Single card Strategies - Portcullis

In my recent Secret Tech II, I looked at Portcullis as a sleeper rare for EDH. I also presented it very briefly on the Commander Cast Podcast Episode that came out this week. This information was pretty much the same in both places, in brief:


1.) It sticks the number of creatures in play at 2 if there aren't already more than 2 in play.
2.) Creatures enter the battlefield, trigger their CotB effects and disappear under the Portcullis.
3.) When Portcullis leaves play, those creatures will once again CotB and their triggers will fire all over again.
           3.a.) It's a "leaves play" trigger on Portcullis, so bouncing, blinking, exiling or destroying it will work.
4.) It works for your opponent's creatures too.
5.) It hoses Tokens


There are a couple of good things and a couple of bad things in there that I'd like to look at in a little more detail to see how we can work around them.

First of all, you have to look at finding some way to control the entry and exit of Portcullis other than the turn it comes into play. One of the suggestions on the podcast was Master Transmuter and it bears looking at in some detail. What will happen if you return a "loaded" Portcullis to your hand with Master Transmuter and return it to play again?


First, returning the Portcullis will be part of the cost of the ability, so this is a realistic defensive measure if you are planning on running the two cards together. The Transmuter ability goes on the stack. The Portcullis "leaves play" ability goes on the stack after the Transmuter ability and will be resolved first.


All of the hidden creatures come into play and their abilities trigger and resolve. You may then put an artifact into play upon resolution of the Transmuter's ability. For the purposes of this excercise, we're going to return the Portcullis. The creatures that recently came into play will remain there but any further creatures will go the usual route and be hidden by the Portcullis.


That's the very basic up-and-down with Master Transmuter. What happens if you start playing with the trigger orders on creatures coming into play normally rather than creatures hidden by the Portcullis?


A.) A creature comes into play where there are already 2 more creatures in play.
B.) It triggers the Portcullis.
C.) The exile trigger from the Portcullis goes on the stack
D.) Activate the Transmuter, returning the Portcullis: the Transmuter ability goes on the stack.
E.) The Portcullis "leaves play" ability goes on the stack.
F.) Resolve the the Portcullis "leaves play" ability though there's nothing to return.
G.) Resolve the Transmuter ability and return the Portcullis to play.
H.) Resolve the exile trigger on the initial copy of the Portcullis. Exile creature. Cheer.

Now that we have this, we can play with variations on the theme. If we wanted to have creatures under a Portcullis come back into play and leave again right away, how would we do that? We're going to use a Voltaic Key to untap our Master Transmuter and then re-activate her ability, returning a second (unrelated) artifact to hand and the original Portcullis to play. It would look something like this (taken from the top):

1.) Pay U, tap Master Transmuter, Return Portcullis to your hand: Transmuter ability #1 goes on the stack.
2.) Portcullis "leaves play" trigger goes on the stack.
3.) Pay 1, tap Voltaic Key: Untap Master Transmuter.
4.) Pay U, Tap Master Transmuter, Return another artifact to your hand: Transmuter ability #2 goes on the stack.
5.) Transmuter ability #2 resolves, you put Portcullis into play.
6.) Original Portcullis "leaves play" trigger resolves, all creatures hidden under initial Portcullis come into play. The new Portcullis sees these creatures coming into play and, as the active player, you place the exile ability onto the stack. The controllers of these creature's CotB triggers put them onto the stack in clockwise play order.
7.) Resolve the creature's CotB triggers in counter clockwise order.
8.) Exile all newly returned creatures under Portcullis #2 if, including them, there are 2 or more creatures in play.
9.) Resolve the Transmuter ability #1 and put an artifact from your hand into play.

Wow! That's a lot going on right there! You can now "flash" in and out a whole host of creatures that you have hidden under a Portcullis as many times as your opponents will allow you to. Despite all that, there's a small hole in your plan in that you don't always control what the other players are going to do with their CotB abilities if they have any. What if there was something annoying that you just didn't want to see back in the game? You could Stifle the "return to play" trigger of that creature but you can also permanently remove all the creatures coming back in if you're willing to lose any of your own too. This will essentially involve adding the steps A.)-G.) into steps 1.)-8.). (Steps G.) and 8.) are essentially the same.)


