Magic combo is so powerful English language has no words to describe it

When you have only two cards, who needs 60?

That’s all it will take to bring games of The Gathering is Magic The release of Phyrexia: All Will Be One, Magic’s latest expansion. You’ll soon have a new way to blow up your opponents with infinite damage, or by creating a swarm of zombie tokens so large that the English language has yet to create the words needed to describe it. The Phyrexian cult is here, and it’s hunting season for Magic’s combo players.

Seasoned Magic Players will recognize that winning strategies generally fall within one of several buckets. “Aggro” or “beatdown” decks use an army of heroes or creatures to bash an opponent into defeat. Another strategy is called “control,” which effectively prevents an opponent from playing cards altogether while slowly setting up one powerful creature that single-handedly wins the game. And then there are “combo” builds, which typically refers to a specific interaction between two or more cards that effectively wins the game once they’re played in a certain sequence.

While combo decks can be difficult to build, finicky to execute, and hard to learn, they’re as old as the game itself and have defined various eras of Magic’s history. These types of decks can be dangerous. Without triggering the specific combo they’re built around, a combo deck might not be able to win at all. New combo decks don’t come around very often, and those that do emerge don’t necessarily have the moxie to compete at Magic’s The highest possible levels. Yet, there are always new combinations that capture our imagination. Who doesn’t want to press the win button every once in a while?

We are now at Phyrexia. The set is narrated to revolve around a cultlike group of monsters called Phyrexians who are determined on controlling the multiverse. They’re physically large, aesthetically frightening, and many of their card designs are objectively weird. While older Phyrexian creatures don’t see a ton of play today, some of the latest Phyrexia Cards offer new combinations with more versatility and ruggedness in competitive circles as well as beyond.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Among those combos is a two-card win condition. It involves the new Phyrexian Vindicator as well as a card from 20 years ago, GuiltyConscience. Vindicator has an ability that states, “If damage would be dealt to Phyrexian Vindicator, prevent that damage. When damage is prevented this way, Phyrexian Vindicator deals that much damage to any other target.” In other words, damage-based effects don’t destroy this creature, but are instead redirected elsewhere, including other creatures or players.

Meanwhile, Guilty Conscience is an aura card that attaches to creatures, and it reads, “Whenever enchanted creature deals damage, Guilty Conscience deals that much damage to that creature.”

Vindicator should be present at the battlefield equipped with GuiltyConscience in order for this combination to work. Guilty Conscience is activated when Vindicator deals damage or an attack to something. Vindicator then redirects the damage to another target and triggers Guilty Conscience once more. It creates an inexorable loop, which kills all opponents by dealing non-stop damage.

A version of this combo existed before with a card called Stuffy Doll, which was also immune to damage thanks to its “indestructible” ability. Vindicator raises the GuiltyConscience combo, unlike Stuffy doll, which can only kill one player. Vindicator redirects damage to all targets, so it can kill any other player participating in a multiplayer match.

A new combination is possible thanks to Phyrexia goes out to all the math lovers who know what Knuth’s up-arrow notation means. This combo may be exponentially multiplying, but it might not take as much to do the math than keeping up the names on some cards.

Image by Wizards of the Coast

The combination requires three parts. The first is Glory Dominus, the legendary Mondrak creature. Mondrak’s power is in its ability to create lots of tokens, and reads, “If one or more tokens would be created under your control, twice that many of those tokens are created instead.”

Ratadrabik, the legendary Zombie wizard who was first introduced in 2013, is one of the other cards. Dominaria United, and Twinflame, a cheeky red sorcery that first appeared in 2014’s Journey Into Nyx.

Ratadrabik has a lot of text, but the critical ability reads, “Whenever another legendary creature you control dies, create a token that’s a copy of that creature, except it’s not legendary and it’s a 2/2 black Zombie in addition to its other colors and types.”

Twinflame’s mechanics are much simpler. Twinflame creates token copies from other creatures that are in play and can attack immediately. But both cards are crucial to the combo because together they exploit the rule that two copies of the same legendary creature can’t be under one player’s control at the same time.

Keeping in mind that Mondrak doubles the amount of tokens that are created and Ratadrabik’s ability activates as another legendary creature dies, the combo kicks off when Twinflame makes a copy of both Ratadrabik and Mondrak, which triggers Mondrak’s ability to create an extra copy of both. Due to the legend rule, there is now three Ratadrabiks and three Mondrak available on the battlefield simultaneously. Therefore, each of them must die. However, the rules indicate that the controlling person can choose the order in which they die.

↑↑(2↑↑7), a number that has no English-language equivalent and may actually dwarf the number of atoms in the known universe. In my opinion, you can win a card game by producing so many counters that you could actually destroy the continent you are playing on.

This combination was initially shared via a tweet by Magic Gavin Verhey (senior designer) and Gavin Verhey (the photographer) actual sequencing spelled out by the self-proclaimed “Magic rules guru” Nathan Long.

Phyrexia: All Will Be OneAvailable in Paper Version Magic: The Gathering Online, Magic: The Gathering Arena