Against the Odds: 20 Shrines vs. Standard
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! One of the more interesting parts of Avatar is that the set brought with it a new cycle of Shrines. So today, we're going to head to Standard and see what happens if we put all 20 of them in the same deck! The plan is simple: ramp into the Shrines, trust that their snowballing value will be enough to pick up some wins, and maybe do some pretty spectacular things along the way. But can the plan work? What are the odds of winning with every single Standard-legal Shrine in the same deck? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: 20 Shrines
The Deck
Today's deck is actually pretty straightforward because more than half of our nonland slots are taken up by the 20 Shrines, which doesn't leave a ton of room for support cards. The biggest challenge of building around Shrines is that three of the five members of the cycle cost four mana, which is pretty clunky curve-wise. Ideally, we want to be able to play multiple Shrines in a turn, which means our deck needs a lot of mana to function. As a result, we're playing the fast-mana package of Gene Pollinator, Llanowar Elves, and Badgermole Cub to get our Shrines on the battlefield as quickly as possible.
The rest of our flex slots go to Get Lost for removal and Stock Up because when I first started testing the deck, I had some games where I got multiple Shrines on the battlefield but then proceeded to draw nothingness for a bunch of turns while our Shrines sat around and did nothing since they all trigger whenever a Shrine enters, rather than as a static ability on our upkeep. Having a bit more card advantage helps ensure that once we get some Shrines on the battlefield, we can keep chaining together more Shrines to maximize their value. So, how does our deck actually win? The answer here is our Shrines themselves!
First up, we have our cheapest Shrine Northern Air Temple, which, for one mana, drains equal to the number of Shrines we control when it enters and also drains for one whenever another Shrine enters. Northern Air Temple does two things for our deck. First, it's a cheap way to up our Shrine count. Since each Shrine triggers when it enters based on the number of Shrines we control, we can run out Northern Air Temple early in the game to maximize the power of our more expensive Shrines by having an additional Shrine on the battlefield. Second, in the late game, it becomes our finisher. Because there are five different Shrines in Standard, in theory, if we get the other four Shrines in play and then chain together all four copies of Northern Air Temple, we drain our opponent for 20 and win the game on the spot! This might sound like Magical Christmas Land, but once our Shrines start snowballing, it's pretty easy to draw through our deck thanks to Shrine #2...
The Spirit Oasis is our card-draw Shrine, and it's a good one. For three mana, it draws equal to the number of Shrines we control when it enters and then will continue to draw one whenever another Shrine enters. It's arguably our most important Shrine since the card advantage it offers allows for some massive snowball turns where we go from not doing much to having a massive board out of the blue! Combined with Stock Up, it gives us a massive amount of card advantage in the mid- to late game, which is where the snowbally power of Shrines can really take over!
Much like the blue Shrine, Kyoshi Island Plaza is another super-important support Shrine. When it enters, it ramps basics equal to the number of Shrines we control and then ramps again when a Shrine enters. Thanks to our wonky 15-basic-land five-color mana base, Kyoshi Island Plaza is incredibly broken in our deck. The first one often ramps two or three lands for four mana, and as the game continues, it's not uncommon for us to ramp all 15 basics out of our deck pretty quickly. Hilariously, the power of Kyoshi Island Plaza eventually ends up dwarfing Badgermole Cub. We really need the Cub's power early in the game to get our four-mana Shrines in play, but we don't really care if our mana dorks die once we stick a Kyoshi Island Plaza because we're going to have all the lands we need anyway.
When it comes to killing our opponent, Crescent Island Temple gives us the creatures we need, making a 1/1 prowess Monk when it enters for each Shrine we control, and another one whenever a future Shrine enters. Typically, by the time we play it, we'll get three or four 1/1s for four mana, which is already solid. And then, the future Monks when more Shrines are played give us a way to keep rebuilding our board to fight through removal (or a steady stream of chump blockers in a pinch).
The final piece of the puzzle is Ouroboroid...I mean, Southern Air Temple, which actually is just Ouroboroid in disguise. When the white Shrine enters, we put a +1/+1 counter on our team for each Shrine we control—often four or five counters the turn it enters, which is super far about the curve. As the game continues, we get a bonus +1/+1 counter on our team whenever another Shrine enters. Combined with the tokens from the red Shrine, this is our primary plan for winning the game, and honestly, it does feel a lot like Ouroboroid: the Shrine version, thanks to the absurd amount of power it adds to the battlefield for just four mana!
And that's basically the deck. Play as many Shrines as possible, as quickly as possible, and trust that their Sliver-like ability to power each other up will let us snowball our namesake enchantments into a victory!
Wrap-Up
So, how well did Shrines work in Standard? Overall, we went 6-10 with the deck for a 38% win percentage, which isn't great overall but actually felt reasonable considering we're playing 20 Shrines in our deck. The deck's biggest problem is consistency, which makes sense considering we're a five-color deck built around four-mana enchantments and playing 15 basic lands. The deck feels insane with a good draw where we can use our mana dorks to ramp into an early Shrine and start snowballing our value. We managed to go toe to toe with Simic Spew and beat it because Southern Air Temple just out-+1/+1-countered Ouroboroid, and we had some games where we basically drew our entire deck and made a hilariously big board. On the other hand, we also had some games where our mana dork died and we were left with a bunch of four-mana Shrines in hand, which are just way too slow for Standard without help. We tried a few non–mana dork hands where we'd just curve out with our Shrines, and it turns out the deck is just too slow unless you are getting the four-mana Shrines down early.
Basically, 20 Shrines is a deck that has some really sweet games where it feels unbeatable and also some really bad games where it feels unplayable, which I guess makes it the perfect Against the Odds deck!
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.
