Against the Odds: Oops, All Fynns (Standard)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 288 of Against the Odds. Last week, I was browsing around Magic on Reddit and noticed a post titled "Oops, All Fynns." While I didn't actually bother to read the post or look at the decklist, I was pretty sure I knew the plan: make a bunch of creatures, play a Fynn, the Fangbearer, and then turn all of our creatures into copies of Fynn with Echoing Equation. While the plan didn't sound all that competitive, it did seem like it would be hilarious when it worked, so today, we're going to give Oops, All Fynns a shot. How many games will it take to make a lethal board of Fynns? Are we officially dirty Infect players now? Let's get to the video and find out in today's Against the Odds; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
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Against the Odds: Oops, All Fynns
The Deck
We need to do a few things for our Oops, All Fynns plan to work: get a bunch of creatures on the battlefield, find Fynn, the Fangbearer and Augmenter Pugilist, and then cast Echoing Equation to turn all of our random dorks into Fynn to (hopefully) poison our opponent out of the game. I considered a couple of ways to go about this, including a learn / lesson plan, but in the end, we ended up with a mostly mono-green deck that has a few interesting backups for Fynn, the Fangbearer (creatures that have attack- or combat-damage triggers), some token production, and a bunch of card draw to find our combo pieces.
Fynn, the Fangbearer is unique as the only creature in Standard that can give the opponent poison counters. More importantly, Fynn triggers whenever a creature with deathtouch hits our opponent for combat damage, so if we get multiple copies of Fynn on the battlefield, we usually only need to hit our opponent with a couple of them to give our opponent 10 poison because each copy of Fynn, the Fangbearer triggers the other copies. Of course, in general, it isn't possible to have multiple Fynns on the battlefield since Fynn is legendary. This is where Echoing Equation comes into play. For five mana, the sorcery can turn all of our creatures into a creature of our choice for a turn while also getting around the legend rule. The main goal is to flood the board with creatures, make them all into Fynns with Echoing Equation, and poison our opponent with one hilarious Fynn attack!
One of the problems with our plan is that we only have four copies of Fynn, the Fangbearer, so there's a chance that we might not find a copy to pull off our combo. As a result, we have a few backup creatures to target with Echoing Equation. Syr Faren, the Hengehammer snowballs in a really funny way with Echoing Equation. Let's say we use Echoing Equation to make a bunch of Syr Farens. We go to combat, attack with everything, and—assuming we stack our triggers right—get a hilarious snowball. The first Syr Faren, the Hengehammer triggers, pumping our second Syr Faren to +2/+2. The second Syr Faren then will pump the third Syr Faren +4/+4. Then, that one will pump the next one +6/+6, and so on, until our last Syr Faren, the Hengehammer is massive. Meanwhile, a board full of Elder Gargaroths can gain us a ton of life, draw us a bunch of cards, or make a bunch of Beast tokens that we can turn into something sweet with our next copy of Echoing Equation.
Of course, for our plan to work, we need a bunch of bodies on the battlefield. The more creatures we can assemble, the more Fynn, the Fangbearers we can make. For this, we turn to Scute Swarm, which can quickly make a board of 1/1s as we make our land drops, and a card that shall not be named that adds two bodies to the battlefield for a total of four mana. Meanwhile, Esika's Chariot gives us two Cat tokens when it enters the battlefield and can also be a pretty funny target for Echoing Equation since we can crew it pre-combat, attack with a bunch of Esika's Chariots, and build a massive board of tokens with the vehicle's attack trigger.
For card draw, we turn to Toski, Bearer of Secrets, which offers a ton of card advantage with our go-wide token plan. Toski can also be an interesting target for Echoing Equation, although in reality, if we make a board full of Toski, Bearer of Secrets, we'll probably draw our entire deck and lose to milling ourselves out (which sounds like one of the best ways to die). Meanwhile, The Great Henge takes advantage of the fact that our deck has 29 creatures to give us a steady source of card advantage to find our Fynns and Echoing Equations.
For removal, we have one of the most underrated cards from Strixhaven: Decisive Denial, which sort of calls back to Rogues all-star Drown in the Loch, offering an efficient removal spell and an efficient all-in-one counterspell card. While not as strong as the Throne of Eldraine version, we have enough big creatures to turn on the fight mode, while the Mana Leak–esque Negate mode gives us a way to answer sweepers and Emergent Ultimatum.
The Matchups
While we did manage to win a couple of matches with Oops, All Fynns, I'm not sure we're actually favored against anyone. Our plan is pretty janky and weird, and our main goal is to pull off the hilarious Fynn kill rather than win as much as possible. Control decks are especially tough. Maybe the biggest weakness with the Fynn / Echoing Equation combo is that if our opponent kills the Fynn with Echoing Equation on the stack, it fizzles, which means control decks with a lot of instant-speed removal are rough. Against aggro, we do have a lot of good blockers to stay alive, and our opponent is less likely to be able to fizzle our combo with removal, but we're not always fast enough to beat a rush of small red or white creatures.
The Odds
All in all, it took us four matches to pull off the Oops, All Fynns kill, although we did win one other match along the way as a bonus. While the deck isn't really all that competitive (I played a ton of matches with different versions while testing and tuning and didn't win many), the Oops, All Fynns kill is as hilarious as I had hoped. When we finally pulled it off, we managed to give our opponent 60 poison counters with one attack, which probably breaks some kind of record!
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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.