Playing the Deck

Preamble

As a deck with two unique gameplans, Entombsday requires some flexibility from its pilot. Knowing the ins-and-outs of both Tin Fins and Doomsday will improve your performance with the deck, as will developing your own heuristics for when to use which plan.

Because this Wiki already contains excellent resources for how to play Turbo Doomsday, we will primarily focus on the Tin Fins plan and when to transform into Doomsday.

Playing Tin Fins

Fundamentally, Tin Fins is a reanimator combo deck. You are looking to bin a copy of Griselbrand, then reanimate Griselbrand. Where Tin Fins differs from traditional reanimator builds is the use of Shallow Grave and Goryo's Vengeance. Because these cards are Instants and grant Haste, they allow you to win on your combo turn. The most common way this is done is by reanimating Emrakul, the Aeons Torn before going to combat and attacking with Griselbrand and Emrakul for 22 damage.

The deck also includes Children of Korlis to enable to you to draw your whole deck with Griselbrand. Children of Korlis also enables you to loop your deck to allow wins post-combat, which will be discussed below.

The Combo Turn

Your combo turn is the turn in which you reanimate Griselbrand and attempt to win. The combo turn generally proceds as follows:

1. Cast Entomb to bin Griselbrand
2. Cast Shallow Grave or Goryo's Vengeance to reanimate Griselbrand
3. Draw 7 to 14 cards, looking for another Entomb + reanimation spell or Children of Korlis
4. Then, depending on your draws:
   • Cast Entomb to bin Emrakul, reanimate it before the shuffle trigger resolves, then attack for 22 damage
   • Cast Children of Korlis to regain the life paid this turn and continue drawing cards until you can

General Tips

• Goryo's Venegance can only target a legendary craeture. It is better to use that to reanimate your Griselbrand and save your Shallow Graves for Children of Korlis.
• Shallow Grave and Goryo's Vengeance create a delayed trigger that will exile the creature reanimated with them at the beginning of the next End Step. Because of this, you can cast them on your opponent's End Step and still have the creature in play for your turn.
• You can sacrifice the in-play Griselbrand to Cabal Therapy's Flashback cost to put it back in your graveyard for next turn, bypassing the delayed trigger from Goryo's Vengeance or Shallow Grave.
• The life gain from Children of Korlis cares about total life lost this turn. In paper, make sure you track every point of life lost (fetchland activations, Thoughtseizes cast, etc.)
• Be mindful of both your life total and the number of cards in your library. You don't want to draw twice from 14 life or draw seven cards with only six left in your deck.
• If you find that you're missing one combo piece before going to combat, you can try to cast some of your cantrips to dig a little deeper into your deck. This is also useful if you have less than seven cards left in deck and need to find a specific piece.
• Entomb can tutor for Cabal Therapy if you need access to a discard spell on your combo turn — if your Emrakul or Children is stuck in your hand and you don't have a Thoughtseize or Brainstorm — or need to sacrifice your Griselbrand to avoid the exile trigger from Shallow Grave and Goryo's Vengeance.

Entombing Without Entomb

While Entombsday only runs two copies of Griselbrand, you will still find hands that have a copy in them. If you're on 7 cards on the draw, it can be correct to keep these hands and use your cleanup step to discard Griselbrand. This does not work for Emrakul, since you will never get the opportunity attack before it is exiled to the Shallow Grave or Goryo's Vengeance trigger on your opponents' end step.

Lion's Eye Diamond in Tin Fins

Lion's Eye Diamond is a tricky card to use properly due to the rules weirdness surrounding it. It is primarily included in the deck for its use in Doosday piles, but there are a few important interactions to be aware of for the Tin Fins half of the deck.

LED can be used to bin a Griselbrand in response to a Shallow Grave. This unfortunately does not work with Emrakul, as her shuffle trigger will be stacked on top of Shallow Grave and leave you with an empty graveyard when Shallow Grave resolves.

Similar to its use in Storm decks and Doomsday piles, LED can be cracked in response to a Griselbrand activation to make the mana available for the cards you will be drawing. Just make sure you hold priority when activating Griselbrand by holding Control on MTGO or announcing it in paper.

What If You Whiff?

If you did not find a way to continue comboing in your first 7 to 14 cards, go to combat and attack with Griselbrand. This will gain you 7 life and allow you to either continue drawing cards (Generally best if you're only missing one piece), set yourself up to go off again on your next turn, or sculpt a disruptive hand that will allow you time to rebuild.

Infinite Loops

In the event that you can’t find a way to reanimate Emrakul pre-combat, you are able to loop your deck to either cast Emrakul or repeatedly cast Collective Brutality to drain your opponent out 2 life at a time.

