Against the Odds: I Play Every Ugin in the Same Deck (Pioneer)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, planeswalker tribal returns after a long hiatus! We finally got our third Ugin, which qualifies Ugin for a planeswalker-tribal deck. So today, we're heading to Pioneer to play a deck with the full four copies of every Ugin that exists! What are the odds of winning with a deck with all the copies of every Ugin? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Ugins
The Deck
The plan of today's deck is actually super simple: ramp as aggressively as possible with as many colorless cards as possible, and then cast as many Ugins as possible, trusting that the planeswalkers will win us the game! The good news is that pretty much every Ugin is busted. They each offer some form of removal and card advantage. In fact, Ugins are so strong that a single one can take over a game! The challenge is that Ugins are also pretty expensive, with the cheapest being six mana and OG Ugin, the Spirit Dragon going all the way up to eight mana. This means the biggest question for the deck is whether it's actually fast enough to keep up with the Pioneer meta.
Thankfully, our deck is overflowing with ramp to help us start playing our Ugins as quickly as possible. With our best draws, we can ramp on Turn 2 with Glimpse the Core or The Irencrag and then double-ramp on Turn 3 with Hedron Archive, which should give us enough mana to start casting Ugins as early as Turn 4! Our colorless ramp spells also do double duty in our deck since once we get an Ugin, Eye of the Storms on the battlefield, they'll each blow up a permanent when we cast them, which is pretty sweet.
Wrap-Up
So, how did the deck work? Shockingly, Ugin Tribal might go down as the best planeswalker tribal deck of all time. We went 6-0 with the deck for recording, and then I kept playing the deck for fun and am currently 12-4 overall. While the deck looks a bit clunky on paper, Ugins are so strong that, in practice, we really only need to stick one or two to win the game. Perhaps the most surprising part is that we actually managed to beat the aggro decks of Pioneer, like Mono-Red and Prowess, which I expected to be our hardest matchups. The only downside is that we never actually got to see all three Ugins on the battlefield at the same time because if we managed to get one or two on the battlefield, we'd either win the game or our opponent would scoop. Ugins are just that strong! While playing the full four copies of every Ugin might be overkill, I came away from this deck feeling like some sort of Ugin Tribal deck might actually be legit in Pioneer. Everyone is so focused on stopping aggro that many decks can't handle a massive planeswalker. As weird as it sounds, Ugin Tribal might actually be at least somewhat legit!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Play more Ugins! 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.
