B/G Fog Machine (Nether Shadow Combo)

Let’s talk about this deck:

Despite not having posted here for several months, the Legionnaire Magic League (aka LML, the semi-formal outlet for our playgroup’s casual meta) is still going strong. Collecting deck photos for monthly blog posts got to be overbearing, so we instead elected to start sharing them amongst ourselves via a private discord channel. Apologies to anyone who might’ve been reading/enjoying the posts—happy to occasionally toss more decks up here, if so...

In any case, this was the “Fog Machine” (B/G Nether Shadow combo) deck that I ran for March, placing 2-1 in matches and 4-3 in duels. My match against Jason was only one game, because Arboria made the duel last over an hour, at which point we’d both run out of time and patience to keep playing. But more on Arboria later. Fog Machine wins by getting 4x Nether Shadow into the graveyard with Ashnod’s Altar and Rocket Launcher in play. During your upkeep, you recur the bottom Nether Shadow and sacrifice it to the Altar for two colorless mana. Keep doing this any number of times, until you have enough mana to kill your opponent via Rocket Launcher. Easy, right?

“Wait a minute,” savvy Magic: The Gathering players out there might observe, “that’s not how Nether Shadow works. The Oracle wording says, ‘At the beginning of your upkeep, if this card is in your graveyard with three or more creature cards above it, you may put this card onto the battlefield.’ You only get one trigger per Shadow, so you can’t go infinite.” Which is absolutely true based on modern MTG rules. But the Akron Legionnaires play by the Revised-era rules of 1994, and Duelist #4 will happily tell you this:

You’d probably get a bit of side-eye or a “JUDGE!” called over trying to pull this off at most tables. AL Magic might even be the only environment where it works—so I had to give it a try! But while the Nether Shadow combo represents the endgame, the reason I actually wanted to build this deck was Chains of Mephistopheles.

If you’re reading this, I don’t need to tell you that Chains is ridiculously awesome, but also usually terrible and pretty much always confusing. I’d lusted after a copy for a long time, finally cashing in last November at Eternal Weekend in Pittsburgh. Mine is a clean NM-, but also slightly inked. So it’s NM/damaged. (People love to argue about this stuff. But whatever, I’ve been playing it unsleeved.)

Anyway, a year or so before acquiring the Chains, I’d been ruminating with Adam, close friend and regular AL deck brewing co-conspirator, on what could be done with Chains of Mephistopheles in our casual Old School meta with no sideboards, and we talked about how Chains gets fairly wacky with Sylvan Library: while your normal draw for the turn is (initially) unaffected, for every Sylvan you then activate, you have to (get to) discard-draw, discard-draw. Then, for any cards still in your hand that you’d draw this turn, each goes back on top of your library unless you pay 4 life. Is this bad? Yes. Does it help get cards into graveyard quickly, especially with multiple Sylvans in play? Also yes.

So, the plan became, stay alive long enough to find/deploy the two combo pieces while setting up a milling engine to dump Nether Shadows into the graveyard as fast as possible to eventually go off for infinite. The rest of the deck supports this idea, using Thallids, Spore Flowers and Elvish Farmers to stall + gain life, and other nuisances (like Forcefield and Mirror Universe) to play for time. Obviously the deck gets steamrolled in any remotely competitive OS tournament environment, but in LML it fits right in... though I still wasn’t sure it would work.

Turns out, it got there a few times over the course of the month. One game it managed to win without the combo, on the back of early Thallid aggression followed by a [non-infinite] Rocket Launcher finish. In others it was forced to lean heavily on Arboria, a card that functions wonderfully with green Fallen Empires cards that accumulate spore counters, but also skews the terms (and length) of the duel in ways that can be frustrating for opponents not packing Disenchant, Tranquility, Disk, or... that’s about it. Desert Twister, I guess. Or Gravity Sphere. Arboria was almost always my Demonic Tutor target, as it was often the only piece that could keep me alive when the opposing onslaught became too much for conditional removal spells/lands and intermittent fog effects.

In the end, “Fog Machine” hit the LML power level mark but was a bit too polarizing from a gameplay standpoint to run back again. Still, this was a really fun experiment, was super challenging to play, and highlights the kinds of interesting things we’re able to do in our local play environment. Hope you enjoy!