Arsthbt

Vivien, Champion of the Wilds is a new planeswalker which allows casting creatures with instant speed. I want to combine it with Wilderness Reclamation to be able to double my mana during my end step and cast a giant Hydroid Krasis. The best case scenario for the deck is:

• turn 1 - Llanowar Elves
  


• turn 2 - Incubation Druid
  


• turn 3 - Vivien of the Wilds
  


• turn 4 - Wilderness Reclamation + adapt the Incubation Druid


• turn 5 - Cast a 12/12 Hydroid Krasis during the endstep

Will it be competitive in Standard?

Also adding a biogenic ooze and simic ascendancy may win you a game. Maybe also add hadanas climb?

Let me start by saying this is a really cool idea, and it may be a very fun deck to play in casual format.

However, this combo is very unlikely to be competitive in standard given how many pieces you need for it to go off. It's a three card combo at it's heart (Vivien + Wilderness Reclimation + Krasis) that also requires mana acceleration to go off on a reasonable timeframe. The best-case you present is a turn 7 win, and your whole first 5 turns were spent setting it up, leaving you little buffer to react to your opponent or handle disruption. On top of that, your plan is very brittle; most combos are vulnerable to control, but yours is also vulnerable to burn and aggro due to many of your key mana sources being creatures and one of your key cards being a planeswalker.

Compare your combo to Carnage Tyrant + Blanchwood Armor, which requires a similar mana base. This creates a similar sized beater on a similar timeframe. However, it has several advantages:

1. Carnage Tyrant is resistant to both control and burn


2. You can still win with Carnage Tyrant even if you don't draw Blanchwood Armor


3. It's mono-green, meaning you don't need a complex mana base and can't get color-screwed


4. You can do other things in your early turns, like Commune With Dinosaurs to help set you up or Vine Mare to defend you from an aggro deck or start an early offense against a control deck.

Hydroid Krasis is already played in some variants of the relatively popular Wilderness Reclamation deck. Being able to create a large creature, gain some life, draw cards and then immediately have access to the cards thanks to your refreshed mana pool is a genuinely powerful effect.

Your main issue with this combo is just the inclusion of Vivien, who doesn't have a lot to do in a deck without very many non-flash creatures. You find yourself in sort of a catch-22 here; Vivien's main purposes are to dig for creatures and give them flash, so she works well in a deck with a high density of creatures without flash.

Unfortunately on draws wherein you don't draw or can't protect Vivien, your reclamation won't synergize very well with non-flash creatures. Similarly, Vivien loses value if most of your creatures already have flash. If there are cheaper or more flexible ways to give creatures flash in the format, that may be worth looking into!

Nobody knows, and nobody will know until we can actually playtest it.

That said I'll say my first impressions are that it's unlikely, because your cards don't work well together:

• Vivien gives your creatures flash, which usually isn't particularly strong with creatures (see Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage, which sees no play).


• Because creatures are usually sorcery-speed, Wilderness Reclamation does not synergize unless you also have Vivien in play. This is the reason why current Wilderness Reclamation decks are generally loaded with instants or at least instant-speed mana sinks.

In other words you have subpar cards unless you also have the other card. Vivien is likely to be acceptable even if you don't have Wilderness Reclamation (its two activatable abilities are decent), but Wilderness Reclamation is likely to be a do-nothing.

Finally there is also this:

• Even if you pull the combo off, you might not win. The really strong combos result in a practically won game (e.g. when Standard's current premier combo deck - Nexus - goes off, the opponent never gets another turn, which makes it really hard to lose). In this case you make a 12/12 Krasis that's fully vulnerable to enemy removal. Gaining six life helps, but if you are well behind on the board (which is the biggest weakness of Nexus decks right now) it might not be sufficient. Opponent could easily play something like Conclave Tribunal and attack you for 10+ damage.

You could certainly try, but offhand I don't think it'll be worth it.