Against the Odds: I Made Drawing Cards a Bad Thing for my Opponents (Historic)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Lost in all the Avatar hype was Prosperity coming to Arena for the first time on the reprint sheet. To the modern eye, the card doesn't look like much because normally, you don't want to be drawing your opponent a bunch of cards. But if you dig back in Magic's history to the late 1990s, there was a time when Prosperity was actually a devastating combo piece alongside Cadaverous Bloom, in the ProsBloom deck made infamous by Mike Long's fabled "Bloom in the Lap" cheat. Our deck today is inspired by ProsBloom but with Smothering Tithe replacing Cadaverous Bloom as the mana engine, which I guess makes the deck ProsTithe? The plan is to use Prosperity to let—or should I say, force—our opponent to draw a bunch of cards, which will trigger Smothering Tithe to make a bunch of Treasures, which we can use to make our opponent draw even more cards and eventually (hopefully) win the game! What are the odds of winning with Prosperity in Timeless? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: ProsTithe
The Deck
While Prosperity is the reason our deck today exists, Smothering Tithe is actually the most important card in the deck. While there are other ways to force your opponent to draw cards, there is nothing else (at least, on Arena) that turns the cards our opponent draws into mana. I'm sure you know what Smothering Tithe does from Commander: when an opponent draws a card, they have to pay two mana or we get a Treasure. The idea of our deck is to turn this ability into a game-ending combo piece by forcing our opponent to draw a ton of cards!
Let's say we get Smothering Tithe on the battlefield. Our next step is to force our opponent to draw as many cards as possible, which will generate a ton of Treasures that we can use to snowball and win the game. We have two cards that make our opponent draw cards. The first is our namesake Prosperity, which, for blue and X, makes each player draw X cards. Let's say we cast Smothering Tithe on Turn 4 and then dump all of our mana into Prosperity on Turn 5. Each player will draw four cards, but we'll also get four Treasures because our opponent is very unlikely to be able to pay for Smothering Tithe, which means we essentially just drew four cards for one mana! Sure, our opponent also drew four cards, but that's actually an upside rather than a drawback with Smothering Tithe on the battlefield. In the future, we can use all of the Treasures to cast an even bigger Prosperity to make even more Treasures and eventually draw into more copies of Smothering Tithe. And with two Smothering Tithes, the game typically ends super quickly.
Meanwhile, Archival Whorl is our backup way to force our opponent to draw cards. While it has some weird wording because it's from Alchemy, it's basically just five mana, each player shuffles their hand and graveyard into their library and draws seven cards. With Smothering Tithe on the battlefield, Whorl becomes a ritual. We spend five mana but make seven Treasures because of the cards that our opponent draws, and making our opponent shuffle their hand back into their library is a great option post-Prosperity to make sure our opponent isn't holding too many cards in hand.
Ideally, we'll win the game on the turn we start casting Prosperity and Archival Whorl by chaining them together. We can cast Archival Whorl to make seven Treasures, then use those Treasures to cast Prosperity to make more Treasures and draw into more copies of Prosperity and Archival Whorl to keep the fun going.
When it comes to actually killing our opponent, we do that by forcing our opponent to draw cards too! As we chain together copies of Prosperity and Archival Whorl, we'll eventually find Orcish Bowmasters, which will ping our opponent for one and amass Orcs 1 whenever our opponent draws, except for their draw step. This means a single Archival Whorl gives us seven damage and a 7/7 Orc Army. And if we can get enough mana from our Treasures, a single Prosperity can burn our opponent completely out of the game with Orcish Bowmasters on the battlefield! We also have one Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, which is super powerful with our "both players draw" cards since it will not just burn our opponent for two whenever they draw but also gain us two life when we draw! The only problem with Sheoldred is that it costs four mana, which can make it tricky to play during our big combo turn, which likely makes Orcish Bowmasters a better finisher overall.
We also have a few mana rocks to help speed the deck up. Initially, I built the deck without the Talisman, and it felt a bit slow. After I added them, the deck ran much better thanks to the ability to get Smothering Tithe on the battlefield on Turn 3. Plus, having some extra mana floating around is never a bad thing in a Prosperity deck since we can also just dump it all into a massive Prosperity to draw even more cards.
The rest of the deck is just interaction to help make sure we can stay alive while getting our combo set up. Fatal Push and Damn deal with creatures, and Damn can also be a sweeper. (Honestly, Damn was one of the cards that impressed me the most in the deck, and it probably should see more play.) Meanwhile, Counterspell and Thoughtseize deal with threats proactively before they even hit the battlefield!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we finished with a 42% win rate with the deck across nearly 20 games, which isn't great but also isn't bad for an Against the Odds deck built around drawing your opponent cards! One of the things that makes the deck so interesting is that our plan is super risky. You know those trick football plays where one guy tries to throw it back to another and then another? When those plays work, everyone thinks the coach is a genius, but when they fail, he's called a fool. That is basically our deck. Because we're actively giving our opponent resources, if things backfire and our opponent can deal with our Smothering Tithe or Orcish Bowmasters, we often lose in hilarious fashion. But when everything comes together and we start chaining together Prosperity into Prosperity and win with a massive pile of triggers and Treasures, you feel like the smartest player in the room!
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
