Against the Odds: Invasion of the Doppelgangs
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, as we wait for the release of Tarkir: Dragonstorm, we're heading to Standard to play a deck built around one of my favorite cards from last year: Doppelgang! The other night I was dreaming about Doppelgang and I realized, what if the problem with Doppelgang was that we simply weren't Doppelganging enough? So the goal of our deck today is simple: we're not just trying to cast big Doppelgangs, we're trying to cast increasingly big Doppelgangs ever turn with the help of Invasion of Arcavios! How many Doppelgangs does it take to win a game of Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Invasion of the Doppelgangs
The Deck
We've played Doppelgang a few times before, so I'm going to skip over some of the boring stuff. Like every Doppelgang deck we're overloaded with ramp to be able to get enough mana to actually cast Doppelgang, some sweepers to stay alive and and some card draw to find our important pieces, so let's get right to the fun stuff.
What makes this Doppelgang deck unique is Invasion of Arcavios, which is the card that let's us cast a Doppelgang every turn. You probably noticed that we only have a single Doppelgang in our main deck, which is because we can use Invasion of Arcavios to tutor an extra copy from our sideboard. Plus, we really only need one Doppelgang, because we get to keep using it over and over again thanks to Invasion of Arcavios. Here's the idea.
We ramp a ton to get up to eight or 11 mana, and then we use Invasion of Arcavios to tutor Doppelgang from our sideboard. We can then cast Doppelgang, ideally for x=3 to copy Invasion of Arcavios and some lands or ramp spells. When Invasions enter we can use one to return the Doppelgang from our graveyard to our hand, and the others to tutor more cards from our sideboard, like Time Stop to skip our opponent's turn, Finale of Revelation for card draw, River's Rebuke for removal or Negate to protect our combo.
Next turn we do the same thing, except this time we'll have even more mana so we can cast Doppelgang for an even bigger X. We again copy Invasion of Arcavios to get back the Doppelgang and eventually we'll us the extra copies to tutor our entire sideboard into our hand, at which point we can win by casting a massive Worldsoul's Rage at our opponent's face!
Wrap Up
Record wise, we went 5-2 with the deck, which is a super solid record. It turns out that casting a Doppelgang ever turn is pretty tough for most decks to beat! More importantly, I'm pretty sure this is the most spectacular Doppelgang deck we've built yet! We had some wild games where we literally did tutor our entire sideboard into our hand before eventually closing out the game! If you like doing absurdly big things, or just like casting Doppelgangs, keep the deck in mind because it's a blast to play!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, opinions and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
