-Hardcast Emrakul -Chump block with Emrakul -Get a mill win -Play against an opponent on a roadtrip -Blind name Force of Negation off of Cabal Therapy So many achievements unlocked in this league.
Brainlet combo players: "I have a, I have b therefore I win." Gigabrain combo players: "So I know that I will win, but figuring out when can only be calculated in factorial time, you may have to sit and watch me win this game until time itself ends."
And then the Brazen Borrower Beatdown. That's what happens when the Decks have to focus entirely on doing their thing and beating the opponent's thing so Magic just becomes what it basically would be and the better simple thing wins.
The reason fabricate didn’t do anything is that you put it on the bottom of your deck twice and boarded it out in every other game. This was my favorite video you’ve posted by far.
Just like my favorite (casual) deck of all time: agro, combo, mill using Maze's End (5 color + combo kill... never really happens), Doran the siege tower (and other cheaper versions of the effect), Phenax god of deception for mill, and the enchantment Hold the Gates to glue the whole toughness-matters-with-gates strategy together. The rest of the deck was 1-2 cost creatures with high toughness to block/stall until a win con was in play. Favorite bit of spice: Slumbering dragon. Terrible card in most situations because it rarely can attack or block, but it's TOUGHNESS is still available for mill, opposing creature decks are sometimes too scared to attack you for fear of waking it up, and it gets better in multi-player casual settings.
I loved learning about these niche history lesson of magic- like this and the wall of roots "in-between turns" combo deck. You also mention that it was invented only " a few years ago" but I'm pretty sure that it was at least in 2016 or earlier.
@@Cowter4 There was a time in the rules where there was an "in between turns" step; in order to make an errata for the card time vault work. However a side effect of that is that wall of roots, which can make mana "once per turn", was able to make infinite mana during this step since it wasn't a turn.
Honestly, I think you could play this deck in paper just fine with just a couple small tweaks. Emrakul's shuffle is a trigger, so you can mill your Narcoamoebas in response. Then, you just need to mill Dread Return and Syr Konrad before milling Emrakul, which can be done reliably enough. The last part doesn't care of the Emrakul timing, as you repeatedly poke for damage anyway. But two cards can make this deck leave the 4 Horsemen category: T3feri, and Quicken. Either allow you to cast one spell at instant speed, meaning you can respond to the Emrakul shuffle by milling more and get your Narcoamoebas out, then flash in the Dread Return to start the loop with nothing left to chance.
Still have the same problems with getting your two pieces at the same time in grave before emrakul so I mean yeah same issue... at a different scale Now of only I could get an instant speed dread return to make this combo work every time.
Emergence zone can give everything you have flash by spending 1 and sacrificing it. Alchemists refuge can give flash too, but that requires more mana and green.
Though I love your serious leagues with Bant+, this was one of the most fun leagues to watch! I was seriously laughing here by myself on multiple occasions, and I really love the full sideboard juke. Would love to see more decks that leans into those mind games!
Not sure how much I like this modern take on 4 horsemen only having 2 horsemen. And don't try to tell me narcomeba is a horsemen it's definitely the horse in this deck! Edit: This league was great
I feel like you can play a version where you cut the Emrakul and Konrad and just play Thassa's Oracle, then you don't have to do the loop of reshuffling your graveyard. also you can call the deck seahorses
Problem: Emrakul is what makes the deck so resilient to grave hate. Solution: Play Emrakul, Coffin Purge, and Thassa’s Oracle. You need B more to do it, but you can win deterministically while using Emmy. (Coffin Purge can exile your Emmy from grave to help go for game).
one of the main reasons to run four horsemen (and not some other self-mill combo win) is because of its graveyard hate resiliency; if they try to surgical your dread return or narcomeba, you just mill down to emrakul and shuffle back in to fizzle it. also, it lets you cabal therapy them four times with flashback.
I have been watching your videos daily as they come out for the last few months and every time I scroll through RU-vid and see one of your videos your short intro music gets stuck in my head. It's great!
I love four horseman, this was really fun to watch! I have registered the deck in paper maybe a half dozen times back around 2015? There was only one judge who didn't like it, all the rest were cool as soon as I told them I knew the slow play rules and would just take the L if things got sketchy. This did result in quickened dread return an Emrakul into play, and a lot of laughs from regulars at the shops
I think my favorite part is that it isn't unplayable because it's jank, it's unplayable because it's literally not allowed to be played in organized paper magic. It's a very solid deck, just a logistical nightmare gameplay-wise for all the shuffling you would need to do irl
For what it's worth Brian, I absolutely love the edh breakdowns/tournament reports. Legit one of the best things about your content is the ability to listen and not watch due to your attention to detail on game states is a huge draw to your content. Even looking back on games after the fact that skill is still fully on display. Keep trucking dude. We stan Islands, and Ponders, and Bosh round here.
