Hi. My name is Dan Shen and this will be my very first Magic the Gathering article.

I wanted my first article to be on a format that I absolutely love to play: Classic. I was immediately drawn to the format because it is both fast and powerful since the format’s cardpool includes all the available cards on Magic the Gathering Online. I no longer play paper Magic so this online format is as good as it gets for me. For those who know me, I have had my fair share of success in Classic with the pre-restricted Flash-Protean Hulk deck. In the aftermath of the restrictions to both Flash and Vampiric Tutor, I have worked on another winning deck that I wanted to share with you.

Bomberman.dec

So how does this pile of 60 cards win a game of Magic? Well first of all, Bomberman is a control-combo deck originally designed for the Vintage format. This deck would abuse the combination of Auriok Salvagers and Black Lotus. Let us imagine both the Salvagers and a Lotus are in play. The combo begins when you activate your Lotus for 3 white mana. Using 2 of the white mana, you could return the Lotus to your hand with the Salvagers’ ability. Then you could replay your Lotus leaving you with the exact same board position except that you have netted 1 additional white mana. Thus with just two cards, you could create an infinite amount of mana (or if you want to be technical, an arbitrarily large amount of mana).

In addition, you can create an infinite amount of ANY colored mana, not just white mana. For example, if you went through the cycle described above 4 times, you will have 4 white mana in your mana pool. Instead of activating Black Lotus for white mana, let’s pretend you need green mana.You could activate your Lotus for 3 green mana and return the Lotus to your hand for 2 white mana. After you replay the Lotus, your mana pool will have 3 green mana and 2 white mana. At this point you could produce more white mana as described in the paragraph above or you could continue to convert 2 more white mana for any 3 color of mana you want. With an infinite amount of mana of any color and an infinite number of spells played, there are many cards that you could cast such as Tendrils of Agony or Fireball to finish off your opponent.

So how does this mana engine apply to the Classic format? Although Classic does not have access to the all-powerful Lotus, it does have Lion’s Eye Diamond in the format. With the Diamond, you still can generate an infinite amount of any colored mana. Killling an opponent, however, is not as easy if you have no cards in hand, but thanks to a little artifact in Mirrodin, we can still finish off our opponents with our infinite mana engine.

Pyrite Spellbomb is the third key to this very elegant combo which also gives the deck its name. Pyrite Spellbomb solves the problem of having no cards in hand because it can always be returned to your hand through the Salvagers. In addition, the Spellbomb can serve as your win condition. After you generate an infinite amount of mana through Auriok Salvagers and Lion’s Eye Diamond, the Spellbomb can be returned for 1 white and 1 colorless mana, played for 1 colorless mana, and used to deal 2 damage for 1 red mana. As a result, you can deal 2 damage to your opponent for every four mana you generate but since you have an infinite amount of mana, you can deal an infinite amount of damage.

Now, I am sure there are some people out there who aren’t that impressed because there are a lot of three card combos in Magic that can win you the game. Most of these combos do not even have such a severe penalty of discarding your entire hand. But what makes this combo great is the context of the combo. In other words, the synergy between the 7 combo cards with the rest of the deck makes it powerful.

Unlike most combo decks, Bomberman doesn’t have a “critical turn” when tries to combo early in the game like TEPS does in Extended. Instead the deck plays very similar to a control deck which tries to manipulate the board position until it can resolve one big spell through for the win. Like most blue white control decks, Bomberman controls the tempo of the game with a healthy combination of counterspells and creature removal while trying to gain card advantage by drawing more cards than the opponent. While establishing control of the board, the deck can find the combo pieces it is looking for through the amazing tutoring powers of Trinket Mage which can fetch either Pyrite Spellbomb or Lion’s Eye Diamond.

The real secret to the success of the deck is that the combo elements have a very minimal impact on the control elements of the deck. There are never any dead combo cards just sitting in your hand. Pyrite Spellbomb can be used to kill an opponent’s creature or you can use the second ability to make the card read like “Cycling 2”. Lion’s Eye Diamond despite being the one “dead card” when trying to establish control of the board can easily be shuffled away until it is needed later in a Brainstorm followed by a Flooded Strand activation or can be discarded to a Thirst for Knowledge to draw three relevant cards. Auriok Salvagers can serve double duty as an effective 2/4 blocker while helping to bring back both Engineered Explosives and the “cycled” Spellbombs from the graveyard before you can establish your combo. Even your combo tutor spell Trinket Mage can help serve as a chump blocker while helping to gain control of the board with either Engineered Explosives or Pyrite Spellbomb.

In other words, the power of the deck comes from the fact that there are no dead cards ever sitting in your hand. Each combo card can help serve a productive role in gaining control of the board as explained above. And since you have been “cycling” both Pyrite Spellbomb and Lion’s Eye Diamond (with the help of Thirst for Knowledge) to draw more cards, eventually you will reach a board state where you will have both Pyrite Spellbomb and Lion’s Eye Diamond in the graveyard. When the board reaches that state, every Auriok Salvagers becomes that one big spell control decks use to win the game. And if it still hasn’t dawned upon you, you will have actually gained card advantage in the process of trying to set up the combo, not lose card advantage like most combo decks.

So I hope I have been able to successfully explain why Bomberman is a great combo-control deck. There are many nuances to the deck and many card choices which I have selected for the “metagame” of Classic. I could go through them all including why I only run 3 copies of a great tutor in Trinket Mage, why I run a “soft” counter in Memory Lapse instead of a “hard” counter in Counterspell, or why I run Adarkar Wastes when painlands are notoriously known to be bad for control decks. However I began to realize that many of my selections are based on either personal preference or on my interpretation of the Classic metagame. For example, Leyline of the Void while clearly a suboptimal graveyard hoser in a non-black deck is unfortunately very necessary to fight against fast decks that abuse the graveyard such as the Flash-Protean Hulk deck. I know many players including myself, however, question the viability the Flash-Protean Hulk deck now that Flash is restricted. Therefore, I choose to leave my article as it is so that my decklist can be used as a starting point for your future improvements. I encourage everyone to build and adjust the deck according to their personal play preference and what they think the metagame is.

Firestarter:

There is one topic of debate however that I feel is important to discuss before I finish. The greatest weakness of the deck’s combo is that Auriok Salvagers can be easily killed by spot removal in the middle of the combo. If your opponent times his or her removal correctly, you will have already discarded your entire hand and will have no counterspells in hand to protect your Salvagers. There are two major schools of thought in solving this problem. The first type of answer is to protect your Auriok Salvagers. I personally like to have a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir in play so that the opponent can’t play any spells on my turn when I am trying to combo. Other ways to protect the Auriok Salvagers have included Meddling Mage, Orim’s Chant or Counterbalance plus Sensei’s Divining Top.

The second type of answer in dealing with the vulnerability of Auriok Salvagers is much more proactive. It believes the answer lies in running additional targets for spot removal in the deck. By doing so, an opponent can be overwhelmed with targets they have to answer so that when you eventually play your Auriok Salvagers they will have run out of removal spells. Cards like Exalted Angel can kill an opponent quickly and are very difficult to race against because of the life gaining ability. If the opponent saves the removal spell for the Salvagers, they will lose to the Angel. This second school of thought has the added benefit of having an alternative way of ending a game. If an opponent’s removes part of your combo from the game through cards like Cranial Extraction or Extirpate, you will always be able to win through good old creature damage.

I hope all my advice and explanations were helpful.

Dan Shen

Feel free to contact me any time on my MTGO account: bear named snuffy