Coffers/Urborg outside of mono black

[CleanBelwas]

Hey all,

I play a lot of mono black decks, and the Cabal Coffers / Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth synergy is obviously pretty good there.

My question to you is:

Do you consider it worthwhile to run coffers/urborg together outside of mono black or dedicated lands build?

Obviously it's great in mono black or decks like Golos or Dredge where getting both together is pretty easy.

Outside of these though, would you run it?

Urborg is obviously great on its own. It has no downside to running as it enters untapped and can tap for mana immediately and can fix your colours in heavily black two or three colour decks.

Coffers is a different story though. The payoff is enormous, but the downside of having it in play before it breaks parity is pretty real, and only gets worse when you're in multiple colours without an urborg.

I can't decide, so thought I'd ask for your insights.

[Slyvester12]

I play them in my Yuriko deck, but Yuriko draws a lot of cards and has multiple tutors that can find Coffers. I would be careful of thinking Urborg doesn't have a downside, though. There are plenty of games in which an opponent's Urborg ended up fixing my colors better than theirs.

I also probably wouldn't run Coffers in 3+ color decks. In BX, you still have ~half your lands counting without Urborg, but beyond that you either have both or Coffers is basically useless.

[Morganator 2.0]

Tomb of Yawgmoth is good, and I recommend it for decks including black. My issue with it is that I often forget to include it in decks.

Coffers is different however. I'm with Slyvester12; use it in two-color decks at most. I'd also recommend using a few land tutors like Expedition Map and Crop Rotation.

[Marshstepper78]

I used Urborg and Coffers in my Kess, Dissident Mage deck. It won with a huge Exsanguinate or Torment of Hailfire usually (sometimes with an Exproriate). I ran Expedition Map to tutor for it (along with a few other tutors of course). I never had mana issues.

[CleanBelwas]

Thanks for your inputs guys.

To add a little more context for the specific deck I'm debating:

I'm brewing some jank with Sengir, the Dark Baron. The plan of the deck is to pay life for stuff, get my life total nice and low, then swap life totals with an opponent and kill them to gain all the life back. It's good, clean, janky fun.

At the moment I'm torn between mono black and Orzhov. The only real reason I'm looking to include white is because of Axis of Mortality. The partner is looking likely to be Alharu, Solemn Ritualist if I go Orzhov as there are some good synergies to be had between vampires, +1/+1 counters and killing/sacrificing things (Blade of the Bloodchief, Cordial Vampire, Mephidross Vampire etc.).

I have things like Expedition Map and Weathered Wayfarer to find lands, as well as more generic black tutors, but I don't really plan on having a specific big mana pay off. I may include one or two big X drain spells to finish people off after playing things like Sorin Markov and Torgaar, Famine Incarnate, but the main idea is to get my life total low, then swap life totals with Magus of the Mirror, Axis of Mortality, Soul Conduit, Repay in Kind etc., so big mana isn't that important.

I'm torn. Coffers / Urborg will be easy enough to assemble and produce a lot of mana in the late game, but without much specific payoff, is it worth taking up the slots for them and the pieces to find them? Maybe I'd be better off just running a couple of extra low cmc ramp spells instead of map and wayfarer to get ahead in the early game rather than catch up in the late game.

The question I'm undecided on is: Are they generically good enough to include in a deck that isn't looking to maximise the potential payoff? I'm leaning towards yes, not least of all because Coffers is one of my favourite cards of all time and it's nice to play what you love.

[WizardSpartan]

I would say to prioritize playing what you want to play. You've described this deck as janky, so you (probably) aren't looking to make your deck as smooth and optimized as possible.

But just telling you to play what you want is very much non-advice, so here's my thought process.

You don't need to be focused on big X payoffs to run the combo, fueling your expensive janky shenanigans seems like a good enough reason to me.

We've established Urborg is good enough on its own, so really the big question is Coffers worth the inclusion? You mentioned being torn between mono black and Orzhov, so if you go Orzhov for those few valuable white cards, just see if you can weight your mana base towards black.

If you can do that, include the few land tutors available in Orzhov, and mulligan correctly (aka no keeping dumb hands with Coffers and the hope of drawing Urborg), I think there is no reason to not run the combo.

[Glstriker5000]

Its always good to have lots of black mana and not have to tap down all your lands. I see the combo played a lot in my meta by decks that have more then one color or have very few basics. Its better then using cabal stronghold. Depending on the conditions yes cabal coffers could be a dead card in your hand, but same could be said for gaea's cradle when you don't have creatures and many people who have that card run it in multicolored decks.

[stuffnsuch]

Coffers is pretty great, but you can do some simple math to decide if you're going to be actually able to use it when running to many non-swamp lands.  What are the odds that you have at least 4 swamps in play, even late in the game.  If you have 3 swamps generally at some point in the game, you could switch out one of them for a Coffers and get no advantage at all, it would be a dead card.  If you have 4 swamps most games, then if one were switched out for a Coffers, it would gain you one mana, but, it wouldn't even produce mana until you had the 3 swamps.  So, only 25% of the time will the Coffers come into play as a useful land if you're only expecting 4 swamps in a game.  If you're expecting 6 swamps in a game, the Coffers will have a 50/50 chance of being able to produce mana the turn it come into play if it's replacing a swamp, but still only a 33% chance of being better than a swamp when you first play it.

These numbers are, of course, not taking into account that you may have several choices of which land to play, and ways to tutor for the combo, and such, but if you're just playing the first land you draw and don't get Urborg, you'd need to be planning on quite a few swamps to break even when you first play Coffers.  This is even worse in multicolored decks because they're typically running fewer basics, and only a minority of non-basic lands have land types.  I'd only run it in decks that are very heavily skewed to black or that have ways to tutor lands the full combo.