Round 4's Vault hurt me deeply lol *Looks 8 times, seeing 40 of the 50 cards in the deck, without seeing a single Omniscience* I'm also in the camp of 4 vault forever, card is incredible, and just blue enough for force to care
Since the deck is splashing white anyway, have we considered Enlightened tutor over fabricate? Searches for artifacts at a more efficient rate (even if you need to draw them still, but cantrips make that nicer) but also fetches omniscience alongside S&T post board. Seems like it's better than the awkward narcomoeba post board lol
I feel like this combo would be a lot easier if you just replaced Syr Konrad and Emrakul with Thassa's Oracle... But every combo gets easier with Thassa's Oracle.
The idea is that with this list you don't lose to "stifle on oracle". But yes, it is much easier to play oracle compared to infinitely milling yourself without knowing if you hit that improbable chance of the top card always being emrakul
to slightly improve the explanation - while in theory it seems reasonable that you'll eventually get to execute the combo, you cannot, in a strict mathematical sense, *prove* that it *will* happen, just that, given infinite iterations, the likelihood of you successfully executing the combo approaches 100%. And while in theoretical maths that'd be enough to demonstrate a loop, Magic: the Gathering (and Wizards of the Coast) don't want to take a controversial stance in mathematics and declare supertasks as a mathematical concept that their game supports. on an unrelated note - that R3G1 was amazing.
Several years ago I built this deck in paper! I ran Sidisi, Brood Tyrant as my first Dread Return target so that each iteration at minimum made a zombie to progress the board state to try to get around the soft ban ruling lol
Four horsemen really is a wild deck, thanks for the video to you two! But running this through more than 3-4 rounds of paper magic really seems like an awful lot of shuffling to me. Have a great weekend everybody!
I’m not much of a fan of competitive formats but I’m quite interested in Legacy (watching at least) cause I’m familiar with most of the cards through Commander.
Assuming emrakul is the last card of your deck, with X cards left in the deck against a player with Y life, you can say you’ll mill XY cards which will be lethal damage regardless of where emrakul is in the deck or if you happen to hit any narcomoeba’s… Before that, just step through the loop not “infinitely” until you get Konrad, then mill X cards Y times to win. In fact, because emrakul triggers Conrad twice it’s even shorter then that being XY/2. And if we assume all 4 narcomoeba’s are at the bottom of the deck under the emrakul, that’s (X-4)Y/2 steps for exactly lethal in the worst case scenario. From there the problem is guaranteeing to get 3 narcomoeba’s, dread return, and Konrad in grave before emrakul, but this can be mitigated by playing teferi before declaring the loop. Activate teferi’s +1 to allow you to cast dread return at instant speed, then mill every card in your deck. Even if you mill emrakul, you can respond to his trigger by milling more cards. With every card in the grave, you return narcomoeba’s to the field and cast dread return as an instant to put Konrad on the board, then resolve emrakul’s trigger and do the (X-5)Y/2 mill loop to win the game. So it’s really a 3 card combo to guarantee the win…
Your very good only suggestion I would have is a smother audio its kind of choppy like the mic goes in and out. But your deck and game play are great! Commentary helps you get in your move process! I like your stuff earned my sub!!
Technically. You could just declare to your opponent that you are going to infinitely mill yourself. If they don't object, reveal your deck. If emrakul is below sir Konrad. Shuffle. You can technically play this.
When you trigger your Emrakul you can keep that trigger floating to find your narcos before letting the shuffle resolve, this seems faster to me. I don't have any maths to back that idea up though.
this league had everything, combo win, transformational sideboard win, accidently hardcast emrakul, mill win, accidently win attacking with bounce spells. forget play b, that's a plan e win
Man, this video is making want to play my Gitrog 4 horsemen EDH deck. Explaining to new players how the combo works elicits one of two reactions usually: "This is bullshit!" or "WOW this is awesome." To be fair I always ask before I pull the deck out and explain how powerful it is and how annoying it can be. I've only had a few people ask me to fully play out the combo, but I do also win using Syr Konrad. I put him in the deck at the onset because I wanted a way to win without just performing Four horsemen loops to generate infinite mana with Dark Ritual. and then casting Torment for infinity.
Maybe I am missing something about infinity loops, and paper play. But if your deck has a starting count of 60 cards, and you trigger the mill count of 60 cards once you get to the combo stage you are 100% guaranteed to have hit Enrakul at least once, even if it is the bottom card and not matter how many cards are remaining in your deck. So that set a minimum damage of 2 point every 60 cards milled, so an infinity loop would be a minimum damage of infinity x2 damage.
