The Basics

Preamble

Entombsday is a Tin Fins and Doomsday hybrid combo deck.

Tin Fins is a Reanimator variant that primarily aims to reanimate Griselbrand with haste using either Shallow Grave or Goryo’s Vengeance, then draw enough cards to reanimate Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and attack for 22 damage. To enable this, the deck runs Children of Korlis to regain the life paid to Griselbrand and enable us to frequently draw our entire deck.

Doomsday aims to win the game by casting the namesake card and building a pile of 5 cards to win the game, typically using Thassa’s Oracle.

The Tin Fins gameplan is incredibly strong in game 1, but is vulnerable to many common sideboard hate cards (Leyline of the Void, Endurance, Surgical Extraction, and more). To work around this, the deck is able to transform into Doomsday in sideboarded games, functionally invalidating the opponents hate cards. Using Doomsday as your transformational plan works exceptionally well, as the core combo package of both plans is ~13 cards, while the rest of the shell is virtually identical for both decks.

History

Tin Fins players are no strangers to transformational sideboards and hybrid gameplans. The deck has frequently run sideboard cards such as Monastery Mentor to dodge the aforementioned graveyard hate pieces. In fact, Doomsday had been discussed as a sideboard option for Tin Fins for years prior to the printing of Thassa’s Oracle. The current Entombsday build was popularized by Walked/Walkedairplane toward the end of 2020 and has continued to evolve from there.

Why Play Entombsday?

Tin Fins is fun to play. Doomsday is fun play. As the old Reese's ad goes, they're "two great tastes that taste great together"!

From a more objective point of view, both game plans cover each other's weaknesses well. Tin Fins is a safer combo against decks such as Delver that pressure your life total by letting you choose how much life to invest, rather than the hard half of your life total that Doomsday requires. Meanwhile, the Doomsday combo doesn't use the graveyard and is more effectively able to 'go off' and then pass the turn. Both plans require little-to-no sacrifice for the other gameplan, and allow for some unique gameplay patterns utilizing cards from both plans.

Ever cast a Shallow Grave to rebuy a Thassa's Oracle? How about sacrificing Children of Korlis after casting Doomsday?

All of this and more is possible through the power of Entombsday!

Additional Resources

These chapters aim to be an introduction to Entombsday and was made possible by Walked's original Entombsday primer and Acclimation's Tin Fins primer. Both of these primers are great resources. If you have questions that are not covered here, they may have been asked or answered before in one of the below resources.

While outdated, the Tin Fins primer on MTGTheSource is still a great resource for the history of the deck, the general play patterns, and quality Sealab memes.

Current discussion of Tin Fins and its variants happens in the Sealab Discord server.

And, most importantly, make sure to join the discussion of Entombsday and Turbo Doomsday in the Doomsday Discord server