Grixis Venture

Overview

As I was working on the Historically Inaccurate - Dungeon Combo article I came to the realization that although the deck was fun to combo off with, you ended up decking yourself quite often. Sure you could go infinite, but doing so took a long time and caused you to draw a bunch of cards. I tried compensating for this by allowing you to shuffle cards back into your deck, but the whole thing felt slow and sluggish.

What the deck needed was a way to close out the game. After a ton of thought I decided to change the deck to Grixis colors, which kept the core loop of the deck intact while opening us up to some great ways to close out the game such as and

Venture Forth

We are at our core a deck looking to venture into a whole lot of dungeons, so it might seem odd that we only run a single card that can actually do that, and not even a whole playset at that. But the reality is that we don't need any other forms of venture as the this single repeatable outlet is more then sufficient once we get going and does every last thing the deck wants to be doing. It's big enough to trigger our payoffs, it's low cost makes venturing over and over a real threat, and it's wizard typing helps us gain value through synergies in the deck.

In terms of actual dungeons we are almost always venturing into the Dungeon of the Mad Magesince planting an usually means we win the game. However we will venture into Lost Mine of Phandelver on occasion too (Such as when we need the treasure a little earlier). Due to the way our deck works, we will basically never venture into Tomb of Annihilation since doing so causes our infinite combo to stop working.

Can You Repeat That?

Why settle for one venture trigger when you can have more venture triggers. I added a full suite of ETB doubling cards into the deck to ensure that every time you cast Acererak your getting maximum value.

Go Infinite

One of the best parts of the deck is going infinite with Omniscience. Once you stick on on the field you can continue to cast Acererak the Archlich who ventures, then bounces itself, allowing you to repeat the process over and over until you drain your opponent through all the various lose life triggers and other value.

Payoffs

The previous version of the deck relied strictly on getting the infinite combo on board to win. But more and more as I played I found that even with the combo I was decking myself of getting out valued by life gain or life loss ETBs. The deck needed a way to end the game quickly when I got the combo off. Adding red enabled me to put in two threats that interact nicely with the combo to end the game very quickly once live.

You're a Wizard...

The deck has an interesting Wizard subtheme. We are already running Naban to double up our wizard ETB triggers (And even triggers), so we double down on that synergy by playing a few more wizards to churn through our deck looking for the combo pieces.

Staying Alive

Even if we plan on cheating an into play, which we usually don't, that is a whole lot of mana and venturing and some opponents may just decide to try and kill us rather then watch the glory that is our combo go off. For those cases we have a removal package designed to reset the board to more favorable states.

It's also great to remember that both of our payoffs can deal with pesky Planeswalkers and creatures as well.