But it will anyhow be almost 100% certain, you can mill your whole deck before the emrakul shuffles (tap/untap in response to emrakul shuffle) to guarrantee the narcomoebas, then it's just a matter of chance if you get the dread return and syr konrad before emrakul and the chance for it to happen at one point after say 10 000 mills is high enough IMO for it to be concidered a certain win. I don't really see a reason for the soft ban tbh.
Oh hellz to the yeah! I still want the paper rules to be changed. Just because the combo requires a little calculus to be deterministic doesn't mean it isn't deterministic. Richard Garfield knows better.
Oh man, I thought this deck was so funny when I first read about it; very cool to see it actually played. ...wait, doesn't Lim-Dul's Vault actually fix the paper version since you can stick Emrakul on the bottom of your library to guarantee you hit Konrad and Dread Return first and then go from there? I guess it requires you to have that as well as the mill engine, but since you only need to hit two cards before Emrakul in this version (Narcomoeba being able to pop out and stick between loops) you could conceivably go for it the regular way and fall back on Vault if you started getting warnings. Unrelated: I kinda wonder if there's a world where the sideboard juke is into, like. Voltaic Key shenanigans or something to hardcast Emrakul.
This is a year late, but I'm curious. Why do you have to run Emrakul? There are a few other creatures like the incarnations (Dread for example) that shuffle just themselves back into your deck (and therefor never shuffle the other key pieces in your graveyard like Konrad or Dread Return). This means that any "progress" you've made with assembling the combo cannot be reset which massively improves the "determinism" of the deck. You should even be able to "guarantee" the proper boardstate after a finite number of loops: 1. I mill until I hit Dread. 2. In response to the Dread trigger to shuffle itself, I mill the remainder of my deck 3. Allow the Dread trigger to resolve making it the ONLY card in your deck 4. With your intact graveyard, Dread Return Konrad using three Narcomebas. (use 4th Narco + Therapy to strip Konrad or multiple Narco's out of hand) 5. Mill the single Dread in your deck repeatedly to kill your opponent. Does anything here not actually work this way? This seems perfectly deterministic to me.
The point is that in response to graveyard hate you can mill an Emrakul, hide the yard in your deck, then start again. There’s lots of ways to empty your deck for Thassa’s Oracle, à la oops or breakfast, this deck is doing a specific thing
@@BoshNRoll Fair. I was trying to see how this combo was better (in theory) than other infinite mill strats, but all I could see was a combo that made the deck non-deterministic. Thanks for the quick reply!
I'm still confused as to why this deck is ok in MTGO and no legal in paper. The combo (if you can demonstrate it) seems pretty straight forward. Oh well. Thanks for the content! If you are doing janky shit and running the clock out I would hope the judges would make a realistic choice. I suppose they want to take the decision-making out of the judges hands now-a-days. I guess I see it now. RIH Worldgorger Dragon, may he rest in Hell. (I don't miss that period of MTG)
MTGO has the chess clock, which is a better timing mechanism than paper rules. If you run out of time, you lose the match. Therefore, infinite nondeterministic combos are legal.
I find it really odd that this combo is not allowed, but in CEDH the Gitrog combo comes from a very similar line in Ulamog´s loops... and it is way worst in complexity.
You would still have to go through the problem part to get thoracle and dread return together in the yard before Emrakul hits, though less shuffling after that step is done!
I'm pretty sure endurance is useless against the combo that infinitely mills you via permanents, where would they interact with it to disrupt it via endurance? It puts the cards back into your deck so you'd just fire again :) 1:05:00 roughly
If we replace Emrakul with something that only shuffles itself then we can mill our whole library and have only, let's say Blightsteel Colossus, shuffle back. That guarantees we Dread Return Konrad and then we can repeatedly mill and shuffle the Blightsteel dealing damage each time. This is a way you can take 4 Horsemen to paper now that Konrad is printed. The reason for Emrakul used to be crazy Sharuun lines but Konrad makes that unnecessary. Please correct me if im thinking about it wrong. I'm still sleepy haha
The reason for the 2 Eldrazi is so you can reset your deck in response to graveyard hate. The BSC/Progenitus style shuffles don't protect the rest of the deck. They're also replacement effects, so they never hit the graveyard and Konrad never sees them. You could use the Orb/Monolith interaction to just mill yourself and win with Thassa's Oracle + Dread Return, but there's better ways to do that.
Would playing the lorwyn shuffle incarnations or Serra Avatar instead of Emrakul help the deck? I mean, they only shuffle themselves back and not the rest of your graveyard.
