Against the Odds: I Play My Opponents Turns for Them (as badly as possible) | Standard
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Waterbending is the mechanic from Avatar that I'm most hyped for but also most uncertain about. While it looks a lot like convoke and improvise, both powerful mechanics, a lot of the waterbending numbers are pretty high. As such, today, we're going to head to our new Standard format and try to see just how broken waterbending can be if you go all in on building around it, and we might just learn the Secret of Bloodbending and maybe even take an extra turn or two along the way! Are Spirit Water Revival and the waterbending mechanic busted? What are the odds of winning by bloodbending opponents into submission? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Secrets of Bloodbending
The Deck
As soon as I saw Spirit Water Revival, I thought the card was super busted. For just three mana, it draws seven cards and gives no max hand size for the rest of the game, which is wild, but this all assumes that we can also waterbend six by tapping six artifacts or creatures. The primary goal of today's deck is to figure out if Spirit Water Revival is indeed busted, or if it's actually a trap because the waterbending cost is too high...
Of course, we also have two other big waterbending cards in the deck to help us finish the game in Secret of Bloodbending and The Legend of Kuruk. Secret of Bloodbending is a super-weird card. For four mana, it lets us control our opponent during their next combat, which at worst makes it a four mana Fog, although we can occasional get some extra value out of it, depending on what's in our opponent's hand and how they play their turn. But if we can also waterbend 10, we get a full-on [[Mindslaver], controlling our opponent not just during combat but for their entire turn, which is brutal. We can cast our opponent's removal on their own creatures, fail to find with their fetch lands, chump attack with their creatures, and generally just play their turn for them as poorly as possible. While a single Secret of Bloodbending can end the game in the right matchup and scenario, in the late game, we'll ideally be able to chain together Secret of Bloodbendings to take multiple turns from our opponent in a row.
Combine this with the backside of The Legend of Kuruk, which can waterbend 20 to take an extra turn but only once thanks to exhaust, and we can sort of play like a weird extra turns deck where we draw a ton of cards with Spirit Water Revival, control a turn or two with Secret of Bloodbending, take an extra turn with The Legend of Kuruk, and use all this time to figure out a way to win the game. As far as The Legend of Kuruk itself, the front side is admittedly clunky, as a four-mana enchantment that only Preordains for the first two turns on the battlefield. But the backside is actually super strong, as a creature that makes a 1/1 Spirit whenever we cast anything. Being attached to a Saga actually makes the backside, Avatar Kuruk, way more powerful than other similar creatures because it means when we flip into Avatar Kuruk, we'll have all of our mana up to protect it or, at worst, can cast a bunch of spells to make a bunch of Spirits before it dies. The Spirits also make The Legend of Kuruk a bit of a hybrid card, as not only a waterbending payoff but also a waterbending enabler, as we can tap the Spirits to help pay for waterbending costs. This begs the question: how do we actually get enough permanents on the battlefield to make waterbending work?
The rest of our deck is primarily permanents that add multiple creatures and / or artifacts to the battlefield to use for waterbending. Cards like Novice Inspector and Spyglass Siren are actually weird rituals in our deck, costing just one mana but adding two mana worth of waterbendable permanents to the battlefield, which essentially generates one mana. Carrot Cake isn't quite as good, making two permanents for two mana, although gaining a bit of life and scrying are a nice bonus too.
Our last big waterbend support card is Cosmogrand Zenith, which makes two 1/1s whenever we cast our second spell for a turn. Ideally, we'll play Cosmogrand Zenith on a turn where we can immediately follow it up with another play to trigger its ability, This means that on Turn 1, Cosmogrand Zenith costs three mana but makes three creatures we can use for waterbending. But every turn that it sticks around, we can make two more 1/1s, which means that on future turns, Cosmogrand Zenith starts generating extra waterbend mana. Eventually, Cosmogrand Zenith also becomes our finisher. Once we start chaining together Secret of Bloodbendings and taking extra turns, we can use it to make a massive board of creatures and eventually grow them with +1/+1 counters so we can win with just a couple of big attacks!
Rounding things out are Caretaker's Talent, as a backup card-advantage engine and also another finisher, since eventually we can level it up to pump all of our tokens from Avatar Kuruk and Cosmogrand Zenith, and Get Lost and Perilous Snare, as more removal. It's also worth mentioning that both of our removal spells can also help waterbend since Perilous Snare is an artifact, and, in a pinch, we can Get Lost one of our own creatures to turn one creature into two waterbendable maps.
Wrap-Up
So, did the plan work? The answer is a solid sort-of. Overall, we finished 5-4 with the deck, which is a solid enough record. But this deck wasn't about getting a good record; it was about trying to break waterbending, and I would say we did a good job overall. Sure, life is tough if we run into a hardcore control deck with a bunch of sweepers, and super-fast aggro can be a problem. But we also got to see some absurd games. We had several games where we were able to fire off Spirit Water Revival around Turn 4. It turns out that drawing seven cards for three and having no max hand size is pretty busted because the first Spirit Water Revival often finds another, and also more ways to flood the board with cheap waterbendable permanents, at which point things snowball into more cards, more permanents, and more waterbending. Once the deck gets going, it becomes surprisingly easy to pay the big waterbending costs. We had one game where we paid Avatar Kuruk's waterbend 20 just by tapping permanents, no mana needed. And once Secret of Bloodbending starts Mindslavering our opponent, it becomes pretty hard to lose.
Secret of Bloodbending was pretty absurd. Yes, it's often game-ending when we actually cast it fully powered for the Mindslaver, especially if we can chain a couple together, which is pretty easy with all the cards we get from Spirit Water Revival. But the part of the card I underestimated was just how good the four-mana mode can be. We had a game against a sacrifice deck where we cast it for four mana and used our opponent's Umbral Collar Zealot to sacrifice their entire board during combat, which was pretty hilarious. But even just using it for four mana to buy some time, like a weird Fog, was oddly effective in some matchups.
Overall, I came away from this deck feeling like waterbending is indeed busted, but it does take a lot of deckbuilding work to make it good. Most decks just don't have enough permanents to support cards like Spirit Water Revival or Secret of Bloodbending. But if you are willing to go all in on building around them, they are actually incredibly powerful and can do some pretty wild things!
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.
