Hiya folks. Plum here yet again with another episode of Fun & Jank!
This week, we’re diving into a brand-new combo deck I brewed up that’s been putting in some solid work on the Historic ranked ladder. But before I show you what I’ve been playing, you know I love hitting you with a little history lesson, and today is no different. So hop in the jank time machine with me. Let’s take a quick trip back to where the inspiration began.
There’s a sweet little enchantment called Enduring Renewal that was (and still is) the engine for a combo list in some of the older eternal formats like Modern or Legacy. Once it’s in play, you can no longer draw creatures, but it has this other incredible line of text: “Whenever a creature is put into your graveyard from play, return it to your hand.”
Smart players figured out that if you pair it with a zero-cost creature (like Ornithopter or Shield Sphere) and a free sacrifice outlet, you could go infinite—looping the creature over and over to generate etb and death triggers. It showed up in all sorts of shells (gaining the name “Fruity Pebbles”): combo control, storm, even a few semi-competitive Standard brews at different points, but all trying to assemble that same basic triage of cards. At this moment in time, the combo has fallen off, with only a few lists popping up here or there across different formats. People seemed to have gotten bored with it. Most lists are just different flavors of the same thing, with little to no innovation with the deck happening these days.
That being said, even if a card doesn’t excite you right away, I think it’s always worth taking a second look—especially as a brewer. The more weird little cards you stash away in your mental vault, the easier it is to make unexpected connections later. Not every new set interests me, but I always end up taking a scroll through the card gallery just to implant some ideas into my head. The Enduring Renewal combo was one of these little packages I had stored in the back of my mind to save for a rainy day.
The Deck
Now that you have a little background, lets look at the spiritual successor to Enduring Renewal.
Yes, I know they’re two completely different cards, but Chitinous Crawler can fill the same role as Renewal in the Historic Format.
Both cards enable a loop with 0-cost creatures, but they go about it in two different ways:
Enduring Renewal returns dead creatures to your hand automatically, letting you cast them again and again, as long as you had a free sacrifice outlet.
Chitinous Crawler, on the other hand, lets you cast one permanent from your graveyard each turn—as long as you’ve reached Descend 8. If that permanent happens to be a creature that dies automatically (like a Stonecoil Serpent for x=0) then we can cast it an infinite number of times.
So although we have a couple more hoops to jump through, namely having 8 permanents in the yard and Crawler being weak to removal, the tools we have access to in Historic actually make that a rather simple task.
This actually started out as a Timeless list, as I thought fetches were going to be essential to achieving Descend 8. This is a version that had a bit more interaction and a back up plan if the combo failed. I don’t want to dive too deep into it, but let me highlight a few things I liked and disliked.
Ranger-Captain felt great. It meant we could play less X cost creatures and had easy access to things like Stitcher's Supplier or Vermin to fuel Descend.
Souls of the Lost was a sweet plan-b that also helped enable plan-a. Supplier on turn one into a Souls on turn two dumps six cards in the yard.
I played a very small artifact package since Altar of the Brood was my only win-con. Ingenious Smith felt decent because it grabbed Altar or Bauble/Portable Hole/Serpent.
The deck definitely needs at least a few pieces of interaction. Whether that should be removal or discard, I wasn’t sure yet.
As you can probably tell, this version was bad. Timeless was not the place for a combo that was aiming to go off on turn four or five without interaction. Like I mentioned earlier, I really thought fetches were going to be the heart of this deck, but I was proven wrong almost immediately. I learned a few things along the way, but I shelved this list to come back to at a later date.
Second Draft
It just so happened that a friend (shoutout to CanCount210) in the r/MTG:Eternal discord was messing with Crawler last week, but was struggling to find a good shell. They had the same idea as I did originally. Jamming Crawler into a midrange-esque shell that happened to be able to combo off, forcing the other player to respect it or die.
The one thing that really hit me was how convinced they were that it must be a GBx shell. Golgari colors give you good sideboard options against graveyard hate, but more importantly it let you play Shifting Woodland.
And I think this was definitely my “aha” moment. Green has numerous ways to dump cards in the yard which makes it easy to turn on both Woodlands and Crawler, but Shifting Woodlands could also copy any of our combo pieces if they get removed. Literally a match made in heaven. Throw in another well known combo enabler, Beseech the Mirror, and we had a powerful core for a new version of our deck.
So here’s what I came up with, and I absolutely love it. Let me break it down by what role each card plays in the deck.
