Against the Odds: I Built a Deck to Never Lose to Aggro (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Recently, I realized that best-of-one Standard is incredibly heavily skewed toward aggro decks, with Red and Rakdos Aggro being the two most played decks in the format and several other aggro decks among the top 10. In fact, if you add up the metagame percentages on Untapped.gg, you'll see that way more than 50% of the best-of-one meta is aggro.
This got me thinking: what we we could build a deck that would almost always lose to control and split our matches against midrange but almost always win against control? The deck should be great, considering how aggro the meta is. The problem is that beating aggro consistently isn't easy; if it were, aggro would be dominating the meta to such a huge extent. But then I realized there was a forgotten card in Standard that could solve our problem. Did you realize that there's a Fog legal in Standard? Meet Eerie Interference!
Sure, sure, Eerie Interference is a bit expensive for a Fog at three mana, but it's actually incredibly powerful in our current aggro best-of-one meta because it prevents all damage that creatures would deal to us our or creatures for a turn. This means that it does the obvious thing—Time Walking our opponent's attack step by preventing all the damage—but it's even better than that! One of the common ways that red aggro wins in Standard is damage from things like Callous Sell-Sword sacrificing Heartfire Hero or Cacophony Scamp to deal a huge amount of damage. But because this damage comes from creatures, Eerie Interference prevents it too! Plus, I'm not sure most people even realize a Fog exists in this Standard, making it super easy to catch opponents by surprise.
The rest of the deck is basically a who's who list of cards that are annoying for aggro. Metropolis Reformer and Beza, the Bounding Spring gain life, and Phyrexian Vindicator is almost impossible for red decks to beat; plus, we have a ton of cheap exile-based removal. Toss in Eerie Interference, and we have a deck that should (almost) never lose to aggro!
Wrap-Up
So, did the plan actually work? Is it worth building a deck exclusively to beat aggro? The answer is mostly yes. All in all, we played 15 games and won nine, which is solid, giving us a 60% win rate. Hilariously, the matchups went almost exactly as expected. We beat red aggro every time, going 5-0 against the archetype, while being other random aggro decks as well. The bad news is we are essentially drawing dead against control. The matchup is hilariously bad. Most of our cards don't do anything, and we don't have enough threats to fight through our opponent's removal to deal lethal damage. Midrange, on the other hand, was 50 / 50 in our matches, although overall I think that we'll lose to midrange more than we win. Really, though, losing to control and midrange doesn't matter much if you're playing against aggro 50%, 60%, or 70% of the time, which is our current best-of-one Standard world, and I expect it will get even worse once Duskmourn is released, along with Leyline of Resonance, which could push red aggro decks into overdrive.
So, should you play the deck? If all you care about is beating aggro, I think the answer is yes. The deck is very good at doing that one thing but very bad at doing anything else. If you ever go on one of those runs on Arena where you play against Mono-Red 10 times in a row, this is the perfect deck to break out!
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.
