THE REFINED REGAL COMBO

Alright, so yesterday's "Brawl Wednesday" might have broken me a little. The cavalcade of Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God, Golos, Tireless Pilgrim, and Niv-Mizzet Reborn decks all trying to outgreed and outvalue each other led me down a dark competitive path to try to shut all that shit down in the most ridiculous "I Win" way possible. So I took my old Kenrith deck and removed the Happily Ever After win condition, focusing instead on tons of card draw and ramp, trying to get the infinite mana combo off as fast as possible, or simply getting enough mana on the board to make Kenrith slam in hard and win the game on the spot with hasty trample damage. So let's see what monstrosity I came up with.

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I really loved my original Kenrith deck. It felt powerful and fun and it had two goofy win conditions on top of all the powerful cards it ran. But while it was super fun, there were a couple of expensive (or just color-intensive) cards in there that didn't really feel like they were adding much to the overall gameplan other than getting the Happily Ever After win. So I cut the Niv Mizzet, Reborn package, removed a TON of dual-colored cards, and added in more card draw and ramp (also removed the stupid Leyline of Abundance because that card is BAYED when you only have one copy of it in your deck). What I ended up with was a deck that went 9-1 yesterday in Brawl, losing only to an incredibly aggressive start from a Judith, the Scourge Diva deck in which I also mis-tappped my mana and couldn't cast the board clear I needed in time. This deck is super fun to play and gives you a LOT of options with its card draw, tutors, and incredibly powerful commander abilities. You WILL be manually tapping your lands quite a bit with this deck, so if you don't like doing that maybe skip on this one.

The Ramp:

Yep, that's 12 cards in this deck that are all about the ramp! There will be even more cards that ramp on top of doing other things later on, but there's a reason for that: we need a lot of mana, and a lot of different colors of it. We want to establish this mana as early as possible to make sure we can then tutor for or draw the cards we need in the midgame, or to just make sure we can cast Kenrith and activate him a couple of times if in an emergency. For dorks we run Gilded Goose, Incubation Druid, Maraleaf Pixie, Paradise Druid, Faeburrow Elder, Gyre Engineer, and Leyline Prowler. As you may have noticed, both Incubation Druid and Faeburrow Elder are part of our combo, but you don't really need to have both, so feel free to cast at least one early on as a mana dork to get you going. We have a few ways of recurring these as well, so it's not the end of the world if both end up in your graveyard. The other side of ramp in this deck comes in the form of our spells and mana rocks. Arcane Signet is an all star in this deck, tapping for any color of mana, and Chromatic Lantern is an absolute must as it should fix our colors for the rest of the game. Then we have Growth Spiral, Circuitous Route, and Escape to the Wilds which not only ramp us, but also help thin our deck and get us closer to our combo, if Kenrith isn't enough to close the game on his own.

The Card Selection:

We're going to be seeing a lot of our cards, yo. This deck doesn't need as much card advantage as it needs specific cards, so we prioritize tutor or impulse effects, only running one Chemister's Insight as pure card draw because that card can dig us 4 cards deeper into our deck, which is just really good. For our tutors we run Scheming Symmetry and Wishclaw Talisman. While these cards are incredibly risky, if used properly they can help us find a much-needed board clear or combo piece. While Scheming Symmetry doesn't put the card in our hand, we have many ways to draw it after putting it on top of our deck. We also run a Teferi, Time Raveler, who lets us bounce the talisman back to hand or cast Scheming Symmetry at instant speed, letting me feel real smart when I cast it in response to a Golos, Tireless Pilgrim ETB trigger, forcing him to choose between grabbing a land from his deck and then shuffling or tutoring for a card next turn (also casting it on the opponent's end-step is really cool). We run Anticipate, Shimmer of Possibility, and Bond of Flourishing to find our important combo pieces, and since a lot of them are permanents the bond actually works quite well. Drawn from Dreams once again feels amazing in this deck, and Shared Summons can help us find any of the creatures we need, be them the combo dorks or a Hydroid Krasis, Cavalier of Thorns, or Golos, Tireless Pilgrim in case we are under some pressure.

The Board Clears:

Well, we have access to all colors, so we're jamming as many safety valves in here as possible. We run the cream of board clears in this deck, with Kaya's Wrath and Time Wipe as excellent, albeit color-intensive ways to deal with early aggression. Planar Cleansing is hilarious and a great emergency "Fuck this shit" reset on the board that hits planeswalkers, one of this deck's greatest weaknesses. Casualties of War doesn't exactly clear the board, but it can hit planeswalkers and is mostly here to deal with Golos, Tireless Pilgrim decks (remember to choose Golos as the artifact in case your opponent has another creature in play. Finally, Realm-Cloaked Giant is a board clear that can be found with Bond of Flourishing and Shared Summons, as well as being a very decent closing threat alongside Kenrith if given haste and tample.

Backup + Interaction:

Sometimes you do need just a little bit of the "good stuff" to make your combo deck pop. So yes, we do run Golos, Tireless Pilgrim with Field of the Dead, Nissa, Who Shakes the World, Cavalier of Thorns, and Hydroid Krasis. But all of these cards do something that help us get to our main gameplan, either by drawing us cards, giving us more mana to work with, or providing us with blockers in case we are getting aggressed on. They also become must-answer removal targets a lot of the time, taking the focus away from our combo dorks and draining our opponent of their removal before we cast our commander. For protection from counterspells, another of this deck's glaring weaknesses, we run Teferi, Time Raveler, who also has all those synergies mentioned before, as well as being just a great card, and the banned-in-almost-all-formats Veil of Summer. This is a dead card vs. a few decks, but its ability to protect our threats and combo from black removal, countering, or Mass Manipulation makes it a worthy include in the deck.

The Lands:

Whoo boy, I spent so much time on this one. You can tell because it actually has 26 lands in it. There's nothing fancy in here in terms of utility lands, though we obviously run one Field of the Dead to fetch with Golos and because we have so many differently-named lands. It provides us with some good board clutter, and if we build up enough zombies we can give them all haste and trample for powerful alpha attack with Kenrith, if necessary. The land choice is a little all over the place, and I prioritized having as many temples as possible to help scry for the cards we need in our deck. We run 5 basics in 2 Islands and 3 Forests, 7 guild gates (we don't run Rakdos, Orzhov, and Selesnya gates), and a bunch of shock lands as well as a Fabled Passage and a Command Tower. I'm still tinkering with the mana base in the deck and I'm sure there's a way to refine this part of the deck even more. Not running any Selesnya dual lands feels like a bit of a miss, but so far the mana has treated me well. This is definitely the part of the deck I'm most curious to hear suggestions for.

And that's it! The more refined Kenrith combo deck. It's not the best one out there, but it's the best one I've made so far, and I've been having a blast with it. If you're feeling competitive I'd encourage taking this for a spin and figuring out how to make it even tighter. Enjoy!