Whimsical

I've been looking for inspirations on ways to use cards that feels like it's working outside those cards' expected parameters/use-cases. Things that feel like they hit strategies that WotC might not have thought about when printing the cards.

For instance, one of the most popular expressions of this is the open secret that Tivit, Seller of Secrets actually functions better as an artifact-combo commander than as a voting commander - every ETB or combat hit makes 5 artifacts, guaranteed, which makes Time Sieve combos easy.

Or, in terms of decks I've brewed/been brewing, Zevlor Elturel Exile as a poison-proliferate deck. Doesn't work great, but the idea is to try and spike the board with multiplied proliferate triggers, so I can tick people up by 3 poison per "single target spell plus proliferate as an upside" spell. Turns out that people just focus you and your commander out of the game pretty much immediately if you try that, but I digress.

Or, using Mutate as a mechanic not to try and actually proc on-mutate effects, but just to strip "legendary" off cards that are balanced around it as a mechanic, like Kiki-Jiki. Mutate him into a nonlegendary, and you can infinitely multiply him during your prior opponent's end step, and overrun the board during your turn.

It's effects like these that I really enjoy exploring, the cases that make people stop and say, "Wait, it works like that?" or, "Wait, you did all that just to do this?" It scoops a lot into the art form that is jank deckbuilding, and I'm curious to know what little corners of the MTG design-space you all have found funny little interactions in.

I was thinking about vaccines and their usefulness, when it occurred to me that, in using vaccines, we've sort of pigeonholed viruses into behaving the way covid does. Haven't we?

If a virus is slow-mutating or distinct enough, then it goes the way of polio or smallpox - that is, nearly or completely eradicated from the world, especially in countries wealthy enough to vaccinate en masse.

So the only kind of viruses that are capable of thriving for very long are those that spread fast, and therefore mutate fast enough that vaccines can "miss" like they do sometimes with the flu. And if a virus maintains lethality above some socially-determined threshold, people take it seriously enough to isolate and kill it off. So it kinda feels like humanity "made" covid, not in a lab, but sort of by default, by killing all the other behaviors of treatable/preventable plagues that could have existed.

Are we setting ourselves up for more fast-moving covid-like viruses in the future, by vaccinating the way that we do?

I guess for this to be any evidence toward changing our practices, it would have to be the case that there's a viral "ecosystem" in which vaccinating against one virus makes more room for others, and I don't know if that's true.

Are covid-like viruses simply an inevitability, or could a change in practice have reduced the likelihood of such a thing happening?

I'm looking to make a $50 budget deck which you can see here.

The deck feels generally well-balanced for normal play, but seems to have the issue that it can't really win until it draws one of its combos, those combos being:

Ivy Lane Denizen + Herd Baloth/Scurry Oak Vigean Graftmage + Faeburrow Elder/Kami of Whispered Hopes/Incubation Druid Devoted Druid + Swift Reconfiguration

The Ivy Lane combos produce infinite creatures, the other combos produce infinite mana, with Devoted Druid also letting grab infinite nonland topdeck-casts from Falco by spending the -1/-1 counters. Once I hit any of them, I can crank out enough resources to make a play toward winning the game.

However, the game feels awfully slow and inconsistent when it revolves around drawing at least one of three specific cards, plus one of the 1-3 matching combo pieces, and then having both on the field, uncountered, long enough to win the game. Feels fragile, more than a lot of combo decks I see others go for.

Am I doing this right? I currently have Threats Undetected and Shared Summons in the deck to try and help set myself up for this a bit better, and I figure that my draw/scry options, with Falco's help, can dig pretty far for cards like these, but I want to know if maybe I'm going about this totally wrong.