-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.
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.
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!
I have been watching your videos daily as they come out for the last few months and every time I scroll through TH-cam 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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
Brainstorm and Ponder are also in this deck. The tiny thinning effect vs. the monstrous effect shuffling with a cantrip has isn't a trade I want to make.
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.
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!
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…
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.
@BoshNRoll Is there anything stopping this combo from working in paper with Quicken in the deck? Respond to the Emrakrul Trigger by continuing to mill, then quicken a flashback Dread Return anyways?
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.
6:30 why don't people play blightsteel or some other creature that just shuffles itself back into the deck? isn't that the same kill with conrad but just the end state of all cards in the graveyard except blightsteel getting milled and then put on top of the empty library any number of times? Am I missing something? or is that just carry over from the older version of the deck that needed a full shuffle. You could also put more than one in the deck in case you draw it as well in that case because it doesn't hit the graveyard.
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.
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 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
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.
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
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!!
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
This is just a thought, but couldn't you run blasting station by itself without dread return and syr konrad? It's 1 more piece you need on the field so it might hurt the performance of the deck but that also cuts 2 cards you need to combo down to 1. Or is it specifically the case between emrakul and narcomeba that is the issue
Is there any reason four horsemen doesn’t win through thoracle other than to differentiate from oops all spells? With the mana base and combo pieces, it can be a more consistent dread return deck
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Chump blocking with Emrakul" is a phrase I never thought I'd hear in all my years of playing Magic.
At the time of this comment, I'm still watching the deck tech. I am now VERY interested in the rest of the video. 🤣
Been there, done that, had to block Marit Lage token with Emrakul in a legacy tournament
@@ladiesman2048 as an elf enthusiast I've made my opponent chump with emmy before but I haven't done it myself
Happens a lot actually.
-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.
I really appreciate that Syr Konrad is an actual horseman.
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."
you have described eggs, yes
@@Pendergast891 glorious eggs!
'Dormammu, I've come to bargain'
At 22:27, I think that's the first chump blocking with emrakul I've ever seen.
Yea that's my first time 2.
Same. Telling a emrakul into play for chump blocking duty is beyond epic
Me and the Bosh and roll community on our way to give ‘ponder the orb’ a new meaning
That game round 3 was amazing. Emrakul vs Marit Lage, as Garfield intended.
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.
Clash of Titans
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.
"Is this a Show'n Tell, Combo or Mill deck?"
Yes
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.
Can you elaborate on the wall of roots thing?
Time is a construct and I am ancient.
Efffff. You're right... 2016 was not "a few years ago." Getting old is lame.
@@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.
@@jfb- ah. Good old "Wall of Boom" combo.
My favorite thing about this deck is the mind-boggle of the game 2 juke
Omg you made a Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog reference. Such a wonderful piece of media
You said "a positive record with four horseman in 2020". That feeling of time the stood still and that its actually still 2020, I feel you man.
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.
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!
✔️ Omni-Tell Emrakul juke
✔️ Hardcast Emrakul
✔️ Narcomeba Machine Gun
✔️ Literal Mill
4 Horsemen? More like the 4 Win-cons of the Cheese-pocolypse
I have been watching your videos daily as they come out for the last few months and every time I scroll through TH-cam and see one of your videos your short intro music gets stuck in my head. It's great!
This was the most fun I had watching a magic video in, well basically ever. Thank you.
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
Wow just wow... This deck is something. That sideboard plan is INTENSE
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.
0
You do not know how happy I was to see the hardcast Emrakul
AND the mill win?? You madman
That was absolutely beautiful. And then watching the two giant spaghetti monsters fight. So good.
This was the most hilarious Legacy league we've seen on the channel Brian, thanks so much for giving jank a chance!
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
Oh man the Sharuum horseman list was one of my favorite stitched together combo deck followed closely by cephalid breakfast.
This league was exceptionally fun to watch. So many amazing little moments.
The way you said "Force of Will, Ancient Tomb and Ponder" in round 2 I was almost expecting you to follow it up with "walk into a bar."
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
Yeah it seams a lot stronger not sure why it wasn't mentioned
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 absolutely love decks with transformative sideboard plans :D
I love 4 Horsemen, such a great deck when it's allowed to be played.
This league was incredible. Thank you
"I'm pondering with my orb." LOL!
Triple monolith for hardcast Emmy and triple orb for the mill kill, amazing!
This league is like the hang over trilogy of magic. Insane events unfolding.
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
I know you say you'll never play it again... But it was a ton of fun watching all the different wins and just shenanigans.
Great video!
This is basicly my Sry Konrad Edh deck. Basalt + orb + eldradi
Really cool showing in other formats
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
The original name refers to the narcoamebas, syr conrad didn't exist back then
@@cowisiontv6611 i distinctly remember the deck containing 4 monsters back in it's introduction
@@cowisiontv6611 the original deck used 1 copy of each of the 4 engine cards. Sharuum, Blasting Station, Dread Return, Emrakul
Pretty sure the "four horsemen" refers to the 4 Narcomoebas.
@@femkeyt2635 see my response
This was an incredibly fun deck to watch, hope you do some deck like this again sometime.
