Against the Odds: I Broke Arena By Making a Billion Balloons (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! The other day, I was playing Standard and broke Magic Arena by making a billion (and actually way more) balloons with The Jolly Balloon Man and Ratadrabik of Urborg. And today, I'm going to show you exactly how I did it!
Against the Odds: Jolly Ratadrabik
The Deck
First off, shout out to Eevee098, who initially sent me the idea for the deck back during spoiler season. While I'm not playing their exact deck, they were certainly the inspiration behind building around the combo!
The primary plan of our deck is to abuse the synergy of The Jolly Balloon Man and Ratadrabik of Urborg. For one mana, The Jolly Balloon Man can tap to make a 1/1 red Balloon token copy of a creature with flying and haste that sacrifices itself at the end of the turn. Meanwhile, Ratadrabik gives us a 2/2 non-legendary token copy of any legend that dies. Together, the cards can do some wild things because The Jolly Balloon Man can copy legends, unlike many similar cards like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. In practice, this means we can use the Balloon Man to copy Ratadrabik, which will give us two legendary Ratadrabiks. One will die to the legend rule, which will then give us a 2/2 non-legendary token copy with Ratadrabik of Urborg's ability. This gives us two Ratadrabiks, so the next time a legend dies, we'll get two non-legendary token copies, which allows us to snowball into an absurdly huge board.
While our deck is much more likely to make a billion Balloons, hit the token limit on Magic Arena, and crash the game than go fully infinite, we can make infinite balloons if we add Relic of Legends to the Ratadrabik of Urborg / The Jolly Balloon Man combo, although we need two copies of The Jolly Balloon Man to make it happen. The trick is that when we play the second copy of The Jolly Balloon Man, we'll legend rule (and make a copy with Ratadrabik of Urborg) and keep the untapped copy on the battlefield, which we can tap with Relic of Legends to make a mana, to activate the Ratadrabik token copy of The Jolly Balloon Man, to copy the legendary version and repeat the process, giving us an infinitely big board of 2/2 hasty red Zombie Balloon Tokens to win the game!
Mondrak isn't 100% necessary for the combo, but it does allow for some spectacular board stats by doubling up not just the token copies of Ratadrabik of Urborg but also The Jolly Balloon Man tokens. It's also a legend, which means we can copy it with The Jolly Balloon Man to make additional copies with Ratadrabik. And once we get multiple copies of Mondrak, Glory Dominus on the battlefield, it's pretty easy to make billions of tokens with our combo accidentally.
While we can win the game just by attacking with a ton of hasty balloon tokens, we can also win without attacking at all thanks to Kambal, Profiteering Mayor, Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim, and Funeral Room // Awakening Hall, which can drain our opponent out of the game directly as our tokens enter or as our Balloon tokens sacrifice them on our end step. Funeral Room // Awakening Hall also gives us a way to reanimate all of our creatures, which is helpful against grindy midrange decks.
Otherwise, we have Djeru and Hazoret to help dig through our deck to find our combo pieces and Zoraline, Cosmos Caller to return them from our graveyard to the battlefield once they die.
Rounding out the deck are Bart as a backup sacrifice outlet and some removal, including Loran of the Third Path for artifacts and Starfall Invocation, which is generally worse than Sunfall as a wrath, but since our deck is built around death triggers, we'd much rather be Starfalling than Sunfalling.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Jolly Ratadrabik wasn't competitive at all. My untapped.gg stats show a 17% win rate, although this is complicated by how good our deck is at crashing Arena. Most of our "wins" didn't actually count as wins because our mass of balloons would break Arena and the match would end in a draw. If we included these as actual wins, our win rate would get a bit better, but it would still be far from a competitive deck.
The good news is that when we do win, we win in spectacular fashion, making billions of Balloons, which is hilarious! The biggest issue the deck has is simply consistency. It's not that easy to find Ratadrabik of Urborg and The Jolly Balloon Man along with a Relic of Legends or Mondrak, Glory Dominus and keep them all on the battlefield. But when everything comes together, it's magical!
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.
