Much Abrew: Grist's First Day of Class (Historic)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! They recently added Grist, the Hunger Tide to Magic Arena which means it's finally time to build around a combo that I've been thinking about for two years, but just couldn't make work in Modern: Grist's Fist Day of Class! The idea of the deck is to get Grist, the Hunger Tide exiled with Agatha's Soul Cauldron. Since Grist is a creature anywhere but the battlefield, this means that all of our creatures with counters will have Grist, the Hunger Tide's loyalty abilities, which is already pretty funny. If we add one more piece to the puzzle though, like First Day of Class which puts a counter on each creature as it enters and give those creatures haste, we can go fully Insect infinite! We can +1 a creature using Grist, the Hunger Tide's ability which will create a 1/1 Insect token, which will get a +1/+1 counter from First Day of Class, which means we can immediately +1 the new Insect using Grist's ability to make another one! This gives us infinite hasty 2/2 Insects to attack with, basically making our combo a super buggy version of Splinter Twin! How good is Grist, the Hunger Tide in Historic? Can the combo actually work? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Grist's First Day of Class
Discussion
- Record wise, I'm 17-12 with the deck so far, good for a 59% win rate across a ton of matches, which is super solid!
- As I mentioned in the intro, the deck is solely focused on comboing off. Here's the plan: first we need to get Grist, the Hunger Tide in the graveyard, which we can do with a bunch of cards including Faithless Looting, Cache Grab, Malevolent Rumble or Fable of the Mirror-Breaker. We can then play Agatha's Soul Cauldron to exile the Grist, which will oddly give all of our creatures with counters Grist's loyalty abilities (although they will start with zero loyalty, so we are mostly locked into using Grist's +1, which is fine since that's the ability that let's us go infinite anyway). By itself, this synergy lets us slowly generate value. We can +1 all of our creatures to mill a card and make an Insect, and then the next turn use those creatures to make even more creatures, assuming we put a +1/+1 counter on them with Agatha's Soul Cauldron, but we are not looking to just generate some grindy value, we're looking to go infinite, which requires on more card...
- To go fully infinite we need a way to put a counter on our newly made Insects as they enter the battlefield. For this we have three options. Metallic Mimic can do it by naming Insect. Grumgully can do the same thing while also having a slightly more resilient body (it doesn't die to Fatal Push without revolt), but the best option is First Day of Class. The learn instant is perfect for the combo. For just two mana it lets each creature enter with a +1/+1 counter and gives them haste, which means we win the game on the spot. We can +1 a random creature to make an Insect which will enter with a counter so we can immediately make another Insect thanks to Agatha's Soul Cauldron, and we can just keep doing this until we make a few hundred or million Insects, then we can swing in for a ridiculous amount of damage!
- While the main purpose of First Day of Class is put counters on our creatures and give them haste, learn is also oddly relevant. While we do have one lesson in our sideboard in Containment Breach which we can use to answer graveyard hate that stops out combo, if we don't need the lesson we can use First Day of Class to discard a card and draw a card, which means it not only lets us go infinite, but also offers another way of getting Grist, the Hunger Tide into our graveyard!
- Speaking of filling our graveyard, the rest of our deck is either doing that, ramping or killing stuff so we can stay alive long enough to set up the combo. Faithless Looting and Malevolent Rumble are the most important cards here. Faithless Looting let's us get Grist in the graveyard as early as turn one, which potentially sets us up to go infinite on turn three. Meanwhile, the Eldrazi Spawn token that Malevolent Rumble makes is actually pretty helpful, because to start our combo we do need at least one creature on the battlefield to give Grist's ability to.
- There's also a single Eternal Witness in the deck, with the idea being that if we happen to mill over a combo piece while we're looking for Grist we can always use the three-drop to get it back later when we are ready to combo off, and occasionally getting back a removal spell or even just something like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is a pretty good deal.
- Oh yeah, initially I had a Gaea's Blessing in the deck at the insistence of chat, with the idea being that it let us go even more infinite! Technically our combo is limited by the number of cards in our deck because every time we +1 a creature using Grist, the Hunger Tide's ability we have to mill a card, which means eventually we'll run out of cards in our library. If we have Gaea's Blessing in our deck, this won't happen, since when we mill Gaea's Blessing we'll shuffle our graveyard back into our library, so we can keep comboing forever. While this is funny and super fun, the problem with Gaea's Blessing is if we mill it off of something like Malevolent Rumble or Cache Grab we must shuffle our graveyard into our library, which often undoes all of our hard work of trying to get Grist, the Hunger Tide in our graveyard. After having this happen to me a couple of times I decided that as funny as going infiniter is, it just wasn't worth the risk. Every time we comboed we made enough Insects to win the game anyway, even without Gaea's Blessing, so it's not like we really needed it for the deck to work, so once it started fizzling our combo it had to go.
- So should you play Grist's First Day of Class in Historic? I think the answer is yes! A 59% win rate across nearly 30 matches is super solid. While the deck can we a bit inconsistent at times, which makes sense considering it's a three-piece combo, we has so much card filtering and digging that in general we can set it up pretty easily. Plus, the entire combo is just super funny and weird, Both Grist (being a planeswalker that is also a creature) and Agatha's Soul Cauldron (swapping activated abilities to different creatures) are incredibly unique cards, and this deck is a great example of the hilarious things they can both do! If you're looking for something different to try in Historic, give Grist's First Day of Class a shot, it's not only fun, but also pretty good!
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.
