Much Abrew: Cosmogoyf Self Destructs (Standard)

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Cosmogoyf is one of the coolest cards from Edge of Eternities, as a Tarmogoyf that cares about cards in exile rather than the graveyard, although it hasn't really taken off in Standard so far. But what if, unlike Tarmogoyf, which is mostly a fair midrange card, Cosmogoyf is actually a combo piece in disguise? That's what we're going to find out today! The goal is simple: self-mill aggressively and then use a collect-evidence card to exile our entire graveyard, which will hopefully grow Cosmogoyf to 20 or more power. At this point, we can win the game by using Self-Destruct to throw damage equal to Cosmogoyf's power directly at our opponent's face, winning us the game on the spot! Is Cosmogoyf actually a combo piece? Can our plan work? Let's get to the video and find out!

Much Abrew: Cosmogoyf Self Destructs

Discussion

• Record wise, we finished 3-4 with the deck, which isn't horrible but also isn't great. While the deck feels powerful when everything comes together, it can be a bit slow and clunky when things don't come together and we draw our deck in the wrong order.
• Before talking about the deck, the most important thing to realize about Cosmogoyf Self Destructs is that it's a full-on combo deck. While it might look a bit like a midrange deck at first glance, in reality, we're very unlikely to actually win fairly. Instead, we're trying to set up a combo, which is essentially getting 20 cards in our graveyard, exiling them all to a collect evidence card, playing a Cosmogoyf, and throwing it at our opponent! If you decide to take the deck out for a spin, keep your focus on assembling the combo rather than trying to piece together a fair win.
• So, here's how the deck works. In the early game, we try to fill our graveyard as fast as possible with Rubblebelt Maverick, Town Greeter, and Overlord of the Balemurk (which is especially important because it allows us to return combo creatures like Cosmogoyf from our graveyard to our hand if we mill them). 
• The next step is exiling our entire graveyard to grow the Goyf with a collect-evidence spell. For this, we have Urgent Necropsy, Analyze the Pollen, and one Vitu-Ghazi Inspector. Of these, Analyze the Pollen is the strongest since, along with exiling our graveyard, it allows us to tutor up a Cosmogoyf or, if we already have a Goyf, a Callous Sell-Sword for fling purposes. As far as Vitu-Ghazi Inspector, it's not a card I ever expected to play in a constructed deck, but it serve a very important purpose: it's a collect-evidence card that we can get back from our graveyard with Overlord of the Balemurk, which is super helpful since we self-mill so aggressively.
• The final piece of the puzzle is to play Cosmogoyf and use it to win the game. So, how do we win with Cosmogoyf? We've got two plans. First, we can play it and use Herd Heirloom to give it trample so we can win with combat damage. But an even faster plan is simply throwing the Goyf at our opponent with either Self-Destruct or Callous Sell-Sword, either of which allows us to win the game on the turn we play Cosmogoyf since they don't care about summoning sickness, unlike Herd Heirloom. 
• And that's basically the deck, although I did want to mention that I generally don't think it's worth running out Cosmogoyf early in most matchups. If we are up against a deck without hard removal (like red or green decks, primarily), then running out Cosmogoyf as soon as it's somewhat big makes sense because even without support, a 7/8 Goyf is going to dominate the game. But against decks with removal, I think it's often better to try waiting until we get the combo kill set up before playing the Goyf so we don't lose it to removal.
• Speaking of removal, by far the hardest matchups for the deck are removal-heavy black decks like Dimir and Golgari. The trick to beating Cosmogoyf Self Destructs is to simply kill the Cosmogoyf with the Fling on the stack. (Sadly, both Self-Destruct and Callous Sell-Sword are worded in a way that gives opponents a window to kill the Goyf before the spell resolves.) I'm not really sure what the solution to this problem is, outside of adding some discard like Duress to the sideboard to try to get the removal from our opponent's hand preemptively.
• So, should you play Cosmogoyf Self Destructs in Standard? If you really like Cosmogoyf or Fling-style decks, I think the answer is yes, although overall, I found the deck pretty medium in terms of how competitive it really is. But the surprise Goyf Self-Destruct kills are super hilarious!

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.