Explosion of Riches: Standard Terminal Adamantoise

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Before We Start

In FFXV, the Ancient Adamantoise is the ultimate hunt target and the key to earning the Platinum Trophy. Its absurdly thick health bar is recreated on the Magic card as an eye-popping 8/20 body, and the generous rewards it drops on death become a pile of Treasures on cardboard. Beyond protecting your own team and being very hard to kill, does this thing have a future in the current Standard environment? The new cards from Edge of Eternities have the answer!

Card Analysis

●Ancient Adamantoise
Creature - Turtle
Vigilance, ward {3}
Damage dealt to this creature isn’t removed during cleanup steps.
If a source would deal damage to you or another permanent you control, prevent that damage. This creature is dealt that much damage instead.
When this creature dies, exile it and create ten tapped Treasure tokens.

Ancient Adamantoise effectively gives you and your other creatures 20-plus extra life (excess damage your opponent pours into it gets absorbed too). As long as it doesn’t eat removal, you almost never have to worry about being burst down, and when you’re behind, holding on for two or three turns is usually no problem. When it dies it also produces ten Treasures for you to play with, and that is where I focused my build. There are three problems, though:

1. How to cast Ancient Adamantoise quickly
2. How to reliably get it into the graveyard
3. How to make use of all those Treasures

The decklist I came up with as the answer is below:
Decklist

The cards that pair with Ancient Adamantoise are Biotech Specialist and Terminal Velocity. Biotech Specialist is an early-game accelerant: it creates a Lander token when it enters, and whenever you sacrifice an artifact it deals 2 damage to your opponent, so the ten Treasures from Ancient Adamantoise add up to exactly 20. Then Terminal Velocity can drop a creature or artifact from your hand onto the battlefield, giving that permanent haste and an ability that deals damage to every creature, based on its mana value, when it leaves the battlefield. It is sacrificed automatically at the beginning of the end step. Paired with Ancient Adamantoise, that is one punch for 8 damage plus an 8-damage sweep that wipes out your opponent’s threats. Next turn, slam Biotech Specialist onto the battlefield, sacrifice your Treasures, and shoot your opponent until they burst.

To support this plan, the deck has to be a red-green ramp shell with big creatures as its finishers. To go with Biotech Specialist, I used the new set’s Lander ramp package: Sami’s Curiosity, Larval Scoutlander, and Lithobraking, filling out the one-mana and three-mana Lander curve. Sami’s Curiosity makes a Lander for one mana, and Larval Scoutlander can sacrifice a Lander to fetch two basic lands, getting you to six mana on turn four at the fastest. Lithobraking helps you survive the early game as a small sweeper, and even against a non-creature deck it works as an instant-speed Lander maker.

Of course, having only four Ancient Adamantoise as big creatures is clearly unrealistic, so I added the usual red-green ramp cast: four each of Overlord of the Hauntwoods and Overlord of the Boilerbilges for ramp and damage support. Then four Smuggler’s Surprise refill your resources in the mid to late game or drop two creatures at instant speed to ambush your opponent, and with Treasure support you can pay for the full mode set with tons of mana (mill four and take up to two creature and/or land cards, put up to two creature cards from your hand onto the battlefield, and your creatures with power 4 or greater gain hexproof and indestructible until end of turn).

The last puzzle piece is a way to get the creature combo pieces into your hand: Analyze the Pollen, which, after you collect evidence, can search your library for any creature or land card, and Archdruid’s Charm, a versatile card that lets you choose between searching for a creature at instant speed, searching for a land and putting it onto the battlefield tapped, exiling a target artifact or enchantment, or putting a +1/+1 counter on your creature and having it fight an opponent’s creature. For lands I added a few Fountainport, using its ability to sacrifice tokens and draw cards to recoup the Treasures from Ancient Adamantoise or Landers and boost the deck’s staying power.

Gameplay Demo

As the finisher of a big-creature ramp deck, Ancient Adamantoise really showed off its excellent ability to keep you alive. It not only protects your life total but also lets the Overlords throw themselves into combat regardless of your opponent’s creature lineup. It is a ruthless character that plays much stronger than it looks, truly worthy of being FFXV’s most durable boss.

Conclusion

Although the Standard rotation took away many of the scourges, it still left some obvious tumors, making it hard for some traditional strategies to survive, and I had a real rough time developing new decks. Since nobody wants to drive properly, let’s just throw a turtle shell and blow everyone up. Hope you all enjoy it!