Over the weekend I was playing some Achroma against fellow player Shaz, and he was playing a really nice Salum PREVENT deck, taking advantage of the new Realm Modifiers, and featuring a Magus Elite heavy build. After stealing a win from a desperate position thanks to a well timed Dark Rainbow, I recommended that he include that card in his very wide Magus build.

During work today, I started building my own version of his deck, but as so often happens, I ended up going down a rabbit hole of palette building, and finally producing the following palette, which little resembles the core deck concept I started with:

Let’s break down what’s going on here:
The core concept of the deck is to take a chroma win using Dark Rainbow. It achieves this through a chain reaction of cards, hence the title of the article: Ray’s Rube Goldberg Machine (note: if you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg Machine is, you can’t go to far wrong with this OK Go music video).

Getting Dark Rainbow played:
To ensure Dark Rainbow sees daylight, I have Peorth and Murky Manor and no other achrom cards except Cintimani Stone. Play either of those two cards once Cintimani Stone is not in your deck, and you are guaranteed to end up playing Dark Rainbow.
To ensure Murky Manor hits my hand, I have two copies of The Veil Chaser’s Nest and no other locations (I previously wrote about how much I love this card here).
These combos mean you have, essentially, 6 copies of Dark Rainbow in your deck. If you have to play 2 Nests to get it out, this just means 2 more cards to curse and gain from.

Playing Dark Rainbow twice:
The second piece of the puzzle is to replay Dark Rainbow with Cintimani Stone.
To make sure I get Cintimani Stone, I have two copies of Alchemist’s Tincture and no other objects.
To ensure I pull Alchemist’s Tincture, I have two copies of Replenishment, and no other supplies. As a bonus, I’ve built the deck with only one resource, so this card will also gift you an Abundance of Quintessence.
These combos mean you have, essentially, 5 copies of Cintimani Stone in your deck.

Other card choices:
Ray and Apollo are just fantastic value. This deck is racing to the finish line, and these help a lot.
Fireball: best control card in the game.
Lone Survivor, Luxmorn Villager, Veil Chaser’s Cat: cheap characters with a nice Action.
Sea Serpent: simple 2 cost steal but without that all important achrom shards, plus DIVERT.
Watchmen of the Veil: some light control, 4 strength, 2 prevent and now 2 GAIN with Realm Modifiers.
Tempest: this palette isn’t playing many locations, so this is an obvious control choice.

Playing this deck is not for the mathematically fainthearted. Calculating your resulting shard bank before pulling the trigger is rather tricky.
You have to get your sequencing right too: if you try for a Rainbow with Manor when Cintimani Stone is still in your deck, you have to be prepared to maximise that outcome. There’s two Hex Clunker Engineers so that if you do play the Stone out of sequence, and the Stone is erased, you can replay it.
You also have to make sure you only deploy 3 cards. However, you do tend to cheat the system a lot:
Murky Manor into Peorth into Dark Rainbow only counts as playing 1 card.
Disposing Alchemist’s Tincture to deploy Cintimani Stone to play Dark Rainbow doesn’t count as deploying any cards.

These points aside, this deck is a lot of fun to play, and while I haven’t tried it in a multiplayer, I could definitely see it taking some sneaky wins. This deck’s biggest weakness is likely to be achrom, as you need to manage your shard bank carefully to be able to afford to set up your blowout turn. It would also probably get obliterated by a smart sandbagging Rayders player. It’s strongest against mid-range decks, that try to build a boardstate, as it gives you more cards to curse.

Thank you to Shaz for the inspiration, and for being such a gentleman when I played this against him, taking 3 rapid wins out of nowhere (incuding one game where I would have finished on 43 shards, playing Dark Rainbow 3 times in one turn).

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