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Against the Odds: Five-Color Colorless Door to Nothingness (Modern)


Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 264 of Against the Odds. Last week, we had a Modern Against the Odds poll, and in the end, Door to Nothingness took home a pretty commanding victory. While we have played Door to Nothingness a couple of times in the semi-distant past (once alongside Wilderness Reclamation and once in a Primal Surge deck), today's build is very different: we're a mono-colorless deck! How can we make the two mana of each color needed to activate Door to Nothingness in a colorless deck? Chromatic Orrery, of course! The mythic artifact from Core Set 2021 is actually the perfect combo piece for Door to Nothingness, not just fixing our mana so we can use it to activate the Door but also giving us five extra mana to ramp up to the 10 we need to win the game! Can Door to Nothingness work in an all-colorless deck in Modern? What are the odds of winning with the artifact? 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: Five-Color Colorless Door to Nothingness

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The Deck

Building around cards that we've played before can sometimes be tricky, mostly because along with trying to find a way to make a janky card work, in a perfect world, we'll also avoid just running back the same deck we played before. Thankfully, this wasn't a problem with Door to Nothingness. As soon as it won the poll, I was pretty sure that we'd be playing it with Chromatic Orrery because the new mythic mana rock seems like the perfect way to win the game with Door.

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Door to Nothingness basically asks us to do three things, and if we do, we win the game (by making our opponent lose the game). First, we need to find Door to Nothingness. Second, we need to get it onto the battlefield and untap with it. Third, we need not only 10 mana but ten very specific mana, with two mana of each color. While the sounds like a lot of work—and in some sense, it is—the reward is high: literally winning the game! Thankfully, we now have the perfect combo piece to help pull off the Door to Nothingness kill in Chromatic Orrery. Not only does Chromatic Orrery help us ramp up to 10 mana to activate Door to Nothingness, but by allowing us to spend our mana as if it were any color, it also is the strongest mana fixing possible. With an Orrery on the battlefield, we can have 10 colorless mana and still activate Door to Nothingness to win the game! Of course, for any of this to work, we need to get up to seven mana to cast Chromatic Orrery. The good news is we have a few ways to get there:

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First off, we have the Tron lands along with Expedition Map to help us find whatever Tron piece we are missing. It just so happens that if we can get one of each Tron land on the battlefield, we'll have access to seven mana, which is exactly enough to cast Chromatic Orrery. And then Chromatic Orrery taps for five more mana, which is exactly enough to cast Door to Nothingness. As a result, if we happen to luck into Tron, we can cast both Chromatic Orrery and Door to Nothingness on Turn 3 and then untap on Turn 4 with at least 12 mana—more than enough to win the game with Door to Nothingness. Since we're playing Tron and Tron makes seven mana, I couldn't resist adding another powerful colorless seven-drop to the deck. Don't worry, it's not Karn Liberated. Instead...

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we have Sphinx of the Guildpact. While Sphinx of the Guildpact probably looks pretty janky (and I guess, in some sense, it is), it's actually really powerful in our deck. Apart from being a big flier, having hexproof from monocolored means that basically none of the most popular removal in Modern actually interacts with Sphinx of the Guildpact, so it's likely to stick on the battlefield. More importantly, because Sphinx of the Guildpact is technically all colors, it combos with the card-draw ability on Chromatic Orrery, allowing us to draw five cards for five mana each turn, making it a great way for us to dig through our deck to find Door to Nothingness or whatever else we might need to close out the game.

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Our second plan for ramping into Chromatic Orrery and Door to Nothingness is putting a bunch of charge counters on Everflowing Chalice and Astral Cornucopia with Surge Node and Coretapper. While both Astral Cornucopia and Everflowing Chalice as somewhat overcosted as ramp spells, we can cast them for just a few mana (or even for no mana at all) thanks to Coretapper and Surge Node and then use Surge Node and Coretapper to power them up. Coretapper specifically is really powerful with this plan. If we can tap it once and then sacrifice it, we can add three charge counters to either Astral Cornucopia or Everflowing Chalice, which basically gives us a Gilded Lotus for just two mana. And as the game progresses, we can keep adding counters turn by turn until we have more mana than we'll ever need, thanks to the free mana rocks.

