Against the Odds: Otter Duplimancy (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Vesuvan Duplimancy is a really cool card but also a really difficult card to make work. But thanks to Bloomburrow, we now have the perfect combo piece for the enchantment in Daring Waverider! If we can spend the early game casting cheap spells that can target our creatures, like Parting Gust, Scrollshift, Stall for Time, and Fleeting Reflection, we can stick a Vesuvan Duplimancy and then cast a Daring Waverider to flashback a spell that can target itself, which will make another Daring Waverider thanks to Duplimancy. This will let us flashback another spell to target the Waverider, and we can do this until we empty our graveyard to make a hilariously big board of Otters! Oh yeah, and since the copy that Vesuvan Duplimancy makes is non-legendary, we can also just make a bunch of Beza, the Bounding Springs to stabilize the board in a pinch! What are the odds of winning by making a ton of Otters with Vesuvan Duplimancy in Bloomburrow Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Otter Duplimancy
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we finished 7-2 with the deck, a shockingly good record for a deck that looks super janky on paper! It turns out that the plan of stalling out the game with cards like Stall for Time, Parting Gust, Get Lost, and Beza, the Bounding Spring while we get Duplimancy and Daring Waverider set up actually works surprisingly well.
The combo itself was also a solid way to close out the game. Usually, we made five or six Daring Waveriders, which was enough to win the game, although we managed to make ten Otters during our best combo, which was pretty hilarious. Toss in that we can normally end the combo loop with a removal spell targeting our opponent's best creature, and every time we managed to assemble the combo, it was good enough to win the game.
We also had some wild Beza games. Our deck is pretty slow, and we tend to fall behind early in the game. But Beza's ability to gain us life and stabilize the board was a great way of catching up, and doubly so once we started copying it with Vesuvan Duplimancy or blinking it with Scrollshift. We had some games where we got down to as little as one life before Beza and Duplimancy would end up pulling us out of the abyss and back up near 20. While not as funny as comboing with the Otter, the deck wouldn't be nearly as successful without Beza.
So, should you play Otter Duplimancy in Standard? Honestly, I'm not convinced the deck is as good as our record suggests—winning 78% of the time is probably unsustainable—but I also think the deck is a lot better than it looks on paper. Most importantly, it's super funny and super fun! If you like weird, blinking, copying decks, give it a shot! I can't promise that you'll win as much as we did in the video, but I will promise that the games you do win will be hilarious!
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.
