New Magic: The Gathering infinite combo is just making The Hulk step on caltrops over and over until he’s mad enough to win

If there’s one thing I love about card games, it’s the absolutely obscene sentences that come out of explaining play-by-plays to the uninitiated, especially when you’re playing a game with licensed characters. For example: Disney’s Lorcana once had a combo with minor character Hiram Flaversham that elevated him to godhood via banishing and re-summoning a popsicle.

Now a new sentence has emerged: Magic: The Gathering’s new Marvel set has a combo where you make the Incredible Hulk so, so very angry by forcing the poor guy to step on spiky caltrops over and over and over again, hurting his poor feetsies.

As spotted by Wargamer, you do need to put in a little work here—the card starts off as an un-crashed out Bruce Banner that has to be transformed with six mana. Once he’s all green’d up, though, there’s a crucial bit of rules text: “Enrage—Whenever The Incredible Hulk is dealt damage, put a +1/+1 counter on him. If he’s attacking, untap him and there is an additional combat phase after this phase.”

Combine this with Caltrops, which deals one damage when a creature attacks, and you start to see the vision: The Hulk crashes into an enemy, roaring, frothing at the mouth. He takes a step back and steps on a little itty-bitty piece of metal. He loses his gourd. He attacks them again. He steps back, and—god damnit, those Caltrops are still there.

This is what we call an “infinite”. It’s not a completely unavoidable one: If you’ve got enough “blockers”, creatures who can soak up damage in play, then ramming The Incredible Hulk into them will eventually kill him. The +1 to its health each combat phase from Enrage is negated by Caltrops, after all.

However, as Wargamer notes, there are cards that can get around this—like Moonmist, which transforms Bruce Banner into the Hulk immediately, though with the caveat that combat damage is completely prevented for the turn, unless they’re a Werewolf or a Wolf.

Fun fact, though: Caltrops doesn’t deal combat damage. So you could just spend your Moonmist-neutered turn sending the Hulk out to stomp on legos until he is strong enough to one-hit KO anything in the known universe on his next turn. Again: One of those new sentences, you love to see it. From what I’ve heard about M:TG, finding obnoxious new strategies is part of the fun.

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