speed with the mana base?

[MadManiac21]

If you are chosing to run a aggro/combo affinity deck while splashing blue, shouldn't you also consider timetwister and/or windfall? Looking at this deck it seems to drop its hand pretty fast (as most fast artifact/affinity/modular decks do). Twister provides an invaluable role in this decks; as you "combo off" with ironworks and skullclamp, this will allow you to reset your deck, putting back in all those creatures you sacrificed, bombs countered, lands wasted.

Taking an idea from Hale (Purple Hat), I believe that cranial plating would be an absolute bomb here. In the deck he has created (Crushing chamber) he runs an innumerable amount of artifacts, artifact dudes, and modular/affinity guys, making cranial plating hit hard every time. It seems with your high artifact count you could use it to great avail as well. This card is a bomb that should not be overlooked in artifact-aggro decks anymore.

[serialjester]

I am running Sol Ring, Colossus.

Maniac, I am not running Timetwister because I don't own one. If I did you can be sure it would definitely be in there, and I have already considered Windfall in the past 2 weeks or so, I haven't actually tried it.

I haven't seen a decklist for crushing chamber, I'll see if I can find it, presumably on here. Cranial Plating is no doubt a bomb, it's a card that I sort of relate more to Ravager Affinity and haven't tried in this deck, despite what I know it can do. In a pure aggro sense it is worth trying.

I forgot to mention earlier that I have played this against a run of standard Fish, Tog, 4cc and TNT (regular and TFK variant) and have a good track run against those decks. The one that gave Me the most trouble was 4cc, but I haven't actually lost a match to anything except Fish, which finds the main culprit as Null Rod.

[Purple Hat]

Isn't nullrod a huge problem for you?  

Also I found when working on my deck that I had troubble getting microsynth golem out with cards still in my hand for cheap enough for it to matter.  It was a total win more.  Admittedly my concept is different from yours but I always felt that the golem was broken when he worked, but I was already winning at that point.

Hale

[serialjester]

Yeah, Null Rod is a problem, but at the same time Affinity is a naturally anti Null Rod mechanic, so it is not as backbreaking as it normally is. What it does for the most part is stick Me into a topdeck mode, it totally kills the combo aspect of the deck but there I'm hoping My creatures are making the rush.

I just saw your deck, and see how it is similiar and at the same time different than yours. I was told your deck is similiar to Mine, so I check it out, and I see the 2 card draw engine of doom: Clamp and Chamber, and I see people questioning the power of it. I'm glad to see that someone else caught onto how explosive and how vital to Affinity style decks the Chamber is.

As I've stated, it is more often than not the Chamber that makes the Golem an easy drop. I think the most I've ever spent to cast him was 4.

The no drawback clause that Sphere has in your deck, and in Affinity decks in general was something I missed. Since I'm being bashed for not running any disruption I will give the deck a slight retooling and see what happens.

[Colossus]

Heh, I missed the Sol ring on that list, sorry, must've glanced past it.  What about ancient tomb though?  Its fast mana to get artifacts on board, and is a land that isn't shut down by Null Rod.

The reason Null rod doesn't hurt an aggressive deck like this so much is that once the creatures are on board they just need to attack, whereas a Ravager needs to get pumped and a cranial plating needs to be equipped.

[Plognark]

I've been tooling around with janky affinity decks a bit, and i've found that sphere of resistance is a nasty little addition. With the workshops/ancient tombs it gets out turn one far too often for your opponent to be happy, and it's effectively a neutral card towards affinity while hosing your opponent.

Now if I can just organize the pile I threw together in five minutes maybe it'll work better  

[Jacob Orlove]

Moved to newbie.

[lil-Devil]

ever thought of using crusher..?? it will become big and null rod wont affect it...

[Kaervek]

I toyed around with a similar sort of deck, I ran Rush of knowledge and the sac for mana golems though, Using windfall, Diminishing returns and rush of knowledge you didn't have to rely on your skullclamps, so it effectively eliminated the effect of null rod.