A Reality Shift Combo

that doesn't suck

1. Players have talked about a Reality Shift combo since Seed's release. But the decks that they built around the idea suffered from two fatal flaws:

2. They required multiple cards to be in your hand before you went off. This necessitated dedicating large chunks of the decklist to combo pieces, which made the decks weaker in general and less consistent. They required you to have a lot of material in play. To win the game with Shift-Millipede-Tinker-Replication-Rifleman, for example, you need to have cards in play with a total numeric cost of 12. But if you have that much on the board, you're probably in a winning position anyway!



This version of the combo gets around these problems because

1. Adding Prototype to the plan allows you to go off with only one card in hand. The rest of the combo pieces may be one-ofs because you can search them out of your deck.

2. Using 700160x 31f and cost-reducers like Senior Research Assistant and Adjunct Artisan makes it easier to ramp up to the necessary board material. Also the combo can go off with a much smaller board presence, making it more likely that when you play Shift, you actually need to play it to win.

I've been fooling around with a Purple Haze/Combo hybrid build. The idea behind it is that it can win two ways: an explosive start like 1337!, Senior, 633fy, or 700160x, Basic, Basic, 633fy, supported by Prototype + bounce, wins by dealing a fast 25, or a slower draw manages to stall the board until it can win with the combo.

The core of the deck looks something like this:

2 Elitism
4 Neurosis
11-14 Obsession

4 Basic Node
4 633fy 31f
4 700160x 31f
4 Quotidian Ejector
4 Senior Research Assistant
3-4 Violating Anomaly
4 Luteoderm Prototype
1-2 DethMurderBludgeon, the Craghammer
4 1337!
4 Quotidian Assassination
4 12 Man Brunch of Doom
4 Brainbath

3-4 Reality Shift
1 Voidal Replication
1 Ectypal Stave
1 Thabbashite Haruspex
1 Adjunct Artisan

That's 68-74 cards. With the remaining slots you might want to put in redundant combo pieces or recursion such as Rouse, Rummaging Millipede, or Recollection Bazaar. Another option is to add more control elements in the form of Forget, Servile Centipede, or Confounding Conjurer.

Note also that there are many different board configurations that allow you to go off; 700160x 31f with DethMurderBludgeon and Prototype is just the easiest to set up. For example, if you control the following:

- Senior Research Assistant
- Luteoderm Prototype
- 2 Basic Node
- 6 resources

you can go off with just Shift in your hand. With 1337! and Shift you could go off with only five resources, although two of them would have to be Neurosis to meet Shift's threshold.

Feel free to visit Will Morgan's The Spoil page for more articles and tips at http://www.thespoilsonline.com/