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Ramp plan number three is Golos, Tireless Pilgrim, perhaps getting our two copies of Cascading Cataracts. Golos is great in our deck, not only tutoring a land (like a missing Tron piece) to the battlefield when it comes into play but also—thanks to Cascading Cataracts and Chromatic Orrery's ability to allow our colorless deck to make any color of mana—digging through our deck to find Door to Nothingness and our other important cards with its activated ability. Thanks to our charge-counter ramp plan, Tron, and Chromatic Orrery, it's very possible that we can get to the point where we can activate Golos, Tireless Pilgrim two or even three times in one turn, allowing us to play massive chunks of our deck for free. As for Cascading Cataracts, apart from helping us activate Golos, it's also our backup plan for making the two mana of each color we need to win the game with Door to Nothingness. We have two copies of Cascading Cataracts in our deck, which is just enough to make double WUBRG with the help of our artifact ramp and Tron mana.

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Rounding out the non-land cards in our main deck are All Is Dust for removal and Voltaic Key, which is mostly in our deck so we can untap Door to Nothingness on the turn when we cast it to win the game immediately (if we have enough mana), rather than passing the turn and giving our opponent a chance to kill our Door or us. But it is also good for untapping things like Chromatic Orrery or Everflowing Chalice to make even more mana. 

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The other big benefit of playing an all-colorless deck is that we have a ton of room for sweet, powerful colorless utility lands. Inventors' Fair gives us another way to find Door to Nothingness (or whatever other artifact we need), Blast Zone offers a bit more removal that we can tutor up with cards like Golos, Tireless Pilgrim or Expedition Map, and Karn's Bastion is a good way to add even more charge counters to Everflowing Chalice and Astral Cornucopia by proliferating the charge counters. 

The Matchups

Matchup-wise, we're most scared of two things: fast combo decks and decks that are really good at blowing up lands and artifacts. Against fast combo decks, it's possible to win, either by getting a nut draw and winning with Door to Nothingness before our opponent can combo off or thanks to cards like Chalice of the Void and Grafdigger's Cage in our sideboard. But in general, Five-Color Colorless Door to Nothingness is just a bit too slow to keep up. Meanwhile, decks like Ponza that have Pillage are especially tough since it's hard to make enough mana to get Chromatic Orrery and Door to Nothingness online if our opponent can kill our lands or mana rocks. On the other hand, our deck is solid against midrange and even aggressive creature decks, where we often are fast enough to race, and we have some sneakily good removal (All Is Dust is game over against most of these decks). And we have a decent chance against control as well since we can make so much mana that we can usually cast our important spells even through disruption like Mana Leak or Remand

The Odds

Somehow, we ended up going 4-1 with Five-Color Colorless Door to Nothingness, giving us an 80% match win percentage. This is a shockingly good record, especially considering that our one loss came to Ponza, which is a really tough matchup, and we actually came pretty close to pulling it off. More importantly, we won almost every game with Door to Nothingness! We've played Door to Nothingness a couple of times in the semi-distant past with cards like Wilderness Reclamation and Primal Surge, but this version felt way better, not just at winning games but at winning games with Door to Nothingness itself. The big reason is that Chromatic Orrery is the perfect card to make the Door to Nothingness kill work. Having perfect mana is obviously helpful when it comes to making double-WUBRG for the Door kill, and the five mana that Chromatic Orrery makes is an oddly perfect amount to pick up the Door to Nothingness kill. If you want to take the challenge and try to pick up some wins with Door in Modern, this is the version I'd recommend for sure!

Vote for Next Week's Deck

No poll this week. Tomorrow Kaladesh Remastered releases on Magic Arena and we'll be celebrating with a special episode. Don't worry, the poll will be back next episode and overflowing with sweet new options!

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.



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