I'm still working through all the colors to build an artifacts-focused deck for each one. For blue, I knew I wanted to use Twiddle. There are so many cool tricks you can do with Twiddle! Not the least of which is to untap Time Vault.
Okay, here's the thing. I want to say this right now. I have no problem with combo decks. I don't have a problem with people who play combo. I don't have a problem playing against combo.
Right.
With that out of the way, actually playing with a combo deck only sort of feels like playing Magic. Basically, you do stuff for a couple of turns and for the most part it doesn't matter what your opponent is doing and then you win (or lose).
My goal for this deck was to beat down with robots, but to use the Time Vault and Twiddle combo to give the deck some oomph. I liked the idea of getting in an extra attack when the opponent wasn't expecting it. What I did not expect was to simply take all the turns that easily.
There isn't one Old School format. There are several different groups that have slightly different restricted lists. The differences really start to show with the Twiddle Vault deck. In all of the major groups, Twiddle is unrestricted. But in some of the groups, Recall and Time Vault are restricted.
For those of you who have not seen the combo, it goes like this: Time Vault comes into play tapped. Use Twiddle to untap it. Tap Time Vault to take another turn. Use Recall to get Twiddle back into your hand. Continue to take turns until you find a win condition. Win.
You are exiling Recall as you go, but it's common to end up Recalling 2-3 Twiddles back to your hand a couple of times and that's a lot of extra turns to figure out a way to win. If you have a Timetwister and run out of Recalls, you can always cast that and hope to draw more Twiddles to keep the party going. Even just a Feldon's Cane is probably enough for the small percentage of time that you would run out of cards without being able to win for some reason.
I am playing Pacific Old School rules which allows only one Time Vault but four Recall. Even without multiple copies of Time Vault (or other obviously broken cards like Black Lotus, Time Walk, or Timetwister), this deck is still bonkers in how easily it strings together a fantastic number of turns.
Usually this is an all-in combo deck with Fireball for the win-con. It runs all five colors for all the restricted cards. It usually runs a Mana Short and/or Power Sink to help set up the turn where your opponent is tapped out and cannot interact with your combo. It usually runs multiple Transmute Artifact to get the Time Vault quickly.
This version of the deck isn't doing any of those things and it still takes all the turns. I can only imagine playing a version with multiple Time Vaults (Atlantic / Swedish)!
I goldfished quite a few times with this to get the hang of it. That seemed fine. But it got crazy when I actually played with it.
We were just playing around for fun at home. I think she got two or three turns in before I took all the turns and won with a combination of Triskelion beats and the Rocket Launcher. The combo was new for the family, so it was fun to demonstrate. Then we swapped decks.
This time I got beat with good old-fashioned robots and Copy Artifact.
We played at least one more time and the combo was readily available and took all the turns.
All the turns.
Playing a combo deck like this is not my jam. That wasn't even my plan. Even just taking a few turns in a row and then passing back creates a massive advantage. Depending on which Old School format they use where you play, if you have access to four copies of Recall it's probably difficult to avoid the combo.
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