Our main goal is to get 8 permanents in the yard so we can use Crawler’s ability, with our secondary task being that we need to hit Delirium for Shifting Woodland.
Malevolent Rumble – The best card in the deck that’s not essential to the combo by far. Makes sure we hit our land drops, finds our combo pieces while fueling Descend, and helps us ramp into turn three Chitinous Crawler. Notable that you can sac the token to Beseech as well.
Stitcher’s Supplier – Cheap and simple way to fill our graveyard.
Vessel of Nascency – Plays a very similar role to Rumble, while also being a permanent for Descend and another type for Delirium. I think this card deserves more play than it gets.
Prismatic Vista – We’re trying to get 8 permanents in the yard and turn on Delirium as quick as we can. Without fetches, Vista is the next best thing in my opinion.
The core of the combo is the same, but I wanted to diversify our win-cons a bit more. We have some extra utility built in.
Chitinous Crawler – No explanation needed.
Marketback Walker/Hangarback Walker/Stonecoil Serpent – The numbers here can vary, but with no tutors ~10 felt like a good starting spot, but I’m sure you could get away with 8. These are halfway decent creatures that do a good job gumming up the board, and the fact that they have 2 types for Delirium is even better.
Altar of the Brood – Win condition number one. Easy to cast early and get incremental mill before you go off, and also cheap enough that you can cast it the turn you need it if it’s not on the board already. I’ve also found that having a way to win through infinite life or a Solemnity lock has been necessary in Historic.
The Meathook Massacre – Win condition number two with a built in board wipe. This could easily be a Blood Artist or Marionette Apprentice, but I like the extra utility.
Beseech the Mirror/Shifting Woodland – These are what make the deck fast, consistent, and resilient. Beseech can put Crawler directly into play, or just snag a Malevolent Rumble to hit Descend 8 and make a token. Shifting Woodland is probably what makes this deck competitively viable overall. It copies anything we need it to.
Gameplay
Now before I talk about piloting this list I want to say one thing. This deck is absolutely horrible to play in a digital client. The amount of clicking you have to do to perform the loop, especially if you’re winning with Altar of the Brood, is insane. You will time out. And we all know Arena players, especially in Bo1, get salty. Even after demonstrating the loop I had a ton of opponents who did not value their time or mine, and instead sat there and waited as we drained them click by click from 20 life down to 0.
That being said the deck is straight forward. We try to assemble the following (with any combination of Shifting Woodland and Beseech as well) every game:
We can then use Chitinous Crawler to cast an x-cost creature for x=0, meaning it dies when it enters, and gives us a trigger on Altar or Massacre. Then we just rinse and repeat until our opponent is dead.
We ended this portion of stream with a ~67% winrate and I’m currently sitting at 64% (shown above) after playing some more off-stream. In terms of actual good/bad matchups, the usual suspects against combo are at play here. Counterspells and exile based removal are not our friends. Control isn’t too bad because of Shifting Woodland, but its still an uphill battle for sure.
We also only played this in Bo1 meaning we ran into to soooooo many random people playing maindeck Gaea's Blessing, Tormod's Crypt, Surgical Extraction, and random silver bullets that do well against us. I most certainly want to take this into Bo3 but with grave-hate being so strong against us it’s possible we should leave this to Bo1 only. Our back-up plan of casting our x-cost creatures is not that great. Although I did win a few games off the back of Crawler beat down. Don’t underestimate its ability to conjure additional creatures into the yard.
Closing Thoughts
This list actually felt like one of the most consistent combo brews I’ve ever done. Since the loop is so generic it can easily be adapted with different tools if needed. Dredger's Insight could be thrown in for infinite life or we could play Ornithopter + Goblin Bombardment in place of the x-cost creatures and Altar. Chitinous Crawler is just a very powerful engine in general and allows you to be quite flexible in how you want to support and execute the combo. I would tell you that this deck is blast to play, but then I’d be a liar. It’s consistent, it’s under the radar, but its horrible to pull off on the Arena client. Way too much clicking. But if you enjoy partaking in an endless number of triggers, I’d definitely say you should check this list out.
Thanks for reading.
As always feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below! Make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!
If you want to see these decks in action, come hang out with me on stream where we test, refine, and have a ton of fun together!
Happy Brewing!
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Plum is the creator of the Jank Tank.
He started playing at the ripe old age of 12 and immediately fell in love with the infinite possibilities that deck building could lead to.
He truly understands that jank is a mindset, and spends most of his free time brewing and concocting new and exciting deck lists to help inspire and promote creativity within the MTG community.
