Wizards of the Coast continues to reveal cards for Magic the Gathering‘s upcoming Final Fantasy set, one of which will introduce a new infinite combo loop into standard. Sorceress’s Schemes is a red uncommon that pulls other instants or sorcery cards out of the graveyard or even exile, and – with the right helpers – creates an infinite loop that will ping your opponent to death.
MTG cosplayer PeachyPop revealed the new card via BlueSky late on Monday. It’s a red sorcery that costs three generic and one red mana; you can also cast it from your graveyard for its Flashback cost of four generic and one red mana, exiling it. When you cast it, you return an instant or sorcery card in your graveyard, or an exiled card with Flashback, to your hand; then you add one red mana.
This is a roleplayer for Storm decks in eternal formats, letting you increase your storm count and pull the best MTG card from your graveyard to recast, as well as rebating you a little mana. Being able to pull cards with Flashback back from exile also provides some insurance against graveyard hate.
It looks a bit too expensive to do much work in Limited, as the quality of cards you’ll be able to buy back with it will be a lot lower than in Constructed. I expect you’ll need to have a really strong red-blue spellslinger deck to make this playable – though with the MTG Final Fantasy release date almost upon us, I’ll be eating my words soon enough if I’m wrong.
Over in Standard, Sorceress’s Schemes forms part of a clunky but amusing infinite combo. Credit for spotting it goes to Redditor Hexanhort, who noted the combo in a discussion in the r/MagicArena subreddit.
The combo relies on ‘Samut, the Driving Force’, from the MTG set Aetherdrift, to enable the combo. Samut is a six mana Legendary Creature that costs three generic, one white, one red, and one green. He’s a decent beat stick, but what’s relevant here is that he can Start Your Engines (introducing the Speed counter from Aetherdrift), and he reduces the cost of non-creature spells you cast by x, where x is your Speed.
Get your speed up to three and you can cast Sorceress’ Schemes for one red mana. You’ll use the spell to retrieve another copy of Sorceress’s Schemes from your graveyard or exile, which you can then cast using the red mana generated by the first copy of the spell. You can keep using one copy of Sorceress’s Schemes to buy back the other copy infinitely.
This loop doesn’t net you any mana, but you can still turn infinite casts into a win in Standard. The easiest way is with a Firebrand Archer, a cheap red creature printed in Foundations, which deals one damage to each opponent whenever you cast a noncreature spell.
A feasible deck? Probably not a tournament topper, but a fun one. Ideally you want to win the same turn that you cast Samut, which means you need to Start Your Engines good and early for his cost reduction, ramp hard, and have some non-trivial removal so you survive the early game.
Fancy sleeving this up and trying it? Going to spend some wild cards to build an MTG Arena deck around this? Let us know how it goes in the official Wargamer Discord community!
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Source: Wargamer