Between Steps 6.)  and  8.), after the point where the copy #2 of Portcullis, introduced in Step 5.), triggers upon "seeing" all the creatures coming into play but before you resolve its exile trigger, you need to use a bounce spell or effect (more Master Transmuter activations if you can untap her again) to cause the Portcullis #2 to leave play. The "leaves play" trigger will go on the stack, then resolve, returning all creatures under the Portcullis  #2 to return to play except that there are no creatures under Portcullis #2: they are all still waiting for Portcullis #2 to exile them in Step 8.). What you've done here is slipped A.)-G.) in before you resolve Step 8.). Once you've done that you resolve Step 8.) and exile those creatures. Unfortunatly for them, their lifeline has now been cut and they will stay exiled. How sad. Cheering is not obligatory. Again, there is some price to pay in that any unfriendly CotB effects will fire once, but after that they are gone.


Not every creature will have a relevant CotB effect, some will just be annoying creatures. Either way, if you haven't set up to exile those creatures, when they come back under an opponent's control, unless you have a way to deal with them, it's probably not going to be good news for you. Let's face it, you're not going to be able to remove every creature every time with the method described in A.)-H.). What if I told you that, when these scary creatures came back into play, they'd all be working for you, irregardless of who owned them? Well, it's possible:

If you can find a way (and the hefty mana requirement) to do it, it's entirely possible that, once you have cast a Gather Specimens, you can give the Portcullis a quick spin, get some nifty CotB effects once or twice and end up with the whole army ready to do your bidding.

The other aspect to all this is having only two creatures in play at all times. You're playing blue at least so you have access to some decent control cards as well as man-lands. Having Vedalken Shackles and other Control Magic spells is a good start. Master Transmuter is obviously extremely preferable if you want to do shennanigans. Simply neutering an opponent's creature with Maze of Ith can be an effective route too as players don't really like killing one of their own creatures just to be able to play another one. Other creature-count options are March of the Machines (though this will preclude anyone, including you, from allowing artifacts to come into play) or Karn, Silver Golem and any of the artifacts that become creatures or man-lands like Mutavault and Mishra's Factory.


Just one last point: in the suggestions here, we haven't gone outside Blue. It's entirely possible to stay mono-coloured here as well as branching out into other colours. Go have fun, you crazy kids!

Secret Tech II

So a quick cut to the few rares I thought I'd spotlight featuring 2 cards that you need to build around and a third which is criminally underplayed. Let's start with the most common first.

Hallowed Burial:
"But everyone plays Hallowed Burial!" you say. Unfortunatly, they don't. Everyone should play Hallowed Burial, even before Wrath of God, but players don't do this because WoG is the traditional staple, players don't want to pay 5, players don't want their creatures "tucked" (placed on the bottom of their library) or be see as a player who tucks other player's creatures or players simply just don't realise how strong it is.

Do you remember when we spoke briefly of the importance of graveyard hate in EDH, well the reason is mostly because it's often too easy to bring creatures back from the dead to hand or directly into play. When you're choosing a card to wipe all creatures off the table, putting them into the graveyard is often just delaying things by a turn or two. "Buried" just isn't what it used to be, as Miracle Max said, there's a little dead, mostly dead and Dodo. The Graveyard nowadays is barely even some loose soil scuffed over creatures with the toe of your boot.

So, what are your options? There are very few "Exile all creatures" effects: Decree of Annihilation, False Prophet and Final Judgement being the only other blanket ones. Decree also exiles pretty much everything else and False Prophet can be tricky to control. Final Judgement is another underplayed card and would see more play if it dealt with generals better. The "move to the commander zone" rule allows any generals to be saved from a Final Judgement making it, well, not so final after all. When it's a general you need to nerf, Final Judgement doesn't cut the mustard.

What Hallowed Burial offers, in addition to dealing with all the Indestructibles the traditional WoG leaves behind, is putting pesky generals in the one place that's really very hard to get at with any regularity: Underneath a player's deck. If they don't have a tutor quickly, it's possible they won't get to play with their general at all for the remainder of the game. I hope their deck works well without it! It also neatly sidesteps all the shennanigans that the shallow grave[yard] provides. It's not the ultimate solution because shuffle effects can bring a general or difficult creature back, but in general [heh!], it's a harder lock on a tough general that any other wrath or exile effect.

Portcullis:
I dreged this up as a potential solution for early game defense in my Thada Adel deck. While it can occasionally bite you, you should be able to control the number of creatures on the battlefield. What does it do? It sticks the number of creatures in play at 2. If you control both of those creatures, all the better.

