In Streets of New Capenna Limited, there are a lot of sweet combos to assemble, interactions to explore or non-obvious plays to make. This short article highlights 18 of them that have stood out to me so far.

1. Leave Them with No Choice

If you Incriminate two opposing creatures, hold priority and respond by bouncing or killing one of the two, then your opponent is forced to sacrifice the remaining one when Incriminate resolves.

2. Repeatable Treasures

Glittering Stockpile provides Treasure mana every turn, providing a repeatable way to add +1/+1 counters to Jetmir’s Fixer.

3. A Powerful, but Easily Countered Ability

For Titan of Industry’s enters-the-battlefield trigger, the first and second modes target, but the third and fourth do not. So if you choose a target mode and a non-target mode (say, destroy an artifact and create a 4/4 token) and the single target is illegal at resolution (say, the artifact is sacrificed in response) then the entire ability fizzles (so you wouldn’t even create a 4/4 token). Be careful!

4. Swindling for Counters

If you’re scrounging for playables, then keep in mind that Tavern Swindler can potentially add two +1/+1 counters per turn to Vampire Scrivener.

5. Cutthroat’s Shadow

Shadow of Mortality is often a bit out of place in an aggro deck whose life total is not getting pressured. But if you have Cutthroat Contender, then you can reduce your own life total by two points every turn cycle and cast Shadow of Mortality earn on after all.

6. It’s Raining Cats and Dogs

Tapping a land to create a Cat or Dog token is absurd.

7. Do You Know Your Powers of Two?

I have already had the pleasure of attacking with five creatures, creating five tokens and winning with a 32/3 trampler. Recommended!

8. Drain Out the Opponent

A Volcanic Geyser with casualty would be overpowered. Yet when you control Queza, then Cut of the Profits effectively becomes such an effect!

9. An Immediate Ultimate

I have won a memorable game by attacking with a four-power creature, pumping it to eight power when it wasn’t blocked – they were at 15 and thought “what’s the worst that could happen?” – and then sacrificing the creature post-combat as I cast Ob Nixilis. With this newly created eight-loyalty planeswalker, I immediately activated the ultimate to take my befuddled opponent down to zero life. So yeah, that’s the worst that could happen.

10. A Sweet Value Engine

When the opponent has good blockers lined up, it can be hard to profitably activate Halo Fountain. But the activated ability of Glittermonger solves all that – you can now create multiple Treasures per turn, plus a 1/1 token, without even risking your creatures in combat. For maximum fun, you could add Jinnie Fay and really go off.

11. A Massive Swing

Illuminator Virtuoso is great with any pump spell or evasion-granting enchantment, such as Security Bypass or Sticky Fingers. But my favorite combo is to target it with Majestic Metamorphosis, allowing you to attack for a sudden 10 points of damage in the air. Opponents are usually not prepared for that.

12. Not Quite Like Exploit

This interaction is currently bugged on MTG Arena at the time of writing, but the way it should work is that when Obscura Interceptor or Psychic Pickpocket die in response to their enters-the-battlefield ability, perhaps because the opponent casts Murder, the reflexive “when this creature connives” trigger still happens. It’s part of the resolution of the enters-the-battlefield ability, so you should still bounce something even if the creature is dead at that point. Hopefully MTG Arena fixes this quickly.

Exploit (on, say, Fell Stinger) works differently because “exploit” and “when this exploits” were separate abilities on separate lines.

13. Breaking the Card Draw Symmetry

Sky Crier’s card draw effect may look symmetrical, but there are good ways to break it. One is to deck your opponent if their library is smaller, which often comes up against blue-black decks. Another is to grow your own Faerie Vandal turn after turn.

14. Cementing an Opponent’s Creature

Cement Shoes generally shouldn’t be in your deck unless you have a ton of 1/1 tokens as equip fodder, but if you’re running it alongside Involuntary Employment, then you can combine them to lock down an opposing creature and keep it tapped for good.

15. The Weirdest Fixing

You can play Brokers Hideout, hold priority, respond by exiling Spara’s Adjudicators, target the Brokers Hideout and tap it for mana before you have to sacrifice it. It’s a corner case, but it could come in handy in the mid-game when you need a certain color of mana immediately.

16. Killing Through Shields

Suppose that your opponent attacks you with a 4/4 Voice of the Vermin with a shield counter when you have Kill Shot in hand and a 1/1 token on the battlefield. The right way to deal with this is to chump block, knock off the shield counter during combat damage and then cast Kill Shot at end of combat. On MTG Arena, you need to enter full control or set a stop, as the default is to auto-pass at end of combat.

17. Shutting Down Lifelink

This should be obvious, but I didn’t actively realize it until after combat damage had resolved: when a creature with lifelink would deal damage to a creature with a shield counter, that damage is prevented completely and you won’t gain any life.

18. A Phased Blitz

At least on MTG Arena, if you phase out a blitzed creature, then you won’t ever have to sacrifice it – the delayed trigger will happen once, but it has no effect at that time because the creature is phased out, and it won’t trigger again. However, the blitzed creature gained the “when this creature dies, draw a card” text permanently, and it retains that ability forever when it phases back in!