Against the Odds: I Build a Haunted House of Magic Cards (Duskmourn Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we kick off our exploration of Duskmourn Standard with a deck that's looking to build a haunted house out of Magic cards: Five-Color Rooms! Our deck's goal is simple: win the game with Central Elevator // Promising Stairs by getting at least eight unlocked Rooms on the battlefield! While this might sound like a long shot, cards like Ghostly Dancers and [[Marina Vendrell] help by letting us unlock Rooms on the cheap; plus, Rooms themselves can do just about everything, from ramping us, to killing our opponent's creatures, to drawing us tons of cards! How good are Rooms? Can we actually win a game by building a haunted house of Magic cards? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Five-Color Rooms
Discussion
First and foremost, Rooms are pretty awesome! While they might look a bit clunky on paper, they played incredibly well in practice. While I'm not sure about the deck's exact record (we played on early-access day, so our deck tracker didn't work), it had to be somewhere around 50%.
It turns out that winning with Central Elevator // Promising Stairs isn't really that difficult. A lot of times, we ended up doing it almost accidentally. Since our deck is stuffed full of Rooms, as we play our removal and ramp, we'll naturally end up with eight or more unlocked Rooms on the battlefield, letting us win the game on our upkeep with our haunted house.
Part of the reason the plan worked so well is there's a Room for just about everything. Moldering Gym and Smoky Lounge ramp us, while Greenhouse fixes our mana. One of the odd aspects of Rooms is how much free value they offer. Take Moldering Gym // Weight Room as an example. We're playing the card for Moldering Gym, an on-curve three-mana ramp spell, but later in the game, we can always open up Weight Room if we have nothing better to do, to make a 5/5 and add another Room to our haunted house for the Central Elevator // Promising Stairs kill. In many ways, Rooms are split cards on steroids since, unlike most split cards, we actually get to use both sides of the cards eventually, rather than just one.
We've also got a bunch of Rooms that offer removal, letting us keep our opponent's board in check while we slowly build toward the Promising Stairs win. Some of the removal Rooms—like Roaring Furnace // Steaming Sauna and Restricted Office // Lecture Hall—have powerful second halves, giving us card advantage and protecting our permanents.
Meanwhile, we've got a couple of Rooms focused on card advantage, with Derelict Attic drawing us a couple of cards and Charred Foyer giving us an extra card each turn on our upkeep and potentially letting us play it for free if we unlocked Warped Spaces. While both cards are just one-ofs, they help to up our Room count for Promising Stairs, and we can tutor them up when we need them with Central Elevator.
Discounting our win-con Promising Stairs, the most important Room in our deck by far is Mirror Room // Fractured Realm. I know what you're thinking: "Of course Seth likes the Panharmonicon Room." And while it is true that I love my Panharmonicons, in this deck, Mirror Room // Fractured Realm is more of a combo piece than a value engine thanks to its interaction with our creatures.
We've only got two creatures in our deck, both of which can unlock Rooms. Marina Vendrell is fine, drawing us some Rooms when it enters the battlefield and unlocking a Room for free each turn it sticks around. But the real winner here is Ghostly Dancers, which I think might be one of the biggest sleepers from Duskmourn. Ghostly Dancers can unlock a Room when it enters the battlefield (or return an enchantment from our graveyard to our hand, which does happen sometimes, although far less often than unlocking a Room) and then, thanks to eerie, makes a 3/1 flier whenever an enchantment enters or we unlock a Room. While Ghostly Dancers is fine by itself, it's absurd with Mirror Room // Fractured Realm.
Here's the trick: we can play Ghostly Dancers and use it to open whatever our most expensive or powerful Room is, which will make a 3/1 flier. Then, we can play Mirror Room for three mana (which will trigger Ghostly Dancers to make another 3/1) and use it to copy Ghostly Dancers. This new Ghostly Dancers can immediately unlock Mirror Room // Fractured Realm, giving us a super-Panharmonicon, doubling up all of our triggered abilities, including both Ghostly Dancers, which together will make four more 3/1 fliers. For a total of eight mana (which can be split between two turns), we end up with three new unlocked Rooms for our haunted house (including something like 14 mana of Rooms opened for free) and 22 power worth of flying creatures split between eight bodies. Plus, any future Rooms will double trigger thanks to Fractured Realm, which is insane. When we pull this off, we typically just win the game, either with all of our tokens or by having enough unlocked Rooms to win with Promising Stairs on our upkeep!
The last card I wanted to bring up is Tarnation Vista. When I first saw the land, it seemed unplayable—getting enough different mono-colored permanents on the battlefield to power it up seemed impossible. But it turns out that the card is pretty absurd with Rooms. On the battlefield, only the unlocked side of a Room counts toward Tarnation Vista, which means a card like Roaring Furnace // Steaming Sauna can be a mono-blue permanent or a mono-red permanent, depending on which side we open. Toss in that we're playing Rooms split around all five colors, and it was pretty easy to turn Tarnation Vista into a Standard-legal Ancient Tomb. We had multiple games where we could tap Tarnation Vista for four or even the full five mana, which is wild. I think the land is worth reevaluation in the context of Duskmourn Standard. Having so many enchantments around seems like it might power up the card enough to make it playable, if not super strong. At least in 5C Rooms, the land was a legit bomb!
All in all, Rooms felt great, to the point where I think some build of Rooms (perhaps with fewer colors to make the mana more consistent) could be a real deck in Standard. But if the deck does take off, its success might be short-lived since people could start playing cards like Cease // Desist, which would absolutely wreck our plan. Either way, Rooms are a blast to play and oddly powerful! If you're looking for something different to try in Duskmourn Standard, give them a shot!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, or you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
