Against the Odds: Maze's End (Modern, Magic Online)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 185 of Against the Odds. Last week, we had an "I win" Against the Odds poll featuring a bunch of alternate win conditions. When all was said and done, we had a clear victor, with Maze's End #727 Foil doubling up the next closest option in votes. As a result, we're heading to Modern today to see if we can win some games by getting 10 different Gates on the battlefield along with a Maze's End #727 Foil! Oddly, this isn't the first time we've played Maze's End #727 Foil on Against the Odds. A long, long time ago, we played it in a Turbo Fog shell. Thankfully, today's deck is very different, essentially being a turbo build of Maze's End #727 Foil that's looking to get the right 11 lands on the battlefield as fast as possible. Plus, we've got a bunch of new Gate payoffs (actually, about 75% of our deck is currently legal in Standard) that weren't around when we first played Maze's End #727 Foil years ago. Can Maze's End #727 Foil, backed by powerful ramp and some sweet new Gate payoffs, compete in Modern? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
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Against the Odds: Maze's End (Modern)
The Deck
When Maze's End #727 Foil won the poll, one major concern was to make sure we weren't just rehashing the Turbo Fog version that we played a few years ago, so my main focus was trying to make a more ramp-centric, faster build of the deck. Thankfully, along with reprinting the Gates themselves, our return to return to Ravnica gave us some really powerful Gate payoffs and a couple of strong ramp spells that are perfect for the deck. In fact, of the 60 cards in our main deck, only 21 aren't currently legal in Standard, which means the deck feels way, way different than the older version we played. The main plan of Maze's End #727 Foil is simple: we ramp as quickly as possible toward 10 different Gates, use a handful of interactive spells to keep our opponent at bay, and hopefully win by activating Maze's End #727 Foil with the proper Gates on the battlefield as early as Turn 5 or 6. While winning on Turn 5 or 6 isn't fast in Modern terms, Maze's End #727 Foil helps to make up for this by being really difficult for most decks to interact with. While we'll occasionally run into a Blood Moon #25122 deck or something with a lot of land destruction (both of which are horrible matchups), many Modern decks are so focused on doing their broken thing or on stopping their opponents from doing broken things that they have a hard time beating a deck that can theoretically win without ever resolving a spell, just by making a bunch of land drops!
Of course, the foundation of our deck is Maze's End #727 Foil itself, which is both a win condition and a way to tutor specific Gates from our library onto the battlefield. Here, it's important to note that to actually win the game with Maze's End #727 Foil, we do need to activate it (just having it on the battlefield with 10 different Gates isn't enough), which means a couple of important things. First, cards like Pithing Needle #378 Extended or land destruction can ruin our plan, so we have to make sure to account for these possibilities during deck building. Second, Maze's End #727 Foil is normally a bit slow since it enters the battlefield tapped, which sometimes means we need to wait for an entire turn before using it to win the game, even after we have the correct Gates on the battlefield, giving our opponent a chance to kill us or draw an answer to Maze's End #727 Foil. Thankfully, we have a plan to speed up the process...
Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil is combo piece number one for Maze's End #727 Foil, and it does double duty in our deck. First, it helps to minimize the downside of playing a deck overflowing with Gates that enter the battlefield tapped. With an Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil on the battlefield, all of our random Guildgates are essentially the same as the original dual lands, giving us two colors of mana and coming into play untapped. Plus, if we ever have multiple copies of Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil on the battlefield, we can use them as a weird sort of ramp by tapping the land that we just played for mana with the second untap trigger on the stack. Secondly, Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil is insane with Maze's End #727 Foil itself since it allows Maze's End #727 Foil to untap immediately when we play it, which means we don't need to wait a turn before activating it to (potentially) win the game. Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil also allows us to do some explosive things with some of our ramp spells...
Getting 10 different Gates plus Maze's End #727 Foil on the battlefield requires a lot of ramp, especially in a format like Modern, where a lot of decks can win on Turn 3 or 4 with a good draw. More importantly, we need our ramp spells to be able to find Gates (or nonbasic lands in general), which crosses a lot of good ramp cards (like Search for Tomorrow #229, Rampant Growth #199, and Sakura-Tribe Elder #194) off the list of possibilities. For ramp, we have three options: Growth Spiral #88, Circuitous Route #635, and Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan. The good news is that these ramp spells curve nicely into each other, theoretically giving us a curve of Turn 2 Growth Spiral #88, Turn 3 Circuitous Route #635, Turn 4 Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan, into Turn 5 attack with Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan and potentially win the game on the spot, if we have an Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil on the battlefield. Circuitous Route #635 and Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan are pretty simple: each grabs two of whatever Gates we happen to be missing, while Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan can also find Maze's End #727 Foil if we don't have a copy. Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan also gives us a backup plan for winning the game if the worst-case scenario happens (something like Field of Ruin #308 on Maze's End #727 Foil into Surgical Extraction #19 Showcase on Maze's End #727 Foil) as we can win some games by beating down with the 6/6 trample. Meanwhile, Growth Spiral #88 can do some fun tricks with Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil and Maze's End #727 Foil, allowing us to get multiple Maze's End #727 Foil activations in the same turn by activating it, putting it back into play with Growth Spiral #88, untapping it with Amulet of Vigor #98 Foil, and repeating the process, which gives us a great way to get from eight-ish Gates up to the 10 we need to win the game.
