Against the Odds: Teaching Arena Zoomers About Turbo Fog
This week, we are handing out some more life lessons for Arena Zoomers, this time by teaching the new generation of Magic players about the joys of never being able to deal combat damage with Turbo Fog! The One Ring has quickly proven to be the strongest card from Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth, and it's almost like it was designed to support Turbo Fog. If you think about what the artifact actually does, when it enters the battlefield, it Fogs for a turn by giving us protection from everything, and then it turns into an absurd source of card draw to help make sure we have a Fog to cast every turn until we eventually win the game by milling our opponent out! Is Turbo Fog back thanks to The One Ring? How many salty ropes will we get as we hand out some life lessons to a new generation of players? Let's get to the video and find out in today's Against the Odds; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
The Deck
First off, I should point out that even though I'm calling today's deck an Against the Odds deck, mostly since all the other "Teaching Arena Zoomers" videos were part of the series, we're technically playing a Budget Magic deck. In fact, you can put the deck together on Magic Arena for just 12 total rares and mythics! While this is partly because we're playing a budget-friendly tapped-land mana base, Turbo Fog doesn't really care about curving out, and it's such a slow, plodding deck that playing a bunch of tapped dual lands doesn't hurt much at all.
As I mentioned in the intro, the reason we're playing Turbo Fog today is The One Ring. It's almost like Wizards designed the card specifically to support the archetype. Turbo Fog wants two things: a bunch of Fogs to fizzle combat damage and a bunch of card draw to find more Fogs. The One Ring does both. On the turn we cast it, it's essentially an upgraded Fog, giving us protection from everything. Then, as it sits on the battlefield, it draws an ever-increasing number of cards to make sure we have a Fog to cast each turn!
If you've never seen Turbo Fog in action, the theory of the deck is simple: let the opponent build a massive board of creatures but make those creatures harmless by casting a Fog—a card that prevents all combat damage—each turn. While we don't have literal Fog on Magic Arena, we do have a total of 12 two-mana Fogs in our deck along with a playset of Bala Ged Recovery to return our Fogs to our hand; plus, we have a few pseudo-Fogs like The One Ring that don't technically say "prevent all combat damage" but functionally do the same thing.
Outside of The One Ring, my favorite pseudo-Fog in the deck is Consuming Tide, in large part because of how it interacts with The One Ring. For four mana, the sorcery bounces all but one of each player's nonland permanents. On its base level, this makes Consuming Tide a Fog, more or less. Our opponent will get all (or all but one) of their creatures bounced, which means they'll need to spend a turn or two deploying them. More importantly, Consuming Tide gives us a way to bounce our own The One Ring. This matters for two reasons. First, if The One Ring sticks on the battlefield for too long, the burden counter damage starts to add up. Bouncing The One Ring lets us reset the burden counters if they become too threatening. Second, if we bounce The One Ring, we can play it again to get its "protection from everything" Fog mode for another turn, which means Consuming Tide is often two Fogs in the late game—one from itself by bouncing our opponent's board and another from letting us reuse our The One Ring.
As you can see, our deck is really, really good at staying alive and surviving combat damage. But how do we actually win the game? With one of my favorite jank finishers: Teferi's Tutelage! The enchantment mills for two whenever we draw a card, which doesn't look like much, but combined with the absurd amount of card draw The One Ring offers, it actually empties our opponent's library super quickly. If we ever get multiple copies of Teferi's Tutelage on the battlefield alongside The One Ring, we can often mill our opponent's entire deck in just two or three turns! If we can't win by milling, we have a single Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim, which also interacts really well with The One Ring. The Spirits it makes become massive as we draw cards, while Teferi itself also gains a ton of loyalty and lets us rush its –12 ultimate, which is essentially a super Fog that makes our opponent shuffle nearly all their nonlands into their library!
Last but not least, we have Witness Protection. Initially, I played the deck with zero actual removal spells, trusting that our Fogs and bounce would be enough to win us the game. While this is often true, it's not always true: a few specific creatures can win the game without dealing combat damage. After losing to a Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and a Terror of the Peaks, I decided that we probably needed a little hard removal. Witness Protection is the perfect option, turning a Sheoldred, Questing Beast, or Terror of the Peaks into a Legitimate Businessperson, which keeps our "cast a Fog every turn" plan online.
The Matchups
The matchups for Turbo Fog are super simple: we want to play against decks looking to win with combat damage. We want to avoid control and combo decks that are looking to win with spells because they don't care about our Fogs.
The Odds
Record-wise, I'm 10-9 with Turbo Fog overall, good for a 53% match-win percentage, which is pretty solid, especially for a 12-rare budget deck. But in reality, the deck is even better than its record suggests because it includes all of the matches I played with the deck. When I first built the deck, I was playing too few lands, some awkward finishers like The Watcher in the Water, and, as I mentioned a moment ago, zero removal for Sheoldred-like creatures. After fixing the deck, I ended up going 9-5 with the final version, good for a shockingly strong 65% match-win percentage. Not only did we teach some important life lessons to Arena Zoomers, but we also might have accidentally created one of the best budget decks for Historic on Magic Arena! When you consider that there a plenty of nonbudget upgrades for the deck, including splashing a third color to play something like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria as an additional finisher (it works really well with Fogs since the two lands it untaps are exactly enough to cast one), and it seems possible that The One Ring Turbo Fog might actually be a legitimate deck, which is a scary thought because no one likes playing against Turbo Fog.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. 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.
