Against the Odds: I Flip Kefka, Sephiroth, and Emet-Selch for Just Three Mana (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! One of the coolest aspects of Final Fantasy is that the set has some absurdly powerful double-faced cards. The problem is that flipping cards like Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER, Emet-Selch, Unsundered, and Kefka, Court Mage takes a ton of effort or mana. But what if I told you there is a way to flip these busted villains for just three mana rather than their original transform costs? That's the idea of our deck today! Our plan is to exile a card with a cheap transform cost, like Captive Weird or Blightreaper Thallid, to Agatha's Soul Cauldron, which then lets us use the cheap transform cost of Captive Weird or Blightreaper Thallid to flip Sephiroth, Kefka, and Emet-Selch at a massive discount. This should hopefully let us take over the game with the cards' powerful backsides! Can the plan work? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Grixis Transform
The Deck
The plan of our deck today is pretty spicy! As I mentioned in the intro, one of the coolest themes of Final Fantasy is transforming villains with incredibly powerful backsides that are difficult to flip. Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER offers a huge flier that can generate card advantage alongside its busted emblem, but we need four creatures to die in a turn to flip it. Emet-Selch, Unsundered lets us play our graveyard, but we need a massive 14 cards in the bin to flip it. Finally, Kefka, Court Mage's backside can draw us at least six cards a turn, but it costs a hilariously high eight mana to transform it. It's also worth mentioning that the front side of all of these cards lets us get things into our graveyard, either by looting or sacrificing. This is also helpful since our primary goal is to get a couple of specific creatures in our graveyard to let us cheat on the cost of transforming our FF villains, which should let us take over the game with their powerful back halves.
So, here's the plan. We need to get Captive Weird and Blightreaper Thallid into the graveyard using cards like Kefka, Emet-Selch, Fear of Missing Out, Rona, Herald of Invasion, and even Sephiroth's sacrifice ability. These cards aren't especially powerful; actually, they are mostly draft chaff bulk. But they do have one really important ability: they can transform into their still-not-especially-powerful backsides for just three mana and two life. If we can get these cards in our graveyard, we can exile them to Agatha's Soul Cauldron to give their transform ability (which is an activated ability) to Kefka, Emet-Selch, and Sephiroth. This means we can flip our bomb-y villains for just three mana, which is a pretty absurd deal!
Wrap-Up
And that's basically the deck! Record-wise, we went 6-3 with the deck, which is a lot better than I expected. It turns out that flipping cards like Sephiroth, Emet-Selch, and Kefka on the cheap is actually pretty busted, to the point where I think some sort of Grixis Cauldron Transform deck might actually be at least somewhat competitive.
Kefka, Court Mage also deserves a shout-out—the card felt super strong. While it might not be fast enough to keep up with our current aggro-dominated meta, once we get some bannings and rotation, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Kefka is a legit Standard staple. While flipping it is obviously absurd, the power of the front side really sold me on the card. It was pretty easy to have its enters and attack trigger draw two cards, and in some cases, we were able to use the double type of Fear of Missing Out to draw three. Oh yeah, and our opponent also has to discard a card, which makes it pretty easy to grind opponents out of the game with the five-drop. I know that five mana is a tough sell in Standard, but I really think Kefka has the power to overcome its high mana cost and be a real threat at some point during its life in Standard.
All in all, Grixis Transform Cheat felt surprisingly strong. If you like midrange value decks but with a combo twist, give the deck a shot! While it's probably not top tier, it is oddly competitive and can win a lot of games, even in our current meta. And I wouldn't be surprised to see the strategy get a lot better once we finally get some bannings to slow down the format a bit!
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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