From: GnonnyIrons7777@aol.com
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 8:16 PM
To: StrategyGuide@pojo.com
Subject: Decaying Soil Mana Combo- by Jon Irons

I really don't think Decaying Soil (from Odyssey) is a good card. But in this 
unlimited mana combo, it's okay- the combo has only one color requriement 
(black).
Decaying Soil           1BB
(Insert picture of coffins here)
Enchantment     Odyssey Rare
At the beginning of your upkeep,
remove a card in your graveyard 
from the game.
Threshold- Whenever a nontoken 
creature is put into a graveyard 
from play, you may pay 1. If you 
do, return that creature to your 
hand.

    Of course, with all the removing from the game going on here, threshold 
may not last as long as you may want it to. However, if you combine this card 
with Ashnod's Altar and creatures like Ornithopter (0 mana) or 
Su-Chi/Cathodion, which pay for themselves when they die, you can sacrifice 
one of these creature, get two mana, pay the 1 to return it to your hand, 
then re-play the creature to have a net gain of one colorless mana a cycle. 
>From there, you can simply run the mana through Initiates of the Ebon Hand or 
Bog Initiates to fuel a very large drain life, or convert it to other colors 
with the proper tools. The best thing about this combo is it takes very 
little mana to set up (five if you use Ornithopter) and only needs black to 
work. I hope this combo works. If you want to email me my email is: 
gnonnyirons7777@aol.com (my name, in case you didn't read it before, is Jon 
Irons).