Against the Odds: One Last Job Combo (Standard)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Standard to play One Last Job #22 combo! When One Last Job #22 was first printed in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, it looked like a pretty underwhelming reanimation spell since there wasn't really a big reason to reanimate an aura, equipment, vehicle, or mount in Standard. But things have changed thanks to a certain reprint in the Bloomburrow Starter Deck. Now, One Last Job #22 is a one-card-kill combo piece in Standard! The idea of our deck is to aggressively self-mill, trying to get Colossification #392 and Voldaren Thrillseeker #171 into the graveyard. We can then use One Last Job #22 to reanimate both at once, putting the Colossification #392 on the Thrillseeker, giving us a 21/21 that we can sacrifice to throw 21 damage directly at our opponent's face to win the game on the spot! Remember the Storm Herald #156 deck we played in Pioneer a while ago? This is basically the Standard version, and it works way better than I expected! What are the odds of turning One Last Job #22 into a one-card combo kill in Bloomburrow Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!

Against the Odds: One Last Job

Wrap-Up

The plan of our deck today is simple: in the early game, we aggressively self-mill with cards like Fallaji Archaeologist #48, Picklock Prankster #64, and Founding the Third Path #50. Step two is to get up to seven mana, which is the amount we need to reanimate both Colossification #392 and Voldaren Thrillseeker #171 and have one mana left over to activate Voldaren Thrillseeker #171's ability to win the game. It's worth mentioning that when we pull this off, there isn't really a way for our opponent to interact with it with removal since One Last Job #22 will resolve completely before our opponent gets priority. So as long as we put Colossification #392 on Voldaren Thrillseeker #171 itself, even if our opponent has removal, we can sacrifice it in response and win the game. 

The biggest challenge of the deck is getting to seven mana. We can do this naturally, but we also have a plan to speed it up in Lumra, Bellow of the Woods #183. We can mill Lumra and then reanimate it with One Last Job #22 or Squirming Emergence #241 to reanimate all the lands in our graveyard, which should give us more than enough mana to pull off the One Last Job #22 combo kill the next turn.

Lumra, Bellow of the Woods #183 also give us a backup plan. Since it is so big, it's possible that we can play it (or reanimate it), use Voldaren Thrillseeker #171 to back it up, and then sacrifice it to burn our opponent out of the game. It even makes so much mana that we can theoretically just start hard-casting our Colossification #392s if we happen to draw them rather than mill them and win fairly, although in reality, we won with the One Last Job #22 combo something like 90%+ of the time.

Speaking of winning, we went 16-12 with the deck, good for a 57% match-win percentage, which is surprisingly solid. The matchups with the deck are super polarized though. If you watch the wrap-up, we go through our untapped.gg stats, and you'll see that we generally got crushed by red aggro decks like Mono-Red, Prowess, and Boros Mice. While we didn't beat them a few times, our win percentage against red aggro was something like 25%. On the other hand, we crushed pretty much everyone else. The token control decks are almost a bye, midrange is super easy, and we even managed to beat the counterspell-based control decks we played against. Oddly, it might actually be a pretty solid best-of-one deck if we could find a way to make it a bit better against red aggro. Even as it is, a 57% match-win percentage is great. It's just odd that as soon as the match starts, we are either super unfavored (if we're up against red aggro) or super favored (if we are up against most other decks).

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.