Grim Hireling: Standard Umbral Goldkeeper

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

Before We Start

Tarkir: Dragonstorm is a three-color clan environment full of dragons. Among the clan three-color dragons, besides a cycle of mythic Spirit Dragons, there is also a cycle of uncommon three-color dragons, and this deck’s theme is one of these low-rarity three-color dragons. “It’s only an uncommon, and a four-mana creature at that; is its power really enough?” Sultai’s Kheru Goldkeeper has exactly that potential.

Card Analysis

Kheru Goldkeeper
Creature - Dragon
Flying
Whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard during your turn, create a Treasure token. (It’s an artifact with “{T}, Sacrifice this token: Add one mana of any color.”)
Renew - {2}{B}{G}{U}, Exile this card from your graveyard: Put two +1/+1 counters and a flying counter on target creature. Activate only as a sorcery.

Kheru Goldkeeper’s ability is that during your turn, whenever one or more of your cards leave your graveyard, it makes you a Treasure. Although multiple cards leaving at once still make only one Treasure, there is no limit on the number of triggers. That is, if you have a way to move a card in and out of the graveyard repeatedly for one mana or less, you can make an infinite loop.

Can that be done in Standard? Let’s look at the decklist!
Decklist

In this combo, the one risking life and death going in and out of the graveyard is our sweatshop model worker Forsaken Miner. Whenever you commit a crime (targeting an opponent, anything they control, and/or a card in their graveyard counts as a crime), you can pay one black to move it from the graveyard back to the battlefield. Umbral Collar Zealot, from Edge of Eternities, is a sacrifice engine with no extra activation cost, letting the risen Forsaken Miner lie back down in the graveyard. As for triggering crimes, that’s Vengeful Bloodwitch and Susurian Voidborn, who are good at squeezing surplus value out of workers: when your creatures (Voidborn includes artifacts) die, “target” opponent loses life and you gain life, which makes the Forsaken Miner that lay back down in the graveyard immediately feel a crime has been committed. After paying one mana it climbs back onto the battlefield, triggering Kheru Goldkeeper to make a Treasure. Then, relying on the one black the Treasure produces, you repeat this process until the opponent is drained dry.

An infinite combo that can knock out the opponent outright is exciting, but please stay calm first: it needs all four cards to work. In a Standard game, you have to withstand the opponent’s attacks and disruption and still successfully assemble this combo on the battlefield to win, and Kheru Goldkeeper is a four-mana card, so the difficulty is quite high. Also, these cards are individually weak: early on you might steal a bit of damage, but from the mid-game on, never mind holding the board, you’d be doing well not to get beaten to death by the opponent first. So how do we assemble this combo under the opponent’s pressure? Naturally, we start from Sultai’s specialty, the graveyard-filling and recursion strategy.

The two-mana green enchantment Dredger’s Insight mills four and takes one artifact, creature, or land, giving decent depth, and it gains a bit of life when a creature or artifact leaves the graveyard, which slightly raises your survival rate. Lively Dirge can search your library for a card to put into the graveyard to gather components, then dig up to two creature cards with total mana value 4 from the graveyard onto the battlefield. It can dig up the four-mana Kheru Goldkeeper directly, or dig up Vengeful Bloodwitch + Umbral Collar Zealot to assemble two components at once, and it can also bury Forsaken Miner from the library into the graveyard, ready to go to work.

Next are the graveyard recursion spells that also disrupt the opponent. The Sultai saga Awaken the Honored Dead destroys a nonland permanent on chapter I, mills three on chapter II, and on chapter III lets you discard a card to return a creature or land. With it you can discard Forsaken Miner to return other key creatures and complete the combo. Then there’s Deadly Brew: when you have no creatures, used alone it’s a one-shot edict against a creature or planeswalker, and if you sacrifice one of your own creatures it returns a permanent from the graveyard, which is very handy whether it fetches a combo piece or fetches Awaken the Honored Dead to keep removing things.

The last supplementary ingredients are Molt Tender and Timeline Culler. The former is a mana creature that mills you. Although producing mana requires exiling a card from the graveyard, paired with Kheru Goldkeeper it nets you a Treasure, and when you’ve assembled the combo but lack a way to commit a crime to bring Forsaken Miner back, you can sacrifice Molt Tender to trigger it. Timeline Culler is a stand-in for Forsaken Miner: it can warp back onto the battlefield from the graveyard on its own, but you have to pay life. If your life gain sources are insufficient, you may be unable to complete the combo, but when you lack a way to bring Forsaken Miner back, it can also serve as a combo starter.

Gameplay Demo

Because the main deck has enough removal to buy time, the chance of completing the combo is much higher than in builds that just go all-in on the big play. However, when completing the combo on MTGA, if the opponent doesn’t concede, you have to repeat the process bit by bit until their life reaches zero, which wastes a lot of time, so if you want to play this on MTGA, please think it over carefully.

Conclusion

The main deck has only one set of cheap rares, and everything else is uncommon. As long as you put some effort into the lands, swapping in relatively cheap options like Opulent Palace, Blooming Marsh, and Botanical Sanctum, I believe assembling it in paper isn’t difficult. However, as I said earlier, this is a four-card combo with a fairly high threshold, and if the opponent disrupts a bit more you’re quite likely to get blown out first. If you play it in paper, you need not only to practice the operation but probably also to put more effort into adjusting the sideboard strategy. Players who like combo decks can give it a try!