Against the Odds: Protection from Everything (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Progenitus is one of the most iconic creatures in Magic's history, but its double WUBRG cost makes it incredibly hard to cast. Thankfully, Wizards was nice enough to give Progenitus a best friend in Foundations Standard in Kona, Rescue Beastie, which can cheat the 10/10 protection-from-everything Avatar into play as early as Turn 3 with our best draws! How good is Progenitus in Standard with the help of its buddy Kona? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Kona <3s Progenitus
The Deck
The plan of our deck today is simple: get Progenitus on the battlefield as quickly as possible as consistently as possible. Once we get Progenitus on the battlefield, we trust that the 10/10 protection from everything (well, except for Sunfall and edicts, but close enough...) will be enough to win us the game.
So, how do we get Progenitus on the battlefield as early as Turn 3? While we do have Smuggler's Surprise, which can cheat it into play for six mana, our main plan is Kona, Rescue Beastie. If Kona is tapped at the start of our second main phase, it lets us put a permanent— like Progenitus—into play from our hand!
The challenge of Kona is that we need it to be tapped on our second main phase to work. In theory, we can do this by attacking, but that's risky because Kona will die if our opponent has a good blocker, and we won't get a Progenitus. As a result, we need some ways to tap Kona without getting it into combat. For this, we turn to a couple of Vehicles and a Scene of the Crime in our mana base. Along with giving us a way to tap Kona, Cultivator's Caravan also ramps us into Smuggler's Surprise and Vaultborn Tyrant, and Unidentified Hovership combos with Kona while also working as removal.
The other key card in the deck is Archdruid's Charm. The instant can tutor up Kona if we need it, and we can use it to find Progenitus if we already have Kona. We can even use it to find our single Scene of the Crime to tap Kona if we don't have a Vehicle. Oh yeah, and if we don't need it to support our combo, we can always use it as a bite spell or to exile an artifact or enchantment. The only issue with Archdruid's Charm is that its triple-green mana cost is annoying. But the card is so powerful in our deck that we were willing to warp our mana base to make it work, and it was more than worth the cost.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we finished 3-4 with the deck, which isn't great but isn't horrible. The good news is that the plan of using Vehicles and Kona to cheat Progenitus into play worked super well. The bad news is that "protection from everything" doesn't actually mean everything, and we had some games where we did our thing, cheated Progenitus into play, and still ended up losing, either because our opponent had an answer (like a wrath) or because we were so far behind on board that our opponent could kill us before we could win with Progenitus.
All in all, the deck was fun to play but probably a bit middling in terms of competitiveness. While we have a nut draw that can beat just about anyone, we can also get some clunky draws where we end up with a hand full of expensive finishers but no way to cheat them into play. Still, it was hilarious to see Progenitus in Standard in 2024, and even though it might not be as game-ending as it was 15 years ago when it first came out, a lot of the time, a 10/10 protection from everything is still enough to get the job done!
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.
