Against the Odds: I Saw in Half My Way to Infinite Everything (Historic)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Saw in Half is an incredibly cool and unique card, blowing up a creature but making two token copies of that creature with half the stats. While I've played with it in Commander a few times, mostly in Panharmonicon decks, today, we're going to see if we can use the instant as an infinite combo piece in Historic! Our deck has multiple ways to Saw in Half instantly, which can lead to some pretty hilarious situations! What are the odds of winning by infinitely sawing our own creatures in half? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Saw in Half Combo
The Deck
Saw in Half is a wild card. There's really nothing else like it that exists in Magic. It looks like a removal spell, but in reality, you almost never want to use it on your opponent's creatures because it will give them two (slightly smaller) versions of the creature, which isn't great. The true power of Saw in Half is using it on your own creatures. While we can just do this for value, a couple of creatures actually allow us to Saw in Half infinitely, which is our goal today!
The most straightforward combo for Saw in Half is Dualcaster Mage, the three-drop flasher that copies an instant or sorcery spell when it enters. If we can cast Saw in Half targeting any random thing on the battlefield, we can flash in Dualcaster Mage in response, use it to copy the Saw in Half and then use this new copy of Saw in Half to blow up the Dualcaster Mage, making two new 1/1 copies. At this point, we're infinite. The new Dualcasters can copy the Saw in Half still on the stack to make more Dualcasters, with the end result being infinite 1/1 tokens that we can use to win the game with by beating our opponent down. But the combo is even funnier than that!
Each time we go though the combo loop, we get two copies of Dualcaster Mage, but we only need one of those copies to copy the Saw in Half. The other copy of Dualcaster Mage can target whatever we want, which means if we can combo while there is a spell on the stack (either one of our spells or our opponent's), we can also make infinite copies of that spell. We actually did this in our matches against an extra-turn deck, giving ourselves infinite extra turns. But something as simple as a Lightning Bolt on the stack means we win the game right away with our infinite copies without even needing to attack! This also means that we can use this same trick to make infinite token copies of any creature we happen to control, which is a nice bonus.
Our second Saw in Half combo requires three cards: Saw in Half, Pinnacle Monk, and Sacrifice. If we can get Pinnacle Monk on the battlefield, we can blow it up with Saw in Half to get two copies and also return the Saw in Half to our hand with Pinnacle Monk's enters trigger. Now, we can sacrifice one of the Pinnacle Monks to Sacrifice to make five black mana, spend three of it on Saw in Half to blow up the other Pinnacle Monk to make two more copies, and then return the Saw in Half and the Sacrifice from our graveyard to our hand with their enters triggers. Each time we go through the loop, we're making five mana (from the Sacrifice) but only spending four (three for Saw in Half, one for Sacrifice), which means we make not only infinite mana with the combo but also infinite copies of Pinnacle Monk since eventually, we'll have enough floating mana that we'll be able to keep casting the Saw in Half to copy the Pinnacle Monk without needing to Sacrifice the other copy.
We also have two one-ofs that almost but don't quite go infinite with Saw in Half, in Ardent Elementalist and Cormela, Glamour Thief. Ardent Elementalist is basically Pinnacle Monk but for one less mana, which is oddly a drawback since it makes less mana if we Sacrifice it, keeping it from going fully infinite. (If we do the Pinnacle Monk combo but with Ardent Elementalist, we get infinite death triggers and storm count, but those don't really do anything in our deck.) Meanwhile, Cormela, Glamour Thief would go infinite, but it's legendary, so we can only ever keep a single copy on the battlefield. The good news is that both cards offer value in the deck, letting us get our combo pieces and tutors back from our graveyard to our hand.
The last piece of our puzzle is finding our combo pieces. Since we have multiple creatures that can combo with Saw in Half but no backup for Saw in Half, most of our energy is spent trying to ensure we find a copy of Saw in Half as quickly as possible each game. Faithless Looting and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker help by digging through our deck. But our best ways to find Saw in Half are our tutors. Solve the Equation just directly tutors up an instant or sorcery (like Saw in Half) for three mana. Meanwhile, Gamble can tutor up anything for a single mana, but with the risk that we have to discard a card from our hand at random. The good news is that since our deck is so good at getting cards back from the graveyard to our hand thanks to Pinnacle Monk, Ardent Elementalist, and Cormela, Glamour Thief, we're a very good Gamble deck. Even if we end up discarding the Saw in Half, odds are we can get it back in our hand shortly thereafter.
Wrap-Up
Record wise, we went 9-4 with the deck, good for a very nice 69% win rate. It turns out that it's actually pretty easy to go infinite with Saw in Half, and in the games where we did go infinite, we almost always won. The "almost" is pretty funny though. Technically, the Dualcaster Mage with Saw in Half combo can create an unbreakable loop. If there are no other creatures on the battlefield, Dualcaster Mage must copy Saw in Half when it enters, and Saw in Half most blow up the Dualcaster Mage. We actually had this happen in one of our games, where our opponent used a protection spell to make their only creature hexproof, leaving Dualcaster Mage as the only legal target for Saw in Half. In paper, this would just end the game in a draw, but on Arena, your turn clock will eventually run out, and everything on the stack will fizzle, which is both a blessing and a curse. It ended up costing us the game I mentioned before because we were trying to combo during our opponent's combat step to make infinite blockers, and once we ran out of time, Arena wouldn't let us block. But most of the time, it means we end up winning the game since we can keep comboing until we run out of time, then untap and attack for lethal.
The only disappointing part of the deck was that even though we have two different combos, most of our wins came from Dualcaster Mage. While we did pop off with Pinnacle Monk and Sacrifice a couple of times, a huge percentage of the wins came from Dualcaster Mage going infinite with Saw in Half, which I guess makes sense considering the Dualcaster combo only require two cards while the Monk combo requires three. But I was still hoping for a somewhat more even mix of combo kills.
Oddly, I came away from playing this deck feeling like it might actually be pretty good in Pioneer. We were playing at Top 1,500 mythic, and the deck was surprisingly smacking people. If you're looking for something different and spicy to try in the format, give Saw in Half Combo a shot!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
