Deck Preference : Jeskai Ascendancy Combo

I spent last Saturday at a local game shop for my last PPTQ of the season. My season has been a relatively short experience. I only started last October and was fleetingly unsure as to what I was landing myself in. My first six months of competitive play was fruitful. I haven’t won anything yet – the best I did was second place at a GPT with my Jeskai Ascendancy Combo deck.

I have a habit of brewing three different decks (Combo, Control and Aggro) and the frequency of game exposure is dependable on how I ranked my favorites. And since it was the last Standard PPTQ of my season I decided to play Esper Control instead of my usual favorite.

It was horrific.

Not because I dropped out of the competition with a 1-2 record, but because each match lasted an average 20 to 25 minutes. I won my last game in the nick of time, just after the judge called for the last five turns, and that was only two matches played. (I won 2-0 that particular round). What if that game was tied at 1-1? It would have been a draw game after 50 minutes of mind-grinding.

My friend who was also in the competition, told me that’s what I deserved for playing a control-based deck. Sometimes it’s either you have no time to win, or you find yourself losing after playing for an hour. ”You should have played your combo deck. What was previously a win away from Top-8 became a win away from the bottom,” he said.

My friend was right. It just wasn’t my style to drag play, and hence my decision to end my PPTQ early. It was a six-round swiss format and I didn’t want to grind for another 3 hours playing control.

Yes. I was seriously bored playing my own deck and that is not a good sign. It was a bad decision to play something I’m so out of touch with.

I practically took a stranger to a tournament and blew my own chances.

There are times when you go on a date and realized things are not quite right and you just felt that you are wasting your partner’s time as well as your own. You might want to leave right away and not waste anybody else’s time. I didn’t do my research well enough and realized I would be much happier playing my preferred deck even if I had to lose eventually.

Deck preferences. 

It took me nearly two months of deck testing before I finally brewed my own variant of the combo. It wasn’t an easy deck to play against all the odds. People have solutions all over, and the only way I figured out to play this deck as efficiently as possible, was to replicate what card draws was to Storm decks in Modern, with the inclusion of some excellent top-decking luck.

This was Pro player Lee Shi Tian’s version which made its way to Top 4 of the Manila GP 2015:

How this deck gets to win is simple. With a Jeskai Ascendancy and a mana dork in play, a Retraction Helix would enable your mana dork to bounce either the Astral Cornucopia or Briber’s Purse back to your hand. You recast the X=0 spell again to untap your mana source which triggers the Ascendancy and you get an infinite loop to either buff up your creatures to swing for lethal or find yourself an Altar of the Brood for infinite mill.

My luck dries up whenever it comes to Commune with the Gods because I tend to mill my Retraction Helices into the graveyard, along with Altar of the Brood and Briber’s Purses. 

And so I decided to make some changes:

Since I’ve been getting played out by the bloody Communes on a regular basis, Taigam’s Scheming becomes an inevitable choice for me. It is not card advantage at first instance, but it manipulates your next five draw steps and does the filtering anyway.  The slots for Briber’s Purse and Altar of the Brood has been increased for consistency. There is now three times more of a chance that I would get these cards into my opening hand. 

I replaced Tormenting Voices, a single Voyaging Satyr and Rattleclaw Mystic with Defiant Strikes and Anticipates. The one-casting cost Defiant Strike has been crucial in my build-up.  There was this scenario where this card was particularly impressive.

It was turn three. My opponent had just tapped himself out for a Courser of Kruphix and this was a golden window for me. I had three lands tapped out for Ascendancy with an untapped Sylvan Caryatid in play. I had a pair of Defiant Strikes, one Dragon Mantle and two lands in hand.

I proceeded to trigger the Ascendancy with a string of Defiant Strikes and Dragon Mantles, generating six to seven loops and a Dig Through Time to get all my combo pieces for a third turn win. That is at least 18 cards off the top of my library in a single turn. That play would hardly be possible if I had two Tormenting Voices. Perhaps I got lucky that game, but winning a game is also about setting yourself up when you are reliant on luck to get the right draws.

The variant also features a transformative sideboard that enables the combo to convert into a control deck. The underplayed Ojutai’s Command is able to hold off Dragonlords during midgame, null Stoke the Flames and also reanimate your Caryatids at end of turn after a boardwipe by your opponent. Reprisals are cheap removal spells to get the bigger threats out of the way, while Seismic Rupture and Anger of Gods deal with the weenies.

Narset Transcendent is a surprise inclusion during sideboard testing. When the game is running in Control mode, Narset’s first ability helps the extra draws into combo pieces. And if there is an 8/8 dragonlord staring down at you, you could also cast your one and only Retraction Helix to bounce the attack and activate the second ability of Narset to rebound the Helix for the next turn and hopefully combo off with a free trigger on Ascendancy. The final ability of Narset is almost the best protection in the format for the combo.

The Jeskai Ascendancy Combo is not broken yet, but it’s the only deck at the moment that doesn’t bore me to death.