There's a very simple reason why this is an excellent "build around me" card and that's in the first line: "Whenever any creature enters the battlefield....". It may seem a little obvious, but it's important that the creatures actually enter the battlefield as that triggers their CotB effect. Portcullis will then remove those creatures if there are already 2 (or more) creatures on the battlefield. When Portcullis eventually leaves play, those creatures will once again CotB and their triggers will fire all over again. You're essentially getting double duty.

Another important point is the "Leaves play" trigger of Portcullis: it's not a "goes to the graveyard" trigger, so anything that bounces, blinks, exiles or destroys it will work, essentially like an artifact Reveillark. If you can manage the multiple entries and exits of the Portcullis, it can get pretty crazy.

The only hole in your plan is that it works for your opponent's creatures and any 187 abilities of their creatures will also do double duty. You can't have it all! That said, I've seen some pretty crazy card advantage using Portcullis with Acidic Slime and Duplicant being just two of the CotB effects that you really want to see happen more than once.

For you, of course.

EDIT: I totally forgot to mention what I was looking for defense against when I included this in my Thada-Adel deck, which is relevant because it can completely shut down the strategy until the Portcullis is dealt with and that is Tokens. Unlike non-tokens, once a token is exiled with Portcullis, it will cease to exist and will not be re-created once the Portcullis leaves play. As long as you can keep the Portcullis in play and have 2 other creatures in play, no tokens will make it onto the battlefield and survive.

Cloudstone Curio:
Another artifact and another "build around me" card. What's the deal with the Curio? When Ravnica came out there was a minor buzz about the card but that was quickly swallowed up by how easy it was to play your ultra-efficient gold/hybrid cards, the speed of the format with Boros as the new posterboy and a relative lack of cards that you really wanted to use with the Curio in the format. Most cards in Ravnica did what they did when they were in play, rather than when they came into play. I honestly believe that Cloudstone Curio would have been an excellent rare in a different block but, sadly, it was pretty much chaff in Ravnica.

What does it do? When a permanent other than an artifact comes onto the battlefield under your control, you can return any other permanent of the same type to your hand. Firstly, why did they exclude artifacts? It was just too easy to play a couple of 0cc artifacts, gain free infinite storm and win. As cost reducers on other permanent types generally only reduce generic mana, not coloured mana, there's a good chance that free infinite storm would be harder to achieve. Land being the only other permanent with no mana cost though with a built-in 1-per-turn restriction, it was a pretty good fix excluding artifacts. There are still two legacy-legal "free" infinite storm combos however the individual pieces are underwhelming in a format that can't afford dead cards.*

What Cloudstone Curio provides you with is the ability to return a permanent to your hand, however, you're only likely to do that if you're set to gain from doing so. Let's start with something very basic:

You have a Nekrataal in play. You want to re-play the Nekrataal somehow. Your options are:
1.) Play Blue to bounce the Nekrataal back to your hand. You'll spend mana on the initial Nekrataal, a card and mana on the bounce spell and again, mana on the Nekrataal. You'll still only have a Nekrataal in play at the end of it all.
2.) Play White to blink the Nekrataal. This isn't strictly "re-playing" the Nekrataal, though you'll get the desired effect. You'll spend mana on the initial Nekrataal, a card and mana on the blink spell and again, mana on the Nekrataal. You'll still only have a Nekrataal in play at the end of it all.
3.) Play Cloudstone Curio and another creature. The first advantage is that you don't have to go outside black. The second advantage is that you pay 3 for the Curio and it stays in play, it's not a one-shot. In the case of blinking and bouncing above you're down a card to get the Nekrataal. Here, you will have a second creature in play when the Nekrataal is back in your hand so your board presence is not diminished and, when you re-play the Nekrataal, you can return the other creature to your hand to repeat the process again and again. You'll end up paying 3 and the cost of the two creatures over and over but you're slowly destroying their resources and you're using no additional cards. In the first two examples it was essentially a one time deal until you drew another bounce or blink spell.

Imagine now that the second creature in our little Cloudstone Curio loop is another 187 Nekrataal-like ability. Each creature kills something and sets you up to be able to do it again. Now substitute Nekrataal for Acidic Slime or Mulldrifter or Flametongue Kavu etc. and watch yourself develop CA and all without spending any more cards than the 2 creatures and the Curio in play.

