Against the Odds: Deck the Hallcreeper (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Today, in the spirit of the holidays, we're decking the halls...by trying to build the biggest Silent Hallcreeper ever, with the help of a janky pile of card draw, Doubling Season, and Prime Speaker Zegana! How many counters can we put on the unblockable two-drop? Let's get to the video and find out! Happy holidays, everyone!
Against the Odds: Deck the Hallcreeper
The Deck
Today's deck started out with a simple goal: try to build a Prime Speaker Zegana deck for Foundations Standard. When Zegana was in Standard more than a decade ago, it was a pretty solid option at the top end of your curve. But is it still good in 2024? That's what I wanted to figure out. The question was how best to take advantage of the card draw that Prime Speaker Zegana offers.
Then, I realized that Doubling Season exists in Standard and that it's the perfect way to power up Prime Speaker Zegana. When Prime Speaker Zegana enters the battlefield, it gets +1/+1 counters equal to the greatest power among creatures we control, which is usually five or six (at least, for the first Zegana) thanks to Colossal Rattlewurm, Overlord of the Floodpits, and Overlord of the Hauntwoods. And then we draw cards equal to Prime Speaker Zegana's power. The trick here is that Doubling Season doubles the number of counters on Zegana, which also doubles the number of cards that we draw. So, instead of drawing five or six cards, we'll draw 10 or 12!
The next step is converting this card draw into damage with the help of Proft's Eidetic Memory, which puts +1/+1 counters on a creature we control at the beginning of combat equal to the number of extra cards we drew during the turn. Doubling Season will also double up these counters, which means if we play a Prime Speaker Zegana with a Doubling Season on the battlefield and draw 10 cards, when we go to combat, we'll put 20 +1/+1 counters on a creature...
...like Silent Hallcreeper. Silent Hallcreeper is the perfect creature to deck with +1/+1 counters since it is unblockable, which means that if we can get 20 or more counters on it, we're more or less guaranteed to win the game with just a single attack!
Rounding out the deck are some extra card draw in Overlord of the Floodpits and Up the Beanstalk. Meanwhile, Colossal Rattlewurm and Overlord of the Hauntwoods help ramp us into Prime Speaker Zegana and our other combo pieces. These cards are also super important for our Prime Speaker Zegana combo since we need a big creature on the battlefield to pump up Zegana's card-draw ability. It's also worth mentioning that both Overlord of the Floodpits and Colossal Rattlewurm are good backups for Silent Hallcreeper as creatures to dump a bunch of +1/+1 counters on since they are evasive and can potentially one-turn-kill our opponent.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, the deck was pretty rough, posting a very Against the Odds 23% win rate, which I guess means we were handing out some holiday gifts to our opponent in the form of some free wins. The good news is that we achieved our goal and managed to make a Silent Hallcreeper with more than 100 counters on it, which was pretty hilarious! Overall, the deck was just too clunky and expensive to be super competitive (we got run over by Mono-Red a bunch of times), but it is funny when it works! This probably isn't the deck for you if your goal is to rank up, but if you want to try to beat my record for biggest Silent Hallcreeper of all time, feel free to give it a shot!
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.
