Celestial Kirin

by Adam Rex

"Neigh" is Kirin for "You're gonna have a bad time there, buckaroo."

That last Cephalid deck was far too competent and powerful. Let's get back to our ancient four-month old roots and force a god-awful Kamigawa EDH legend to compete on the level of precons.

Celestial Kirin

A note on Mass Land Destruction and not being a tool.

Land dickery is heavily frowned upon, both in EDH and just in general when you're playing casually with friends. When you sit down to play Magic, it kinda sucks when you have to sit there unable to play Magic. I'm in the weird camp of really liking Balance effects  since green ramp has gotten absolutely f#$%ing absurd, and I think keeping everyone on a level playing field can make for more enjoyable games. I also think that playing MLD when you have a powerful creature or other wincon ready to go is perfectly fine since, in a way, you're just using a preemptive counterspell. Basically, if it's going to end the game more quickly and not leave your opponents barely able to do anything for half an hour, I'm all for it.  With that out of the way, let me make something perfectly clear:

If you destroy everyone's lands with no way to win afterwards,

You're an asshole.

Don't play Ugin's Conjurant when all you have is a 3/3 horse ghost. Don't Armageddon

I've tried a solid half dozen builds of the deck at this point, and what I've settled on as the most consistent is the classic Mono-White Ugin's Conjurant MLD Sweep Tribal. Also I decided halfway through writing this article that it's a Barren Glory

This deck ended up being very similar to my last Conjurant deck, in that it uses a god awful mechanic and makes it only sort of terrible. Last time I praised the true god pharaoh, we were pretty straightforward with Soulshift recursion, now we're saving our lands with Sweep.

Sweep returns as many lands as you want of a certain type you control to your hand to grant some pitiful effect, in our case giving one or all of our creatures +X/+X for a turn. Think of it like Gush

Thankfully with this deck, we don't give a rack pat's ass about what it actually does, just that it picks up our lands. Ideally we can have our horsey sauce on the field, drop Ugin's Enby for 0 to nuke everyone's lands, and save ours in response. Now everyone gets to painstakingly rebuild, but you're not relying on topdecking new mana.

The usual issue with Barren Glory

Wait, what's that - oh my god here comes Leonin Relic Warder

Exiling the big bad with one of these wild and crazy guys is far and away the most consistent way to actually pull the combo out. We just need to perform the simple recipe of:

1. Drop Barren Glory
   with whatever other stuff we have on the board.
2. Exile it with one of our non-exploitable Fiend Hunter
   s.
3. Exploit the crap out of Ugin's Conjurant
   for 0 with Celestial Kirin
   out to get rid of those pesky lands, or alternatively pick them up with Sweep. Always remember kids, be sure to float your mana first!
4. You're probably out of cards at this point because haha mono white bad but no seriously wizards what lesbian couple bullied you as a child to inspire the awful symmetry of Secret Rendezvous
   . Anyways, discard your remainders that aren't Planar Cleansing
   with Trained Pronghorn
   .
5. Use a Planar Cleansing
   effect to get rid of everything else, bringing back our Barren Glory safe and sound.

Very easy and straightforward, suck it Thassa's Oracle

The best part of our Barren Glory combo is that it also sets our opponents up for their own Barren Glory combos! Friendship is fun!

For the deck to function, we really need to find our secret conjurant commander. To that end, we have both Ranger of Eos

As far as lands go, we really need our Sweeps to run at max capacity, so it's all basic Plains. We have the Extraplanar Lens

Oh and at this point the deck doesn't flow too well, so I jammed every card advantage equipment I could find in there with Sram and pals. Now if the lightly stained but still good for another day or two underwear of a combo doesn't pan out, you can always fall back on fracking everyone's' lands and bashing face with a souped-up Balan, Wandering Knight

Conclusion

Celestial Kirin

Out of all the scrappy combo decks I've thrown together, they've got to be the worst. That being said, it's a Barren Glory

I do want to point out that I rebuilt this deck several times, way more than usual for the hardcore cEDH shells I throw together. I found the current equipment build to be the most consistent, but I could easily be proven wrong. The deck got a huge boost from Modern Horizons 2 while I was in the middle of writing it up, so maybe the D&D set will have another uncommon nobody plays that randomly makes a 16 year old horse viable. That's the beauty of Magic: the Gathering that keeps me coming back despite all the dumb crap Wizards pulls, so fingers crossed.

Author's Note: As I was cropping the banner image for this article, which is literally the last thing I do, I noticed Celestial Kirin