How They Brew It - Your Turn

^{This one goes out to everyone that failed chemistry in college.}

Elementary, My Dear

Earth, water, fire, and air. These are the four substances that make up the entirety of the universe... or so they'd have you believe. Most of you have heard of the four elements growing up, and it's true: you can make approximations of a lot of things out of them, such as creating mud by combining water and earth, or making a bag of Lays with a mixture of five percent earth, one percent fire, and eighty-four percent air. Maybe some of you are a little bit more informed, and have dabbled with "aether" or "heart" as a fifth element. But what if I were to tell you that there aren't just four or five elements, but one-hundred and eighteen-thousand? I'm Professor Michael Celani, and welcome, freshmen! Over the course of your journey into the wild world of Introductory Chemistriphyisiodynamicals, you're going to learn so much you feel like you're in... elementary school. Just a little professor humor for you all. Ah, we have fun here.

One of the questions I often get is "Professor, what happens if you combine every element in a single, giant transmutation?" If you do, you summon the Horde of Notions, an omnipotent being with complete control over every form of matter. For a brief moment, you can bind this creature to your will, presenting you with a slim opportunity for wonderful feats. I've been putting my name on papers written by my interns experimenting with using a Horde of Notions to interact with different fundamental forces, and I'm finally ready to release their my findings. Let's get started!

Periodic Table of Elementals

Because the Horde of Notions has complete control over everything physical, it's important that we have a substantial menagerie of Elementals to test with when we get the opportunity to summon him. You might be wondering, "What's an Elemental?" An Elemental is a raw, living manifestation of one of the 118,000 fundamental substances that make up the universe. New ones are discovered all the time, and they're very important to our field; I remember when my team made headlines in 2010 for discovering the first licorice Elementals, sunshine Elementals, and cocaine Elementals, all in one week, and oddly, all in one place, too. Horde of Notions, the most powerful of the Elementals, can kick-start other, lesser Elementals if they become inert. Some of them can be very useful in your day-to-day life, so let's do a quick crash course on a few you might be interested in:

Growing Ghost

If you're gonna work with the manifestations of nature's building blocks, you need to get them started up in the first place, and that's where this category comes in. Not only do we have the typical green ramp spells included, such as Rampant Growth, Cultivate, and Kodama's Reach, we also have a couple Elemental dorks here that are great early-game plays. Smokebraider is efficient in a way even green is envious of, since it adds two mana in any combination of colors, provided you're doing something Elemental-related. Jegantha, the Wellspring taps for all five colors, perfect for casting Horde of Notions or activating its ability, and is itself trivial to pay for. Finally, Bramble Familiar might be middling on the creature side, but it's capable of tapping for some extra mana, and you can no-sell powerful hits in a pinch by blocking with it and returning it to your hand. Oh, you say it has a good Adventure? Well that leads us to...

Cheat 'Em Out

Just like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family or visiting a Wal-Mart, sometimes it's morally correct to not pay for things at all, and these three cards do just that. Our previously mentioned Bramble Familiar's Adventure Fetch Quest mills seven cards and then lets you put a creature, enchantment, or land from among the milled cards onto the battlefield. This is obviously wonderful if you hit something impactful, like Avenger of Zendikar, but the true kicker here is that Horde of Notions lets you cast this spell from the graveyard, too. Horde VPN's ability only cares that the card is an Elemental, not the spell, and since cards with Adventures only have the characteristics of its main spell in zones outside the stack, you can choose to either play Fetch Quest or Bramble Familiar after a Horde activation. Incandescent Soulstoke works as a Sneak Attack for Elementals, which sets them up perfectly to be brought back once they kick the bucket, and for a devastating finish to any game, try looping Maelstrom Wanderer, who cascades twice, giving you two free spells. Remember, Horde of Notions lets you cast the spell on the card it targets, so you'll still get cascade triggers when playing Maelstrom Wanderer from the graveyard, too.