Something like a year ago I tried to understand the exact why executing the combo by hand is considered slow play.In Modern Devoted Druid combo can also take very long to execute (with duskwhatch recruiter). If I play this in paper I thought of a few workarounds to the rulings wher nobody I asked could with certainty tell me if that would work. 1. when Milling a Narco before Emrakul keep the trigger on the Stak and keep milling if you hit Emrakul without the Combo you Still have the Trigger on the stack. Is this considered progressing the boardstate (->makes executing legal) I asked 3 Judges (2 Level 1 and 1 Level 2) and got 3 different answers. 2. only putting 1 narco in Play (leaving additional the trigger on the Stack) until full combo or Emrakul. When you hit Emrakul an additional Creature is in play so you advanced the boardstate. If you hit Emrakul first you leave the trigger on the stack and mill a Narco into play to advance the boardstate. This doesnt guarantee the combo like suggestion 1 but im pretty sure this works. 3. Changing the deck: Playing Lorwyn elementals like Guile for the repeated pings. This weakens the deck against surgical extraction and you lose out on reshuffeling your Narcos what makes removyl a potential problen. -> rekonstruktion nessesray. I also would like to hear other suggestions to fix the softban issue and your opinion on my suggestions.
@@Invisifly2 its ovious that yiz cant shortcut but that didnt stop eggs to ruin modern tournaments when it was legal. As far as I understood the problem it is considered slowplay if you take aktions that repeat the bourdstate exept for that you shuffle your library. My question in 1. essential is if I additional have a trigger (that does essential nothing exept preventing me from casting sorcerys) if that stil is slowplay. If my solution 1 and 2 work you essential have a reroll if you hit narco before Emrakul and if you hit Emrakul first you respond to the trigger and mill a narco into play. Essentially the Questions becomes how often do i need to give my opponent an aditional turn and how often do I loose in that szenorio. Adittionaly you can add creeping chills to make the combo more likely. PS: If i fail to combo in mainphase 1 can I try again in mainphase 2 or would that be slowplay?
@@martinschweithal9571 So, technically speaking, the Four Horseman deck is perfectly legal. Even the OG combo. The issue is that if you are unfortunate enough to fizzle the combo multiple times while actually playing it, you're in violation of the slow play rules at that point. In order to shortcut a loop, you must be able to do two things. 1) Each iteration of the loop must meaningfully progress the board-state. 2) The loop must have a determinate end. Usually achieving 1 achieves 2, but not necessarily. ----------- Let's say you go to loop, you hit Emrakul, you shuffle. Now your GY is empty and you have a random deck. You loop again. Hitting Emrakul before progressing the board-state. You started with an empty GY and a random deck. After looping, you end with an empty GY and a random deck. The board-state has not been progressed. As far as MTG is concerned, one randomly ordered deck is the same as any other random deck, so infinite shuffling doesn't count as a meaningful change. You can't guarantee that every loop will progress the board-state, so you're running afoul of the 1st requirement. ----------- Let's say you have a theoretical card in play that gives you 1 HP every time you mill a card. You want to mill until you have 10,000 HP. This is something that you can guaranteeably do. You can loop an arbitrary number of times, and each time progresses the board-state. Well, after you do that though, what cards are going to be left in your graveyard? If you can't answer that question, you can't legally shortcut the combo. You're running afoul of the second requirement.
@@Invisifly2 To me it is perfecly clear that i cannot shortcut but that isnt the question here. Let me rephrase: If you manualy (without shortcuts) execute the combo how different has the boardstate to be to not violate the slowplay rules. (1. trigger that does nothing 2.creature in play) Where exacly is the line. all i could find is that simply shuffeling is not enought.
@@martinschweithal9571 You're good until your opponent sees you going nowhere and decides to call a judge over and you have to explain to them where your loop is going.
Curious the legality of a port of this in paper going a more tin finsy direction where I mill my deck until I hit the spaghetti lord and savior and then GVengeance/shallow grave him into play.
@@effiefoemperor In your case you only need to hit emrakul once, that does advance the board state, as you are adding cards into your GY. The "problem" with 4 horsemen s you need to hit in a certain order, in particular, before Emrakul. So you could in theory be hitting Emrakul for years before setting up the narc or return. And as the end result after one emrakul shuffle is the same as another (no change in any state) it is considered slow play. Not sure what "states" are, but lets say permanents in play (tapped/untapped), life total, cards in hand, cards in GY, storm count, etc with some bad luck, you are not changing anything at all.
You could make this the mill engine in a Tin Fins list or a Breakfast/Oops style Oracle deck and it would be fine. It's specifically the "I'll get there eventually" Emrakul loops that aren't allowed.
@@BoshNRoll much appreciated! Really enjoy the videos, I took the question to the judge group as well because I was having trouble understanding why traditional tinfins loops which are very time intensive could be legal while this was not but I think I get it now. Seems like the difference is fewer moving pieces and less emphasis on triggering a specific interaction.
