If you could cast five Vampiric Tutors at the same time, what would you get? That’s the question Samuel Alaimo tries to answer as he takes us into uncharted deck tech territory. Enjoy! / Martin
Doomsday is in an interesting place in Premodern. Never having made any presence in Extended, we are pretty much starting from scratch. Luckily, Premodern is a format with a good amount of fast mana—at the expense of Tendrils of Agony and Necropotence. In particular, Dark Ritual seems to be perfect for casting a sorcery that costs BBB.
The deck
Let’s start off with the decklist.
SIDEBOARD
In game one, after you cast Doomsday you want to go for the following cards:
Breakthrough
Sutured Ghoul
Krosan Cloudscraper
Krosan Cloudscraper
Shallow Grave
The pile order isn’t important past Breakthrough being the card on top. For the combo we need 2UB and a card draw to get started. This card can be from a Chromatic Sphere or a Darkwater Egg, from a Sleight of Hand or Opt if you have an extra mana, or simply from your draw step if you can safely cast Doomsday and pass the turn. Drawing any of the combo pieces doesn’t matter since Breakthrough will allow you to discard them as part of going off. Start by drawing Breakthrough, cast it for 1U, draw the rest of your deck and then discard all your cards but one, making sure you put Sutured Ghoul on the TOP of your graveyard. Then cast Shallow Grave for 1B on what should be the Sutured Ghoul. After it feasts upon the two Krosan Cloudscrapers below it will become a fearsome 26/26 that will have haste from Shallow Grave and then trample over your opponent’s defenses without mercy.
Since Doomsday essentially is a one-card combo, the rest of the deck revolves around finding and casting it as fast and efficient as possible. Mana accelerators and Rhystic Tutor speed us up and allow us to do tricks with Lion’s Eye Diamond since most of the cards in the deck cost three, be it a Doomsday or one of the sideboard plan cards.
Transformational sideboard
Due to the all-in nature of Doomsday, it is going to be game over if any part of the combo is disrupted. Depending on the matchup, we can play a lot of different games with our sideboard and can sidestep certain kinds of hate. Since the combo itself is only five cards, we can easily change the deck to be on a different axis than we show the opponent in game one. Assuming your opponent knows your combo, they will most likely want to bring in some sort of graveyard hate e.g. Tormod’s Crypt, Phyrexian Furnace or the fearsome Planar Void. There are two ways we can dodge this. The first way is to swap out our Shallow Ghoul combo for another combo which ignores the graveyard.
Out:
–2 Rhystic Tutor
–1 Sutured Ghoul
–2 Krosan Cloudscraper
–1 Breakthrough
–1 Shallow Grave
In:
+4 Insidious Dreams
+2 Erratic Explosion
+1 Draco
The new combo is simple—cast Doomsday or Insidious Dreams and stack your deck as follows:
Erratic Explosion
Draco
Erratic Explosion
Land
Land
With Insidious Dreams we usually don’t have to discard five cards, but keep in mind that when making piles with Dreams or Doomsday, Erratic Explosion keeps going until you reveal a nonland card, so you can protect your Draco from something like a Predict, and if they don’t have it you just bypass the land. In that same vein if you need to kill someone who is at more than 16, this Doomsday pile will do the trick. It’s very important to put two lands in the pile at the bottom as the Draco is put on the bottom of your deck and will need to bypass the two cards to get back to the 16 CMC.
The second sideboard plan is going for a concentrated creature package aiming to take advantage of an opponent who takes out creature removal in favor of graveyard hate or general anti-combo effects like Arcane Laboratory, Abeyance or Orim’s Chant
Out:
–4 Doomsday
–1 Sutured Ghoul
–2 Krosan Cloudscraper
–1 Breakthrough
In:
+4 Phyrexian Negator
+1 Skittering Horror
+1 Phyrexian Scuta
+1 Rhystic Tutor
+1 Urborg Emissary
We have the fast mana to bring these efficient creatures out early and we have an extra tutor to make sure we have an efficient beater in play by turn 3. Save Phyrexian Scuta, all the creatures are costed to be able to be cast off Dark Ritual, so we can start the plan on turn 1. Urborg Emissary is the body we want for three mana and can be a catch-all in case they have something like Energy Field or Solitary Confinement. The combo of Rhystic Tutor and Lion’s Eye Diamond works hard for the sake of consistency, which is usually the bane of any transformational sideboard plan.
Rather than having hate in the sideboard, we can simply board into two decks that are different from the main deck. Hence, this is very much a deck that has the opponent guessing what they should bring in against you.
Wrap-up
This is a very hard to play deck. It can be very fun and exciting and in no way should you feel limited by the Doomsday piles suggested here. But it takes a lot of decision making and a lot can go wrong with small misplays. While I always suggest that people go outside their comfort zone, I would definitely suggest goldfishing this deck a few times before you decide to commit to a tournament. The losses with this deck can be punishing and can lead to having a bad tournament.
– Samuel
As usual you’re welcome to discuss the article in the Premodern social media channels.