Hello again, Premodern humans! As anyone who follows me on Instagram knows, Parallax Replenish was my jam back in 2000 Type II, and I had quite a bit of success with it in tournaments. Ever since I heard about Premodern, I’ve been trying to figure out the most broken Replenish deck for this format. After much testing and tinkering, I’m ready to show my list!
SIDEBOARD
As you can see, this deck is a combination of the Parallax Wave/Opalescence strategy, and the Pandemonium/Saproling Burst 21 damage kill. Actually, there is some overlap between the two. The PandeBurst combo is the deck’s preferred win condition, either Replenished into play or hard cast, but there is also an infinite damage combo in the deck. If you manage to get Opalescence, Parallax Wave and Pandemonium into play, you can use Parallax Wave to blink itself an arbitrary number of times, dealing four damage each time it comes back into play thanks to Pandemonium.
The other thing you might notice about this deck is that it’s quite expensive. Sorry about that, but if you want to do broken things, sometimes you have to play lots of expensive, broken cards! Originally I actually had three copies of Mana Leak instead of the Mox Diamonds, but it became clear that the deck didn’t really need any interaction, and instead wanted to focus on raw speed and power, leaning on the Defense Grid sideboard plan against opposing counterspells.
I mentioned that there were two ways of getting all those big, clunky enchantments into play, one being to put them in the graveyard via Attunement, Careful Study and Intuition and then cast Replenish, and the other being to simply hard cast them. These two methods seem to be called for in roughly equal frequency, depending on your draw, and deciding which path to go down is the main decision point in piloting the deck. Depending on the combination of enchantments and mana sources you draw, and the presence or lack thereof of Replenish, you will have to decide whether to discard your key enchantments to that turn one Careful Study or to hang on to them and go the hard case route.
However you’re getting your game-winning enchantments into play, the fast mana in this deck is crucial. Having 10 lands that tap for two mana including Ancient Tomb, City of Traitors and the Mercadian Masques depletion lands, along with the Mox Diamonds, makes the otherwise awkwardly high average CMC much faster and smoother to curve out. The absolute nuts is a turn two Replenish kill off of turn one Attunement, but getting your combo off on turn three or four is more typical.
Every good combo deck needs tutors, and the tutors in this deck play very flexible roles. Enlightened Tutor can go for Attunement if you have a good Replenish hand, or if you have Pandemonium or Saproling Burst in hand it can go for the other half of the combo, or even the Mox Diamond to help cast them in a pinch. Intuition is obviously great in a Replenish deck as it can dump multiple enchantments in the graveyard, or tutor for the Replenish itself if you don’t have it.
Overall it’s a surprisingly tricky combo deck to play optimally, but can be quite explosive and powerful, and winning with this type of combo just makes my old school heart sing. As always I would love to hear your thoughts. Leave your comments in the Premodern Facebook group, or hit me up on Instagram @mtgdojoera!