Against the Odds: 52 Surveil Lands (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're playing 52 Surveil Lands! In fact, if you look at the cards legal in Standard, we're playing every single surveil land that exists! Why such an extreme deck-building restriction? The answer here comes from our two non-surveil land cards: Hedge Shredder and Iridescent Vinelasher! In many ways, our deck is like a weird, super-expensive version of Zombie Hunt. The idea is that we mulligan into Hedge Shredder (and ideally find a Iridescent Vinelasher too). We can then play the Hedge Shredder and follow up with a surveil land. When we surveil, odds are we'll hit another surveil land, which Hedge Shredder will let us put into play to repeat the process. If we have Iridescent Vinelasher on the battlefield, we hopefully just win the game on the spot with its landfall trigger. If we don't have Vinelasher, our Hedge Shredder will give us a bunch of lands, and the chain will eventually end with a non-land—hopefully an Iridescent Vinelasher so we can win the following turn! Can a deck with 52 surveil lands actually win? What are the odds the plan works? Let's find out!
Against the Odds: 52 Surveil Lands
Wrap-Up
First off, a couple of quick words in case you decide to try this absurd deck. First, don't keep a hand without Hedge Shredder. It's worth mulliganing all the way down to one to find a copy because we can't win without one, and our odds of drawing into one naturally are low because we have 52 lands in our deck. Beyond Hedge Shredder, it's mostly about the lands we keep in our hand. Ideally, we want two green sources (to cast Hedge Shredder), one black source (for Iridescent Vinelasher), and, if we're super lucky, one of our two untapped surveil lands to help speed things up.
Beyond this, the only other choice you really need to make with the deck is whether to cast Hedge Shredder or Iridescent Vinelasher first. Obviously, the choice is easy if we only have Hedge Shredder, but what should you do if we have both? Initially, my thought was to play Iridescent Vinelasher first since it's cheaper and then follow up with Hedge Shredder so we can play a land drop and immediately try to win. However, this doesn't always work. If our opponent's at 20 life, we need to hit 10 lands in a row to kill our opponent, which is far from guaranteed. As a result, I've come to believe that it's best to play Hedge Shredder first if we can because then we can play Vinelasher the following turn and play a surveil land to combo. Then, once we fizzle by hitting a non-land, we can crew up Hedge Shredder to attack and mill two more cards, which should give us enough surveils to win! Basically, we're very likely to win with the combo if we can play Hedge Shredder first. If we have to play Vinelasher first, our odds of dealing the full 20 damage drop, but it is a turn faster.
Did the plan work? It did 15% of the time! So, 52 Surveil Land isn't exactly a competitive deck—simply too many things can go wrong. Since we only have eight non-lands, something as simple as a Duress to take the Hedge Shredder from our hand usually means we lose, as does removal to kill Iridescent Vinelasher or Hedge Shredder on the battlefield. We also struggle against aggro. In theory, we can win on Turn 5, but decks like Mono-Red can easily kill us a turn or two earlier since we don't have any interaction.
Basically, 52 Surveil Lands is Standard-legal Zombie Hunt, except rather than costing $20 to put together, it costs around $600 since you need four copies of each surveil land in Standard. The deck is hilarious, and the games you manage to win are sure to get you some high fives at your local game store. Just don't expect those games to happen too often.
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.