Take Advantage

We'll need to keep fueling our hand if we want the game to go our way, so card advantage is important. Luckily, some of the best spells ever in this regard are Elementals. Risen Reef is an absolutely busted payoff card from Core Set 2020 that turns every Elemental that enters the battlefield under your control into a Coiling Oracle. Anyone who's ever seen it in person knows how quickly it can take over a game, and it even works with token creatures, so if you've played Rukarumel, Biologist and picked the correct creature type (left as an exercise to the reader), you can easily trigger it multiple times a turn. Mulldrifter needs no introduction; you can play it for cheap to draw two cards now and sacrifice it, then use Horde of Notions to bring it back to draw two more cards. It's worth noting that, unlike the Adventure cards, you can't pay evoke costs for Elementals with Horde of Notions's ability, since that's an alternate casting cost instead of a different spell entirely.

If Horde of Notions isn't enough recursive power for you, try Muldrotha, the Gravetide, capable of casting any permanent spell from your graveyard. As Muldrotha is an Elemental, try picking it and something like Seedborn Muse as targets to be binned to a Buried Alive, and then chain a Horde resurrection of Muldrotha into casting Muse from the grave. It's criminal how resilient this can make you in the mid-to-late game.

Removal

Reviving value pieces is great, but even more devastating to your enemies is recurring removal, and thanks to evoke being a set mechanic at one point, tons of it has been printed onto Elementals specifically. Scalding Viper has a respectable niche as a light punisher card, but it can also use the same Adventure trick as Bramble Familiar to repeatedly bounce permanents. Foundation Breaker is slightly pricier than your average Reclamation Sage, but having a cheaper mode with almost no downside as well as being reusable are definitely points in its favor; Aethersnipe and Spitebellows are similarly useful variants of Man-o'-War and Flametongue Kavu, respectively. If even Foundation Breaker isn't enough for you -- maybe you have an opponent that's running a bunch of cheap enchantments -- Bane of Progress is very unlikely to be a dead card in your hand, since less than a tenth of our deck is an artifact or enchantment. Omnath, Locus of the Roil snipes creatures when it enters the battlefield, and if you find your way into one of this deck's many infinite loops, it can close out the game alone by pinging your opponents to death. Finally, if you really want to annoy your enemies, Nameless Inversion and Crib Swap are both tribal instants with Changeling, meaning they're both technically Elementals and therefore legally capable of being cast by a Horde activation. The best part is that they go right to the graveyard once they finish resolving, meaning you can do it all over again immediately instead of having to futz around with a sac outlet.

Infinity War

Elementals are made from pure energy and the base components of the universe, so if we're going to summon Horde of Notions, the Elemental Elemental, we'll need an incredible amount of energy. But why stop at "an incredible amount" when we could have unlimited power? Not only would having infinite mana help us cast Horde of Notions, we could also use it to revive every Elemental card we've lost throughout the game. Luckily, there's plenty of permanents out there that can help:

Five Outta Five

We want to generate , and the best way to do that is with a card that can generate . Bloom Tender, Faeburrow Elder, Jegantha, the Wellspring, and Selvala, Heart of the Wilds are all capable of doing just that, and are cheap enough to use that they represent some of the best draws in the deck. The only problems we might run into with using them is finding them in the first place, but don't worry: we've got that covered. Neoform, Birthing Pod, and Prime Speaker Vannifar are all in the deck and can search for creatures in your library and put them onto the battlefield, pulling double-duty of combo piece tutor and sacrifice outlet for your Elementals. As long as we have a one-, two-, or four-drop to sacrifice, we're in business.