That's the basic version utility, which is already pretty decent. Let me come at it a different way. One of the avenues to building a great deck is to break the basic rules of the game: Play 1 land per turn, draw one card per turn. If you can find a way to play multiple lands per turn consistantly, you can do bigger things earlier than your opponent and, ideally, win. If you can consistantly draw more cards per turn than your opponent, you provide yourself with a much higher quality card selection and, ideally, can overwhelm your opponent through sheer CA.

We've already seen how we can constantly draw more cards with something like Mulldrifter but, let's face it, 5 for Mulldrifter and 4 for Nekrataal is a lot of mana. What about if we did this with lands instead of creatures? You tap a basic land for mana, you play a basic land, the Curio triggers and you return the tapped basic land to your hand. You now have 1 mana in your pool, 1 land in your hand and an untapped basic land in play. From this point, once you have Cloudstone Curio in play and a land in hand, you will never miss a land drop for the remainder of the game. If you increase your land drops, you will increase your mana count so we can add something like Exploration or Azusa, Lost but Seeking which allows us to do this multiple times.
  
Now, let's change those basic lands out for a Gaea's Cradle and a Temple of the False Gods. Suddenly, you're not producing 1 mana you're getting 2 or GGGG or more with each loop.

Stick with me now because we're going to look at some rules: When a permanent leaves play and then returns to play, the game treats the permanent as a new object. If you had an effect that said "Target land can't tap for mana until the end of the game" and the target leaves and re-enters play later in the game, even if it's physically the same card, the game treats it as a new permanent and the original effect would no longer apply. Let's apply that to Azusa: I have Azusa in play. I play the additional lands that Azusa allows me to. I return Azusa to my hand somehow and play it again. I can now play two additional lands again. Let's break that down with Candy Bars:

- Land drops = Candy Bars
- You get one free Candy bar every turn
- When you have Azusa in play, she gives you two extra candy bars. You can choose to eat them or not (But don't forget to say which candy bar you're eating is the usual free one or the Asuza ones!) but if you don't eat them, they are lost.
- If Azusa leaves and re-enters play, you get two extra candy bars. You can choose to eat them or not.
- Repeat for every fresh instance of Azusa.

So, what this is telling us us that we're probably going to be eating a lot of candy bars but also that, if we can find a way to return Azusa to our hand cheaply with a Cloudstone Curio in play, we can re-play her again and again if we can generate enough mana from the extra land we're looping in and out. Gaea's Cradle should take care of the mana, even give us some extra but returning Azusa will require a Dryad Arbor or a Khalni Garden. The first is a creature and the second produces a creature and is a land so it can do double duty (2 permanents CotB, so the Curio will trigger twice).

What makes most of this academic is that it doesn't really do much unless you've got enough creatures in play to generate a lot of mana from the Gaea's Cradle. You'll probably only break even most of the time but it's patiently insufficient without other creatures or cards in play, though the Khalni Garden allows you to kick off by generating a little army of Plant Tokens netting you +1 mana each loop with the Cradle. Without either of the Cradle or the Garden you're not going far and we're already at 4-5 cards just to turn the wheels. What it does provide you with is the ability to add a card or two and create a snowball effect.

Imagine that, in addition to the above cards (in a colour that has issues tutoring for anything other than Lands & Creatures), you have a Horn of Greed in play. How many lands were we intending to play again? When you add in the simple expedient of drawing a card when you go through your loop, you suddenly have access to your entire deck. While you may have reservations playing a symetrical card like Horn of Greed because you really need to draw more cards than you have opponents for it to be worthwhile, this is one instance when you can see that it's worth it.

You can draw your entire deck, in mono green, without Staff of Dominantion, by the simple expedient of playing a land. Is it convoluted and stupidly difficult to achieve with any regularity? Yes, it is. Perfect for EDH and Cloudstone Curio allows this.

Ok, I can hear the groans from somwhere in the back there that this is a stupid combo and shouldn't be played in EDH etc. etc. but I believe it all comes down to intent. Would I like it to come off in a game? Sure! Does it? Rarely but, in the meantime, Cloudstone Curio is still garnering CA through bouncing a few 187 creatures, allowing me multiple instances of landfall and allowing me to draw an extra card or two a turn.

"Stupid Combo" would be pairing Cloudstone Curio with Aluren though never has flavour text been so apt when it comes to your playgroup's reaction to a card:

A Kidney and a Speeny indeed.

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* The two free Legacy legal infinite storm combos with Cloudstone Curio are:
1.) Curio + 2x Kobolds, the 0cc red 0/1 creatures
2.) Curio + Tangleroot + 2x 1cc green creatures, probably Elves.