Against the Odds: I Make Things That Shouldn't Be Tokens into Tokens (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we head to Standard to turn some things that really weren't supposed to be tokens into tokens! While technically you could call our deck today Jeskai Tokens, that really doesn't do the deck justice. When I hear "Jeskai Tokens," I think of some sort of convoke deck flooding the board with 1/1s. But our deck is doing something very different. Perhaps the most unique part of Tarkir: Dragonstorm is the Jeskai theme of turning anything into a token, which we see in everything from Shiko, Paragon of the Way to Taigam, Master Opportunist and Flamehold Grappler. Our plan today is to use these cards to turn Three Blind Mice or Caretaker's Talent into tokens, which then allows those cards to copy themselves and leads to a hilarious, game-ending snowball of Mouse tokens and value! Can the plan work? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Jeskai Tokens
The Deck
Jeskai's theme in Tarkir: Dragonstorm of being able to make copies of anything—which means that if we copy a permanent, we'll get it as a token—has to be one of the coolest themes in a long time, just because it's so unique. There aren't many cards in Magic that can turn any permanent into a token, and now we've got a bunch all in the same colors. This is huge since it lets us build around the effect and have a lot of redundancy to our game plan. Our best of these cards is Shiko, Paragon of the Way, which lets us exile a nonland with mana value three or less from our graveyard and cast a copy of it for free, although both Flamehold Grappler and Taigam, Master Opportunist can get the job done as well.
So, why is Jeskai's "tokenize anything" theme so exciting? Because of how it interacts with a couple of cards that really weren't intended to be tokens in Three Blind Mice and Caretaker's Talent. The trick here is that both of these three-mana enchantments can copy tokens, which means that if we can use Shiko, Flamehold Grappler, or Taigam to turn them into tokens, they'll be able to copy themselves!
Three Blind Mice is the best payoff for our plan. Its first lore counter makes a 1/1 Mouse token, which gives us a body for chump blocking and eventually to beat our opponent down with. But the real fun is with the second and third lore counters, which copy a token. How this works in practice is that we get a multiplicity of Mice. We turn Three Blind Mice into a token. On the next turn, it can copy itself so now we have two Three Blind Mice. On the next turn, they both copy themselves, and we're up to four, then eight, then 16. Each new Three Blind Mice we make will also make a Mouse token, so we're not just making a bunch of useless enchantments, we're actually adding bodies to the battlefield too! Eventually, we'll start hitting the fourth lore counter to pump our team, which then lets us close out the game with a couple of attacks from our token horde.
Meanwhile, we can build an absurd card-advantage engine if we can get a token copy of Caretaker's Talent. We can pay one mana to go to level two of Caretaker's Talent and use it to copy itself (which will draw us a card thanks to its static ability). And we can do this as many times as we want, as long as we have the mana. However, we don't want to go too far down this path because Caretaker's Talent's card-draw ability is not a "may" ability, which means we're almost assuredly going to mill ourselves out if we actually make 10 or 20 Caretaker's Talents. (I did this once when I first built the deck.) In general, we want to make somewhere around 3–5 Caretaker's Talents. This means we should be drawing three to five extra cards each turn, which is enough to bury our opponent with card advantage but (hopefully) not so much that we die to milling out.
The final piece to our token-shenanigan puzzle is Elspeth, Storm Slayer, which is an absurd card in general, and doubly so in our deck thanks to our token plan. The static ability doubles up our tokens, which gets pretty wild once we start making tokens copies of Three Blind Mice. (It is worth pointing out that thanks to a weird rules quirk, Elspeth won't double up the token that Shiko, Flamehold Grappler, or Taigam makes). We can also use Elspeth to make some tokens or to just kill our opponent with the zero ability. The more I play with Elspeth, the more I become convinced it's one of the best cards in the entire set, and it's great here too.
The rest of the deck is pretty straightforward. We have a few cards to stock our graveyard for Shiko, Paragon of the Way, like Fear of Missing Out and Kiora, the Rising Tide, and some removal to help keep us alive, including Glacial Dragonhunt, which does both!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 7-5 with the deck, good for a solid 58% win percentage. More importantly, we got to see the deck do some crazy things! At one point, we had around 20 Three Blind Mice on the battlefield and could have kept making more if not for our opponent dying. Overall, I came away from the deck feeling like the copying theme of Jeskai might actually be pretty powerful in Standard. While I expected Shiko, Paragon of the Way to be strong, I was surprised at how good Flamehold Grappler felt. A 3/3 first strike is a decent body on Turn 3, and it offers an absurd amount of value later, once we can follow it up with another spell. While these cards work especially well with Three Blind Mice and Caretaker's Talent, I wouldn't be surprised if they were good in a generic sense as well. But why would you want to do the generic thing when you could be making all the Three Blind Mice?!?
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 or Bluesky @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