Untap That

The second step in generating infinite mana is to take one of those creatures that can make and make them make lots of times. An infinite amount of times, actually. The easiest way to do this is to untap one of those creatures by spending less mana than the amount you're generating. For example, if you tap a Bloom Tender for five mana, you can untap them with Staff of Domination for just three of it, spend an additional one to untap the Staff, you're back where you started but up one mana. Additionally, since we're pumping all this into Horde of Notions to cast spells from our graveyard, if we have something that untaps a creature when we cast a spell or have a permanent enter, such as Chakram Retriever or Intruder Alarm,  and we have some sort of sacrifice outlet, like Viscera Seer, Seething Pathblazer, or Phyrexian Altar, then Horde of Notions' ability becomes effectively free, which is functionally equivalent to infinite mana in this list, and although it's not quite infinite, Seedborn Muse and Quest for Renewal are great second-tier mana generation effects, since you can activate Horde on your opponents' turns.

Otter This World

Obviously, as a being with dominion over all matter, Horde of Notions is easily capable of overwhelming your opponents by looping something like Avenger of Zendikar or Omnath, Locus of the Roil over and over, but that won't win me tenure, will it? That's why I've poured my life and soul into my research, and I think I've hit a breakthrough. You see, it's simple: if energy is equivalent to mass, and energy is just power multiplied by time, then if we have infinite mana, and therefore infinite energy; all we have to do is divide our infinite mana by the infinite power it's made up of to generate infinite time. Unfortunately, I must have missed a minus sign somewhere in the equation, because by "infinite time", I meant it goes straight to your opponents and not to you.

Eon Frolicker is a card everyone immediately forgot. It has the incredible effect of giving one of your opponents a free extra turn. Granted, you're all but invulnerable to them during that turn, but that doesn't matter when it effectively puts a single player on a pedestal. You couldn't even blink it to try and give multiple players turns to fight amongst themselves. It was completely useless, and alongside Lutri, the Spellchaser being banned before it was even released, confirmed the existence of someone who really hates Otters on Wizards of the Coast's design team. But that one, singular Otter-swatter made a critical mistake: they made Eon Frolicker an Elemental, susceptible to being cast Horde of Notions from the graveyard. By using a sac outlet and an infinite mana loop, you can grant all of your opponents infinite turns where you have protection from them, effectively leaving the game the winner since they'll eventually run out of cards in their library and die.

Time Out

There's plenty of extra benefits to being trapped in a horrible time vortex. Kardur, Doomscourge forces your opponents to engage in combat with one another, and any attacking creature that ends up dying pushes all your foes closer to the precipice. His effect lasts until your next turn, which never happens, so his hellish combat warscape is eternal. Now, if you actually pull this off, make sure to spread the infinite turns from Eon Frolicker out so that no one player gets a glut of turns. That way, everyone is vulnerable to crackback after their combat step. Goading effects, such as Taunt from the Rampart, work similarly, but they'll only persist on the creatures that were out on the battlefield when the spell was cast. In this case, it's much better to give one player all the turns, as they'll be forced to eliminate your other two opponents before dying of old age. If they try to get rid of all their creatures to spite you, remember that your combo works at instant speed and you can retaliate by simply giving a second player infinite turns instead. Outside of combat, you might run into a lot of aristocrats strategies that lower your life total instead of damaging you directly, bypassing Eon Frolicker's protection clause; you can negate that by casting Teferi's Protection first, which adds the additional security of your life total staying static. When your opponents realize that your time shenanigans are not for their benefit, they might try to come after you and your infinite mana by destroying your permanents or winning with something like Thassa's Oracle. When that happens, it's time to exile their win condition on the stack with a Glorious End, or to render your creatures invincible with Chance for Glory, cards that usually balance out their absurd affects by killing you at the end of your next turn. For you, since you've already noped out of the game entirely, it's free!

Class Dismissed

Now that everyone is thoroughly confused by my long-winded explanations, I think it's time for class to end. Unfortunately, I can't do that, because my time experiments have expanded to encompass the entire campus. Now, everyone is trapped here, forever, in the year 2023. I hope terms like "rizz" don't become stale after a few years, or this might get real unbearable real fast.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy How They Brew It, check out the Discord and my other projects at my website. You can vote on what article you want to see next there, and if you've got an interesting idea for a commander deck, come and discuss it withe the rest of the fans! Hope to see you there soon!

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