The first EDH precon deck for Magic: The Gathering's upcoming Edge of Eternities set was fully revealed by The Command Zone on July 9. But as well as all the new cards featuring alien insects who love to terraform, the deck's reprints stand out as one of its most intriguing aspects.
That's because the new MTG precon deck World Shaper features a well-known infinite combo, one that only uses two cards that both appear in the 99. Those cards are everyone's favorite land-saccing MTG commander The Gitrog Monster and the land card Dakmor Salvage.
The combo makes use of the way Magic's clean up step works. This is the very last part of a player's turn, when they discard down to maximum hand size, when damage is removed from all creatures, and when 'until end of turn' effects come to a close. Normally, it all takes place in the blink of an eye.
But - and you may not know this - if any state-based actions or triggered abilities occur during clean up, you start another clean up step as soon as you resolve them. And that simple fact is the key to this tricksy combo.
Here's how it works. You end your turn with more than seven cards in hand and discard Dakmor Salvage. This triggers The Gitrog Monster's draw effect, but instead of drawing, you use Dakmor's Dredge ability to mill two cards and return the land to your hand.
Even if you didn't hit any additional lands and get another draw when you milled, you'll now be over seven cards again, which means you can bin Dakmor Salvage again and repeat the combo.
This creates a loop that will allow you to mill your entire library. Admittedly, that's not super helpful in Jund colors, where you don't have access to Thassa's Oracle. Typically, the way to play this would be with a 'Shuffle Titan', to allow you to keep the loop going indefinitely.
At this point you're basically recycling your entire deck, and there's some interesting things you can do with this. Having a Syr Konrad on the field to kill everyone springs to mind.
The combo gets even better if you use a discard outlet to dump Dakmor Salvage rather than rely on the automatic discard on the clean up step. That's because you'll now be able to generate infinite mana without worrying about your mana pool emptying. Since you're essentially recycling your entire deck, it's easy to do this by casting Dark Ritual over and over for infinite mana, or using Gaea's Cradle and Crop Rotation to achieve the same goal.
While it's not too scary without a shuffler (Gaea's Blessing works as another, much cheaper option), it's pretty fun that Wizards decided to stick this nasty combo into a precon.
Here's the Command Zone's full reveal of the deck. Keep your eyes peeled, as we should be seeing the other one, Counter Intelligence, some time today (July 10).
You can let us know what you think of the precons over on the Wargamer Discord. And don't miss our MTG release schedule guide to find out about MTG Spiderman and all other upcoming Magic: The Gathering sets.