Life from the Loam #96 is just a one-of, and ideally, we won't have to use it, but it serves an important purpose in our deck by allowing us some chance of beating land destruction. Since we have some Gates in our deck that are just one-ofs, if our opponent can guess right with Field of Ruin #308 or Ghost Quarter #314, they can theoretically cut us off of ever getting the 10 Gates we need to win with Maze's End #727 Foil. Life from the Loam #96 solves this problem by allowing us to return Gates from our graveyard to our hand. Plus, it's repeatable thanks to dredge, so even if our opponent finds another land-destruction spell later, as long as we have Life from the Loam #96 in our graveyard, we'll always have a way to reassemble our 10 Gates for the Maze's End #727 Foil kill.
In a deck overflowing with Gates, both Gates Ablaze #102 and Guild Summit #41 are extremely powerful, even in a format like Modern. Gates Ablaze #102 is mostly helpful in creature matchups, where it can be an Anger of the Gods #116 in the early game that turns into a Wrath of God #279 Retro in the late game, allowing us to keep our opponent's creatures in check and buy some time to get 10 Gates on the battlefield. As for Guild Summit #41, it draws us a lot of cards, especially in conjunction with Circuitous Route #635 and Primeval Titan #48 Astral Titan tutoring multiple Gates directly onto the battlefield. This card draw allows us to keep up with the slower, more controlling decks in the format while keeping our hand full of ramp and interaction.
Rounding out the deck is a handful of utility cards. Snapcaster Mage #78 gives us a way to reuse all of our spells and is especially powerful with Circuitous Route #635 to find us two more Gates. Lightning Bolt #40 Thrum Of The Vestige helps us stay alive in the early game and answers annoying threats like Leonin Arbiter #1764 or Thalia, Guardian of Thraben #318 Showcase, which are really good against our plan of casting spells that tutor for lands. Meanwhile, Cryptic Command #29 To The Crystal Tower is sort of a catch-all answer. Sometimes, we use it to buy a turn or two by tapping down our opponent's team Fog-style; other times, it counters a spell. It also gives us an out to random cards that occasionally show up in main decks and ruin our Maze's End #727 Foil plan, like Pithing Needle #378 Extended or Sorcerous Spyglass #679, and it becomes even more important after sideboarding, when more decks have access to powerful hosers. While Cryptic Command #29 To The Crystal Tower is only a temporary answer that bounces a Pithing Needle #378 Extended (or whatever hoser our opponent has) back to our opponent's hand, if we time it correctly, we only need one Maze's End #727 Foil activation to win the game, so even a temporary answer is usually enough.
The Matchups
Let's start with an easy one: we're never going to beat Blood Moon #25122. Technically, it's possible thanks to Destructive Revelry #192 in our sideboard, and we can potentially counter it on the way down with Cryptic Command #29 To The Crystal Tower, but in reality, we're rarely going to beat it. The same is mostly true of decks like Ponza that are just overloaded with land destruction. Apart from decks that directly counter our Maze's End #727 Foil plan, we'd generally rather play slower, more controlling decks than aggro. While Gates Ablaze #102 (and Anger of the Gods #116 in the sideboard) gives us a chance to compete with aggressive creature decks, most Modern aggro decks are fast enough that we'll be dead if we don't have Gates Ablaze #102 (with several Gates) by Turn 3 or 4, at the latest. Meanwhile, control decks have a surprisingly hard time dealing with our plan since if they leave mana up, we can just choose to not cast any spells, potentially stranding our opponent with a handful of removal and counters, and activate our Maze's End #727 Foils instead.
The Odds
All in all, we played five matches with Maze's End and, against all odds, actually won four of them, giving us a stunning 80% match win percentage. Our one loss to 8 Whack was one of the quickest Against the Odds matches of all time, where we didn't hit our sweepers and our opponent drew a ton of Goblin Bushwhacker #52 Foils to kill us on Turn 3. On the other hand, we managed to beat UB Mill, Whir Prison, Jeskai Control, and Mono-Blue Architect, and some of the matches didn't even feel very close. A surprising number of Modern decks don't have a good way to interact with the Maze's End #727 Foil kill. Of course, it's unlikely that Maze's End would win 80% of matches moving forward. We managed to dodge our worst matchups in the format, although we did beat some decks that felt like miserable matchups (like UB Mill, overloaded with Ghost Quarter #314s and Surgical Extraction #19 Showcases). Basically, I'm shocked at how well Maze's End #727 Foil worked in Modern. The new Gate payoffs are a huge deal, and the combination of solid ramp and a hard-to-interact-with win condition is actually oddly effective at beating some popular Modern decks. While it seems exceedingly unlikely that Maze's End #727 Foil will ever be a tier deck in Modern, it does seem like something that you could bring to FNM and win some matches with, especially if you hit the right matchups.
Vote for Next Week's Deck
It's almost time for War of the Spark, but we have one more week of waiting for the new cards to hit Magic Arena. In the meantime let's build around a janky aura in Modern deck week. Which one of these enchantments should be the centerpiece of our deck? Let us know by voting below!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Don't forget to vote for next week's deck! 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.
