Against the Odds: Door to Nothingness (Historic)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 358 of Against the Odds. Last week, on our Against the Odds poll, one of The Brothers' War Retro Artifacts took home an easy victory. So today, we're heading to Historic to see if we can push our opponent through the Door to Nothingness and make them lose the game! Door to Nothingness is a classic jank alt-win con, but thanks to The Brothers' War, it's on Magic Arena for the first time. To make our opponent lose the game, we need to untap with the five-mana artifact and also have double WUBRG mana to dump into it, which is asking a lot. But the reward is equally high: making our opponent lose the game on the spot! What's the best way to get the Door win in Historic on Magic Arena? Let's get to the video and find out in today's Against the Odds; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
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Against the Odds: Door to Nothingness
The Deck
Building around Door to Nothingness is interesting. Obviously, we need a ton of mana to make it work, so whichever direction we go with our deck, we need to do some ramping. But, beyond this, the possibilities are almost endless. My first thought was to play Door to Nothingness in a Gates shell, although, after testing the deck a bit, it just felt like Maze's End on hard mode. Because Maze's End also wins the game if we can get 10 lands on the battlefield, winning the game with Door instead just felt wrong. Eventually, I realized that apart from just ramping, a few specific cards can almost make Door to Nothingness into a combo piece by speeding up the win greatly. Here's the plan.
First off, it's worth mentioning that Door to Nothingness is our only realistic way to win the game. While we do have a couple of creaturelands in our mana base and one creature, we're pretty much all-in on making our opponent lose the game by sending them through the door. As I mentioned before, winning the game (by making our opponent lose the game) with Door to Nothingness requires two things: untapping with the five-mana artifact and having double WUBRG mana to dump into it.
Thankfully, Kaldheim gave us a cheat code for making double WUBRG mana in The World Tree. With a copy of The World Tree on the battlefield, all of our lands tap for all colors of mana, which means any 10 lands will give us the right mana to make our opponent lose the game with Door to Nothingness.
As such, one way we can win the game with Door to Nothingness is by ramping aggressively with cards like Explore, Growth Spiral, and The Celestus and then tutoring up The World Tree with Titania's Command. That said, we have a much spicier plan as well...
As I mentioned before, one of the biggest drawbacks of Door to Nothingness is that it enters the battlefield tapped, so even if we have enough mana to win the game with the artifact immediately, we have to wait another turn for it to untap...unless we have a way to untap it, like Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset. Teferi is perhaps the perfect combo piece for Door to Nothingness because, along with being able to untap Door to speed up the win, it can also untap Timeless Lotus, which happens to tap for WUBRG mana. Tapping Timeless Lotus twice in the same turn just happens to give us the extra mana necessary to activate Door to Nothingness, making the Teferi-plus–Timeless Lotus package the fastest way to win with Door to Nothingness in our deck.
Another way we can win with Door to Nothingness and Timeless Lotus is Nyxbloom Ancient, which lets our permanents tap for three times as much mana. This means a single tapping of Timeless Lotus will make triple WUBRG, which just so happens to be the exact amount of mana it takes to cast a Door to Nothingness, untap it with a Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset, and then activate Door to Nothingness for the win all in one turn! Nyxbloom Ancient also helps us find our other combo pieces by powering up some of the biggest Sphinx's Revelations the game has ever seen!
The rest of the deck is basically removal and sweepers to help make sure we can stay alive long enough to get the combo pieces or lands we need in order to make our opponent lose the game with Door to Nothingness.
The Matchups
There are two hard matchups for Door to Nothingness. One is very aggressive decks, which often can run us over before we get our Door to Nothingness kill set up. The other is decks with removal that can interact with Door to Nothingness itself. Even if we have Teferi to untap Door, there is a window for the opponent to blow it up with an instant-speed artifact-destruction spell, while control decks can counter Door before it even hits the battlefield. On the other hand, our removal and ramp give us a pretty good shot against various midrange and slower aggro decks.
The Odds
Overall, we finished 4-3 with Door to Nothingness, which is pretty solid considering that Door is a notoriously hard win condition to pull off. Oddly, just ramping up to 10 mana and activating Door to Nothingness was a lot more practical than I expected it to be in Historic; plus, we also got some sweet untap kills with Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset and Nyxbloom Ancient. While I wouldn't go as far to say that Door to Nothingness is a legit win-con in Historic, it was a lot better than I thought it would be, and the deck did some super-sweet things!
Vote for Next Week's Deck
Next week we're wrapping up Brothers' War with a second chance poll. Which card that just missed on a previous poll deserves a shot for glory in Standard? Click here to vote!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
