Against the Odds: Hidetsugu's Second Rite (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! One of my favorite parts of the current Standard is Foundations. Even today, more than a year after the set was released, I'm still stumbling on cards that I didn't even realize had been reprinted into Standard. For example, I recently discovered that one of my favorite (and arguably one of the most powerful) burn spells of all time is currently Standard legal: Hidetsugu's Second Rite! For four mana, the instant deals an absurd 10 damage . . . but only if our opponent is at exactly 10 life! In practice, this means Hidetsugu's Second Rite either does nothing (like quite literally nothing) at all (well, other than up our storm count), or it does everything (like quite literally everything, as in our opponent just dies on the spot from 10 life). With this deck, our job isn't to get our opponent's life total to zero; it's to get our opponent's life total to 10 and trust that Hidetsugu's Second Rite will do the rest! What are the odds of the plan working? Can we actually win with Hidetsugu's Second Rite in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Hidetsugu's Second Rite
The Deck
As I mentioned in the intro, our goal today is simple: count up to 10, deal that much damage to our opponent, and then use Hidetsugu's Second Rite to win the game. The rest of our deck is a pretty straightforward burn deck, with the goal of playing a mix of cards that can deal different amounts of damage to help ensure we can get our opponent to exactly 10 life, because getting them to nine or 11 isn't going to cut it. In fact, if our opponent somehow gets below 10 life, our Hidetsugu's Second Rites do nothing, and we try to win the game like a normal burn deck by throwing a bunch of damage at our opponent's face. Here's a quick breakdown of our damage-dealing cards:
- One damage: Burnout Bashtronaut and Hired Claw (Keep in mind that since Hidetsugu's Second Rite is an instant, we can attack with Hired Claw for one, and if that gets our opponent to 10, we can Hidetsugu's Second Rite before it actually connects for combat damage.)
- Two damage: Burst Lightning, Shock, and Virtue of Courage
- Three damage: Boltwave, Lightning Helix, and Lightning Strike
- Four damage: Boros Charm and Burst Lightning (with kicker)
As you can see, there are a bunch of ways that these cards can deal exactly 10 damage: two Boros Charms and a Shock, three Lightning Helixes and a Hired Claw, five Burst Lightnings / Shocks, and so on. Toss in some opponents taking damage from their shock lands, and that they have no idea that they just die if they end up at exactly 10 life, and it's actually not that difficult to win the game with Hidetsugu's Second Rite.
So, which cards make our life difficult? The biggest are lands that let our opponent pay life while on the battlefield, like Starting Town or Fountainport. (Shock lands usually aren't a problem because they happen at sorcery speed, so we can play around them pretty easily.) If our opponent leaves one of these lands untapped, we can never win with Hidetsugu's Second Rite because if we try, our opponent can simply pay a life to their land to get down to nine and fizzle Hidetsugu's Second Rite. While Starting Town and Fountainport aren't super popular, they do show up in some decks. And in these matchups, we mostly need to be patient and wait for our opponent to tap out before going for the kill (or simply give up on Hidetsugu's Second Rite and try to win by burning our opponent all the way to zero).
The other tricky mechanic is lifegain. While we definitely can beat lifegain, it makes doing Hidetsugu's Second Rite math super hard because rather than just counting to 10 damage and then killing our opponent, we need take into account how much life our opponent potentially can gain, which makes everything a lot murkier. The good news is that lifegain can actually let us win with Hidetsugu's Second Rite even once our opponent gets down below 10 because they'll probably gain enough life that we can get another shot at the Hidetsugu's Second Rite kill.
Wrap-Up
Here's the shocking thing: Hidetsugu's Second Rite actually crushed it. I played 20 matches with the deck and won 16, good for an insane 80% win rate. Now, I know some of you are thinking, "Well, sure, you probably just burnt everyone out of the game and won despite Hidetsugu's Second Rite rather than because of it." I don't blame you for thinking this because I was afraid this might happen myself, but this actually wasn't the case. Of the 16 matches we won, we won eight of them with Hidetsugu's Second Rite—a full 50%! Even better, there were several games that we 100% would have lost (like, we were dead on board the following turn) if it weren't for Hidetsugu's Second Rite's ability to win the game out of nowhere! While Hidetsugu's Second Rite reads like a meme because of its harsh timing restriction, the card is actually oddly powerful because nobody expects it. If we somehow ended up in a world where everyone was playing Hidetsugu's Second Rite, it would get significantly worse because it's pretty easy to play around. But I didn't even realize that Hidetsugu's Second Rite was in Standard, so there's just no way anyone in their right mind would even attempt to play around it, making it super easy to pick up some super funny, random wins with the Saviors of Kamigawa reprint. If you like throwing damage at your opponent but want to do it in style, keep Hidetsugu's Second Rite in mind. At least in my experience, the card plays way better than it looks and (at least, while nobody expects it) might actually be pretty playable!
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.
