Untapped Synergies For Tapping Creatures

Do you ever see a new mechanic get spoiled and start rubbing your hands gleefully, or even remark aloud something like “they made this just for me!”

I’ve been thrilled by almost everything Wizards have revealed from Edge of Eternities so far, as it all seems to lean into my pre-existing playstyle preferences. But the station mechanic I find particularly exciting. Not only for the absolutely wild effects on some of the rarer spacecraft, but because it adds even more momentum to my favorite “exotic” synergy: tapping untapped creatures to pay a cost.

A *LITERALLY* UNTAPPED RESOURCE

Convoke, conspire crew, harmonize, saddle, and now station: these are the mechanics which allow you to pay costs by tapping random creatures you control.

You may notice that five of these six are currently featured in Standard, and three of those actually made their debut within the past 18 months! We’re clearly in a boom period where Wizards is focused on exploring this area of design space, and providing players with a lot of tools and payoffs around these keywords.

Of course, the history of “tap an untapped creature” costs (TAUC) runs deeper than that. There have always been powerful effects which toyed with the idea of “giving your creatures work to do outside combat”, they just didn’t have a common keyword for it. 

But perhaps I should step back for a moment – why am I so enamored with TAUC mechanics to begin with? Simply put: anything which lets you avoid paying mana for effects you normally spend mana on is extremely powerful. 

The amount of mana you have to spend each turn cycle is the most common bottleneck on your ability to do what you want in Magic, and the hardest to overcome. This is why “free spells” are so universally attractive, even if they actually cost multiple cards in hand or chunks of your life total – those losses can be recovered or survived, so long as you get to do more stuff NOW!

Circling back to TAUC costs, you could argue it’s actually even closer to “free” than other alternate costs: life points and cards in hand are expendable resources, and (at least for drawing cards) somewhat expensive to replenish. By comparison, you can generate a bunch of creatures quite cheaply when you focus on it, and those creatures can be tapped again every single turn – including the turn they enter play, or in the opponent’s end step after they’ve already been “used” to block.

They’re also a more generally valuable resource to focus on outside of paying TAUC costs. Going all-in on lifegain is seen as a beginner trap because life points “don’t do anything” other than empower your other cards. But making a ton of creatures is inherently a win condition once you get enough of them, and the threshold for “enough” can be lowered very easily with any number of finisher cards.

So, building around TAUC mechanics like convoke and station is a way to access game-breaking tempo plays essentially for free, as a reward for doing something which is already valuable on its own at all points of the game.

ROTATE A CREATURE IN YOUR MIND

Assuming you’ve been 100% convinced to join me in building around TAUC costs across all decks and formats, how do we go about doing that? Is there even more value we can extract from this already incredible deal? This is Magic we’re talking about, so obviously the answer is yes. 

Just like discarding cards or sacrificing creatures “as a cost” can easily be turned into a benefit for graveyard decks, there are cards which reward having tapped creatures regardless of how they became tapped. And since in most sets you only get a tapped creature by having it survive combat as an attacker, these rewards can actually be quite substantial! 

The obvious place to start is cards which trigger when they become tapped, or when other creatures become tapped. This includes Standard cards like Wylie Duke, Unctus, Grand Metatect and Traveling Botanist. There’s also the survivor creatures from Duskmourn: they’re meant to trigger when they “survive” combat, but it’s way easier to just saddle or station with them before our second main phase.

Some cards scale with the number of tapped creature we control (Crash the Party, Harvest Season, Throne of the God-Pharoah) or give tapped creatures special benefits. For some reason the most common buff to give is hexproof – which we won’t say no to, since with instant-speed TAUC effects this essentially makes our board untargetable!

Effects which trigger when our stuff untaps can also be considered synergistic – it’s just tap-based triggers with extra steps! In Standard we have Fishing Pole and Ghostly Pilferer. But going back further, we have self-mill powerhouse Mesmeric Orb, Commander option Merieke Ri Berit, and a bunch of very underrated cards from Born of the Gods.

Daring Thief is my personal pick for making opponents speedrun from “what does that do” to flipping tables. But there’s literally too many other good ones for me to easily list!

TAUC DIRTY TO ME

If you’re building around these tap-an-untapped-creature mechanics in Standard, then that might already be as far as you need to go. 

Building a wide board quickly to pay TAUC costs naturally dovetails with a go-wide aggro strategy. Crew and station give you access to larger creature stats regardless of their other effects, while saddle is directly linked to attacking. Consider that most of our payoff cards can also just trigger by attacking, and it’s easy to see how you could assemble a fundamentally sound aggro deck while benefiting from these synergies.

But for older formats, where the bar for successful aggression raises exponentially, we are forced to likewise look for more exponential forms of TAUC payoff. 

The obvious way we can combo with tapping creatures is untapping them, which lets us pay more TAUC costs or re-trigger synergies. Free, repeatable untap triggers that affect your whole team are the easiest path to combo victory. Faces of the Past, Moraug, Fury of Akoum, Jeskai Ascendancy and Intruder Alarm are prime candidates. 

But mass untappers where you have to jump through hoops (like paying mana or recurring a trigger) are still viable, so long as the creatures you’re untapping can generate the right mana or other effects to repeat the loop.

Even without going infinite, being able to untap every turn with Murkfiend Liege, Drumbellower, White Plume Adventurer or Quest for Renewal generates a ton of advantage in multiplayer Commander. 

Awakening is the gold standard here. Not only does it untap your creatures AND lands (nice), but it also triggers on your own upkeep step: you can respond to that trigger by quickly tapping everything to play instant-speed effects, and then untap and play the rest of your turn normally!

The fact that you’re allowed to tap creatures for TAUC costs even when they have summoning sickness does open up one final route to infinite combo. Since it’s not unheard of for cards to create free creature tokens as a triggered ability, we can build a loop where tapping creatures to pay a cost also generates new creatures that we can use to pay the cost again!

This is the basis of the powerful “Mecha-Magda” combo in cEDH, the notorious Hogaak archetype in Modern, and the Valley Floodcaller/Enduring Vitality decks in current Standard! 

I’ve also been enjoying a sub-infinite variation with my Hylda deck in budget Commander. She’s a great example of how you can sometimes find these TAUC loops in unexpected places: if I use her trigger to create an elemental token, Kapsho Kitefins or Court Street Denizen will immediately tap down another opposing creature, which can make another elemental… the fun never ends.

ALL TAPPED OUT

That was quite the torrent of TAUC tactics talk, so I hope we haven’t lost sight of why this is all so topical!  This mechanical niche has heretofore been a bit of a hidden gem, especially the idea of building around it – but that seems to be changing now, and quickly. 

Successive new mechanics this Standard season have really put TAUC in the spotlight, and the parade of insane new station cards will only encourage more people to start optimizing around these effects.

As a long-time enjoyer of this playstyle, I welcome all the new development it’s about to receive. But I also know how fun it is to have a headstart on the hipsters and shock your friends with some deep-cut piece of tech – so I hope that my tips today help you to also get ahead of the TAUC trend.