To loop your deck:

1. Draw 14 to 21 cards with Griselbrand until you can put Children of Korlis into play (either by casting or reanimating it).
2. Sacrifice Children of Korlis to regain all of the life you’ve lost so far this turn (this effect is cumulative, so you can gain functionally infinite life if you loop Children).
3. Using the life gain from Children, draw your entire library and begin casting Dark Rituals to generate a large amount of mana.
4. After casting all of your Rituals, discard Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to shuffle them back in. Make sure you have at least 7 cards between your deck and graveyard, so you don't lose the game from decking.
5. At this point you should be able to cast Emrakul and take an extra turn to attack for lethal.

If for some reason you’re unable to attack (i.e. there is an Ensnaring Bridge in play), you can continue to loop through your deck until your deck + your graveyard add up to a multiple of 7. From there, cast and sacrifice two copies of Lotus Petal for , cast and sacrifice Children of Korlis, cast Dark Ritual, cast Collective Brutality for its drain mode, then discard Emrakul using either Thoughtseize or Cabal Therapy to shuffle those 7 cards back into your library. You can now demonstrate a loop that generates infinite life and infinitely drains your opponent.

Notably, you can’t escalate Collective Brutality to discard Emrakul, as this will leave Collective Brutality in your graveyard after the shuffle resolves, which, as Acclimation puts it in his Tin Fins primer, “does not do the thing”.

Mulligans

As a combo deck, Entombsday tends to mulligan well, but requires specific cards to function. It is able to go as low as 4 cards and still combo on turn 1: a source, Dark Ritual, Entomb, and a reanimation spell.

In general, you want to leverage the London Mulligan to find the fastest hand you can in game 1, preferably with protection. You should avoid keeping hands that just durdle and cast cantrips, as that will give your opponent time to stabilize and accumulate resources.

When sideboarded into Doomsday, you want to look for hands that cast Doomsday quickly — generally before turn 3. This typically means hands that contain either Doomsday itself or Personal Tutor and the mana to cast it. As with the game 1 plan, a protection spell is also helpful.

Below are a number of sample starting hands. Would you keep them or mulligan?

Sideboarding

Despite being a deck with a transformational sideboard plan, Entombsday does not need to transform in every post-board game. This guide will not tell you which plan to use in a given matchup, as the Legacy meta is constantly changing and such a guide would be outdated as soon as it is posted. Instead, it will outline some general guidelines of which plan is better against which hate pieces. Strong knowledge of the meta and each archetype's gameplan and common sideboarding will serve you well here.

When transforming, the general sideboard plan is:

Depending on the situation, you are also able to bring in one or both of Flusterstorm and Echoing Truth, typically cutting one to two copies of Preordain or one Daze on the draw.

As a general rule, you want to side into Doomsday when you expect permanent hate pieces such as Leyline of the Void, Dauthi Voidwalker, Grafdigger's Cage, Narset, Parter of Veils, Hullbreacher, or Containment Priest. When expecting stack based hate, such as Surgical Extraction or Endurance, it can be better to stay on the Tin Fins plan, as those are more easily beatable using the instant speed nature of the Tin Fins combo.

It can also be correct to transform back and forth or stay Tin Fins in game two and only transform for game 3.

For example, when playing against Delver, you should swap to Doomsday in game two to try and sneak a win by surprising them. If there is a game three, it's defensible to use either plan, depending on what graveyard hate you see in game two. The Tin Fins plan is stronger again Delver in general and can beat a Surgical Extraction, but if you see permanent hate, such as Grafdigger's Cage, it may be better to stay on the Doomsday plan.

When playing in paper, you should shuffle all 15 sideboard cards in between each game, so the opponent doesn't know which gameplan you are on.

In some matchups — such as Dredge, Hogaak, and Turbo Depths — where you expect a fast clock, discard, but no countermagic you can use a hybrid sideboard plan to create a two-card monte-style deck. The idea here is to have a higher density of action spells, allowing for a higher number of turn 1 combos.

The sideboard plan for this is generally:

Common Doomsday Piles

Because the sideboard swap is so clean, Entombsday has very few deck-specific piles that aren't also available to Turbo Doomsday lists. I would again recommend reading through the resources available in the Turbo Doomsday section of the Wiki. As a quick reference, some common piles to know are:

Pass the Turn OR Cantrip + Land Drop

This is a variation on the Shelldock + Emrakul pile that provides three win attempts over multiple turns and plays around things such as Endurance by putting very few cards into your graveyard. A few things to note with this pile are:

1. It can be sped up by a turn if you have access to a cantrip and a land drop.
2. You don't always need to choose Emrakul for the Hideaway trigger. When playing against Painter, it is sometimes correct to leave Emrakul in your deck and hide Thassa's Oracle under the Shelldock Isle, allowing you to cast Oracle before your Draw Step after being milled out.

Cantrip + + X

This is a common perfect pile when you have 2 total cards in hand. If you have Brainstorm in hand already and are able to cast it, the pile can be changed to:

Brainstorm + + X