Against the Odds: 100 Rhinos (This Time With the Siege Rhinos) | Modern
Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 340 of Against the Odds. A couple of weeks ago, we tried to play a 100–Siege Rhino Battle of Wits deck in Modern, but things went horribly and hilariously wrong when I forgot to add the Siege Rhinos to the deck. Well the deck returns today by popular demand, this time with 100% more Siege Rhinos! The goal of the deck is pretty simple: tutor up a Siege Rhino; copy it as many times as possible; and hopefully win the game with sweet, sweet Siege Rhino value. If that fails, we can always try to tutor up a Battle of Wits and (since our deck has a massive 250 cards) hopefully win the game on our upkeep. Is 100 Rhinos enough to win a game of Modern? 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: 100 Rhinos
The Deck
In all honesty, there probably isn't much point to trying to do a real "deck tech"–style article about Rhino of Wits; there are just too many cards to talk about everything individually. The deck breaks down pretty cleanly into a few different groups. We have 250 cards in all to let us win with Battle of Wits if we happen to find a copy (and to have more room to play Siege Rhinos). We've also got a massive 113 lands, which (hopefully) will be enough to keep us from getting mana screwed. Otherwise, we've got a ton of ramp, ranging from Birds of Paradise to Growth Spiral; a handful of removal; two Panglacial Wurms since no one will expect them; and finally, of course, 100 Siege Rhinos.
As far as the Rhinos, here's the breakdown:
- Four literal Siege Rhinos
- 38 tutors that can find Siege Rhino (some of which can also find Battle of Wits)
- 37 cards that can copy a Siege Rhino, ranging from Phantasmal Image to Lithoform Engine to Mythos of Illuna. It is worth mentioning that some of these cards, like Rite of Replication and Spitting Image, can technically make more than one Siege Rhino. But each card only counts as one Siege Rhino for our Rhino-counting purposes, regardless of how many Rhinos it can theoretically make.
- 12 lands that can copy Siege Rhino: Glasspool Mimic, Littjara Mirrorlake, and Mirrorpool
- Eight cards that can get Siege Rhino back from the graveyard, like Eternal Witness and Bala Ged Recovery
- One Panharmonicon
If you add all those numbers together, you should end up with 100 Siege Rhinos. Of course, not all Siege Rhinos are created equal. Because many of our Rhinos are clones, finding the first real copy of Siege Rhino is super important to the deck. If we can find a Siege Rhino, a card like Phantasmal Image is a two-mana Rhino, which is absurd. But if we don't find the first Siege Rhino, a card like Phantasmal Image won't be able to add a Rhino to the battlefield.
As far as actually winning the game, we have two real plans. First and foremost is to tutor up Siege Rhino, clone it as many times as possible, and trust that Rhino value will carry us to victory. Second, we can try to tutor up Battle of Wits, resolve it, and win on our upkeep because our deck is so unshufflably massive. We can also potentially win by cloning random things, most likely things that our opponent plays, because pretty much all of our non-Rhino, non-Clone creatures are mana dorks, which are not exactly huge threats.
The Matchups
We've got 100 Siege Rhinos. Why should we care what our opponent is playing? Siege Rhino doesn't.
The Odds
Record-wise, 100 Rhinos was a lot better than I expected. We ended up going 4-4 across eight matches with the deck, which obviously isn't an absurdly great record, but I expected us to do a lot worse considering we were playing a 250-card Battle of Wits deck with 100 Siege Rhinos.
Siege Rhino once again proved to be a super-powerful creature. Almost all of our wins came thanks to our Siege Rhino plan, and we even managed to win a game Commander style by kicking a Rite of Replication on a Siege Rhino! Battle of Wits was another story. We spent most of our matches having near-misses, including an especially brutal one against control where we got our opponent down to one card in hand and one open mana before we cast Battle of Wits only for that one card to be a Spell Pierce to counter our Battle of Wits. Thankfully, all of our Battle of Wits troubles were forgotten during our last match against Tron where we managed to luck into the Battle of Wits win two games in a row!
While I wouldn't consider Rhino of Wits to be a competitive Modern deck, as I mentioned before, it was a lot more functional than I expected. Could you take 100 Rhinos to a GP or Pro Tour and Top 8 with it? Almost certainly not. Could you take it to an FNM-level event and win some matches? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes! With the power of 100 Siege Rhinos and some small chance of accidentally winning with Battle of Wits, anything is possible!
Vote for Next Week's Deck
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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.
