Against the Odds: Shelldock Surprise! (Historic)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds. This week, we are fully embracing the jank with Shelldock Surprise! The idea is to use Shelldock Isle to get Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play as quickly as possible in one of the most ridiculous ways possible: by using 36 copies of Shadowborn Apostle just for deck thinning, with the help of Surgical Extraction or Lost Legacy. When things go well, the end result should be a free win thanks to a Turn 3 Emrakul. When things go poorly? Well, we probably mulliganed to zero because such is life with Shelldock Surprise! How does this wacky deck work? Can it actually win games? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Shelldock Surprise!
The Deck
Recently, Shelldock Isle was added to Magic Arena, and as soon as I saw it, I remembered this hilariously janky meme deck idea from Modern many years ago: Shelldock Surprise! Played fairly, Shelldock Isle is basically a mill card. You can play it, hide away a card, mill a bunch, and then eventually cast the card on the cheap thanks to hideaway. Today, we're playing Shelldock Isle anything but fairly. Probably the best way to understand the deck is simply to walk through what it's trying to do and the thought process behind it, starting with the card that takes up most of our deck (literally)...
Our deck today is playing 36 copies of Shadowborn Apostle. You're probably thinking, "Oh, cool, what sweet Demons do you have to cheat into play with it?" The answer is zero. Shadowborn Apostle exists in our deck for one reason: to be deck thinning.
We have two cards in our deck that can remove all of the copies of Shadowborn Apostle from our library in Surgical Extraction and Lost Legacy. These cards are essential to our plan working, to the point where we'll mulligan all the way down to one card to find a copy, if we need to! Surgical Extraction is the better of the two since it's free thanks to Phyrexian mana, although it does require getting a Shadowborn Apostle in our graveyard. We can do this by casting a Shadowborn Apostle and trading it off in combat or, ideally, by choosing to be on the draw, which lets us essentially skip our first land drop to discard a Shadowborn Apostle to hand size. As for Lost Legacy, it's normally combo hate cast against an opponent to remove all the copies of one of their combo pieces. But in Shelldock Surprise, we're playing Lost Legacy to target ourselves and name Shadowborn Apostle, which will not only exile all of the Shadowborn Apostles from our deck but also even draw us a card for any copies we happen to have in hand!
So, why do we want to deck thin 36 copies of Shadowborn Apostle from our deck? Well, thanks to the fact that we're only playing 13 lands, if we can exile all of the Shadowborn Apostles, our deck will be low enough on cards to meet Shelldock Isle's "a library has 20 or fewer cards" condition. Once we exile all of the Shadowborn Apostles, we'll have about 20 cards in our deck. We then play a Shelldock Isle and hope to see an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in our top four cards, which we can then hide away and cast the next turn for a single mana to annihilate away our opponent's ability to win the game!
And that is essentially all the deck does. Each game, we mulligan until we find a Surgical Extraction or Lost Legacy, use that card to deck-thin away the Shadowborn Apostles, and then hope the Magic gods smile upon us by giving us an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn under our Shelldock Isle.
Wrap-Up
So, does the plan actually work? According to our matches, 33% of the time it works every time. I played a ton of games with the deck—which is pretty easy since they go by super fast whether we win or lose—and ended up winning exactly 33% of the time, which probably sounds pretty bad, but in reality is a lot better than I expected. (If you made me guess before recording, I would have predicted a win rate of 20% or less.)
While the deck is absolutely hilarious, and even more so when it works, it's hard to imagine it ever being more than a meme deck just because there are so many inconsistencies or fail points built into the combo that seem unfixable. First, we need to mulligan until we find a Surgical Extraction or Lost Legacy. Then, we need to resolve it without getting it Thoughtseized or countered. If we're on the Surgical Extraction plan, we also need to find a way to get a Shadowborn Apostle into our graveyard. This can sometimes be tricky, especially if we have to mulligan a bunch and can't use the discard-to-hand-size trick. Even if all this goes right and we exile all of the Shadowborn Apostle, there's still a chance that our combo will fizzle if an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn isn't in the top four cards of our deck when we finally get to the point of playing Shelldock Isle. Oh yeah, and we also can't add any more cards to the deck because that would require cutting Shadowborn Apostle. And if we cut Shadowborn Apostle, we won't deck-thin enough to turn on Shelldock Isle, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
The good news is that the 33% of the time that it worked, we ended up with a Turn 3 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in one of the most hilarious and convoluted ways possible!
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.