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
New 4 horsemen is essentially deterministic, or at least advances the board state once it starts combing unless it hits shuffletitan super early
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
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.
Thank you! That’s the pace I’m going for. :)
That flashback reanimation is savage
22:47 : we should crack Scalding Tarn to have better odds at hitting our outs here, right ?
Brainstorm and Ponder are also in this deck. The tiny thinning effect vs. the monstrous effect shuffling with a cantrip has isn't a trade I want to make.
That hardcast Emrakul was incredible xD
The quality Dr. Horrible reference was 👌. All hail the thoroughbred of sin.
Awesome deck would love to see another run with your updates
I once emulated 4hrsmn in edh. It also caused nothing but groans when the table realised what it was.
Some of the best magic I've seen in a long time
That was wild. It looked liked playing to unlock all the hidden features of the deck.
100% speedrun
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.
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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.
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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.
changing emrakul for guile also prevents you from flashing back cabal therapy 4 times before going for it to flush out potential counterplay
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!
Omg I love this deck sooooo much!!!!! Been Awhile :)
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…
This deck is very cool. Unfortunate that it doesn't work within the tournament rules, but very fortunate that it works on MTGO!
"You thought you opponent was Four Horsemen, but it was I, show and tell!!!"
Transformation boards are so fun!
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.
Was not expecting a Dr Horrible reference in 2022 but I'm here for it
I'm old and full of obscure references.
What was the reference? I missed it
@BoshNRoll Is there anything stopping this combo from working in paper with Quicken in the deck? Respond to the Emrakrul Trigger by continuing to mill, then quicken a flashback Dread Return anyways?
Pretty sure it works, but turns it into a 3 card combo, which makes it a whole lot worse.
Teferi does that too.
@@Grael949 Yeah, True. Emergence Zone is a land option i found as well.
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.
It gets all the narcos in on the first spin but opens you up to surgical, which is the reason to play this deck.
6:30 why don't people play blightsteel or some other creature that just shuffles itself back into the deck? isn't that the same kill with conrad but just the end state of all cards in the graveyard except blightsteel getting milled and then put on top of the empty library any number of times? Am I missing something? or is that just carry over from the older version of the deck that needed a full shuffle. You could also put more than one in the deck in case you draw it as well in that case because it doesn't hit the graveyard.
Answered this a few times in the comments, but BSC doesn’t work with Konrad and doesn’t do what Emrakul does to play around graveyard hate.
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.
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 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
JOTS Beautiful transformational sideboard!
59:58 Would you say it's a Teferi vacation?
do you have any Videos with the Teferi & Knowledge Pool Combo?
Not yet. 👀
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.
I guess my rules question is at what point does me milling becomes slow 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.
@@asdad54 thank you! That makes sense to me, I want to cheat on board state, not at the game itself!
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.
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
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!!
Multiple time during this video I paused to hit like, only to find that I had already hit like. It's that much fun folks.
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.
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.
Maybe. But if you don't shuffle the whole graveyard, you don't have the out of milling into the second Emrakul to avoid graveyard hate.
The point isn't to not deck yourself, it's to blank graveyard hate by milling to Emrakul in response and restarting the whole chain.
If the slow play warning is a problem in paper, why not dread return a thassa's oracle as an alternative wincon?
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!
Great content as always, but this league was epic!
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
I think this is one of your best thumbnails.
Isn’t milling advancing the board state? I’m also not quite sure how the play warnings work, can anyone help out?
Would siding out syr konrad and keeping 3 narco for force fodder/ chumps not be a potentially better option?
Yeah I figured that out later on.
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.
Game one of Round 3 was some spicy stuff. Magic as Dr. Garfield intended, I'm sure.
Different eldrazi for the surgica case. Also to feed the algoritm
That would be better, but we have the Show and Tell sideboard plan to consider.
This was goddamn glorious.
Tbh I assumed this one would turn negative. Pretty cool.
The only place I’d seen this combo was commander, this is sweet!
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.
I think you could get away with it locally or among friends. The rules state otherwise at competitive level.
This is just a thought, but couldn't you run blasting station by itself without dread return and syr konrad? It's 1 more piece you need on the field so it might hurt the performance of the deck but that also cuts 2 cards you need to combo down to 1. Or is it specifically the case between emrakul and narcomeba that is the issue
8:20 How does Teferi stop Karakas?
Is there any reason four horsemen doesn’t win through thoracle other than to differentiate from oops all spells? With the mana base and combo pieces, it can be a more consistent dread return deck
It’s resistant to GY hate because you can always find Emrakul to shuffle the GY away in response and just go again.
@@BoshNRoll Thanks! I just saw an ancient video from cfb and this was ranked the #5 most miserable way to lose a game of legacy xD
48:54 my favorite part of the league 😂😂
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.
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.
Round 3, game 1... *spamming that like button*
"That was a game of magic" yes
"In 2020." Yeah my brain keeps forgetting the last 2 years were a thing too.
It is March 2020.
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.
@@BoshNRoll those are good reasons, thanks for the reminders :)
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.
Have you considered Mindcrank? It synergizes well with Konrad
Doesn't this become deterministic if you replace Emrakul with Darksteel Colossus?