Modern Elemental Combo, the new budget powerhouse

(Note: It was just pointed out to me that this combo doesn't actually work the way I originally thought.  I will be revising shortly.)

So, Weirfish posted this really cool Modern Elemental combo deck today on Reddit. It looked like this:

Creature (26)

    4x Brighthearth Banneret
    4x Cinder Pyromancer
    4x Flamekin Harbinger
    4x Grinning Ignus
    2x Smokebraider
    4x Soulbright Flamekin
    4x Storm Entity

Sorcery (10)

    2x Fireball
    4x Grapeshot
    2x Ignite Memories
    2x Volcanic Awakening

Artifact (4)

    4x Dragon's Claw

Land (20)

    20x Mountain

This kinda just does everything a depraved casual combo player wants to be doing: Search my library, Play cheap spells, Go Infinite. Here's how the deck works: Step 1: Find a Brighthearth Banneret Step 2: Find a Grinning Ignus Step 3: Find a Cinder Pyromancer, another Brighthearth Banneret, or a Storm spell with enough mana to cast it. Once you have these 3 creatures, you can play Grinning Ignus, then return it to your hand an infinite number of times. If you have two Bannerets in play, then you also net 1 mana per cycle. This will let you win the game through any number of really fun ways, for example Fireball for 4,000,000.

That's cool, but why would I play this?

To be honest, this deck actually looks pretty solid for something that is meant for casual fun. It can even go off on turn 3!

But what would make this into a competitive modern deck? Lets start with the obvious question:

Why would I ever play this instead of Twin or Past in Flames?

Yea, you're right, this deck will never be quite as good as Past In Flames or Splinter Twin. It requires 3 cards to go off, loses to a Lightning Bolt, and has no disruption (at least for now!). But it does have a lot of things going for it that we can look to exploit:

• It has a tutor that costs 1 mana, finds all of the combo pieces, AND finds the win condition. Hell, we don't even get that in Legacy ANT.
• It is in a single color, leaving us open to splashing anything, running Blood Moon, and more importantly, making Blood Moon dead against us.
• Your opponents will instantly tilt when they lose to Flamekin Spitfire.  In Modern.
• This deck is very fun to play.  But I shouldn't need to say that :)
• The deck is cheaper than most of the other decks out there.

So, let's make this engine work.

WARNING: This deck is about to get expensive, and crazy hard to play correctly. I'll be making an easier, budget version at the end.

Insert Witty Pun Here

• 4 Brighthearth Banneret
• 4 Grinning Ignus
• 4 Flamekin Harbinger
• 1 Flamekin Spitfire
• 4 Grapeshot
• 3 Faithless Looting
• 4 Thoughtseize
• 1 Duress
• 2 Infernal Tutor
• 4 Spoils of the Vault
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Seething Song
• 4 Manamorphose
• 4 Blood Crypt
• 4 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Arid Mesa
• 5 Mountain

This is probably far from optimal, but this deck is already VERY good. Let me explain some choices:

Right now in Modern, the hardest to answer win condition for this deck is Grapeshot. We really want to see it every game, in fact, I usually love seeing two. Sadly, the world isn't perfect, so we need Spoils of the Vault. Spoils is a very hard card to play, and many risk-averse players really dislike it, but we don't have a good alternative. It has been calculated a few times that you will lose something like one in every 15 games to it.  I would much rather lose to Spoils than to not being able to find my combo pieces.  When I cast it, I am almost always naming Grapeshot or Banneret.

Manamorphose/Gitaxian Probe: I want to maximize my percentages of drawing my combo pieces naturally, meaning a smaller deck is worth any life payment or vulnerability these incur. Gitaxian Probe also works as a way to know the way is clear against Control. Manamorphose helps us make black mana for Infernal Tutor, which is hard in this deck.

Infernal Tutor: The reason this card is so good in this deck is because it is pretty often that we end up wanting a second copy of something in our hand. We always want 2x Banneret and with many hands, we can go off with this as our last card in hand, to find Grapeshot.

Flamekin Spitfire:  This is for the sweet hands where we have Harbinger, but no win condition.  It sucks to draw sometimes, but isn't dead very often.  I prefer this over Storm Entity because it beats all creature removal (you can put 20 activations on the stack in response to removal).  This does mean that we are incredibly soft to Leyline of Sanctity, but we will have many answers to that post-board.

Let me walk through a sample hand to show how this deck can play.

Flamekin Harbinger, Grinning Ignus, Brighthearth Banneret, Infernal Tutor, Mountain, Mountain, Blood Crypt

This is basically our ideal hand. We are always playing Harbinger turn 1, and we have a choice of finding another Banneret or Flamekin Spitfire. I think the better line of play here is to try to go off Turn 4, finding Spitfire. This is because if our draw step on turn 3 is not Manamorphose, we cannot make the black mana necessary for Infernal Tutor and still go off. My line is this: Turn 1: Harbinger for Spitfire. Turn 2: Infernal tutor, revealing Banneret. Turn 3: Play two Bannerets or an. Turn 4: Make infinite mana, then activate Spitfire 20 times.

So, the budget version?  Glad you asked.

Here is how I would build this given a budget restriction of around $25.

• 4 Brighthearth Banneret
• 4 Grinning Ignus
• 4 Flamekin Harbinger
• 1 Flamekin Spitfire
• 4 Grapeshot
• 4 Faithless Looting
• 4 Duress
• 2 Infernal Tutor
• 4 Spoils of the Vault
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Seething Song
• 4 Manamorphose
• 3 Blood Crypt
• 4 Blackcleave Cliffs
• 2 Graven Cairns
• 4 Sulfurous Springs
• 4 Mountain

It is arguable that this version is actually better.

I'll see if I can make some MTGO videos of this to see it in action!