Against the Odds: Summon: Primal Odin (Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week our goal is simple: win with Summon: Primal Odin. The new saga creature is pretty interesting, the six-drop blows up a creature when it enters, and then the next turn gains the ability to kill our opponent if it connects with a single attack, which is insane. The challenge of Summon: Primal Odin is that we only get a single turn to attack with it, which means we need to make sure we can get in during that one-turn window even through opposing blockers, but thankfully we have a couple of plans for that. What are the odds of winning with a single Summon: Primal Odin attack in Final Fantasy Standard? Let's find out!
Against the Odds: Summon: Primal Odin
The Deck
Summon: Primal Odin is a super cool card. While a bit expensive at six mana, it's very powerful, blowing up a creature the turn it enters and then potentially winning the game with just a single attack the following turn. As I mentioned in the intro, the trick is being able to get in an unblocked attack during the turn it reaches chapter two, but we've got some plans for this...
The easiest way to win with Summon: Primal Odin is a Commander trick in Rogue's Passage, a land that can make a creature unblockable for a total of five mana. I don't think I've ever played the card in a 60 card format before, it's generally just too expensive, although it's perfect for Summon: Primal Odin. Since we are mono-black we can afford to play some colorless lands, and Rogue's Passage makes Primal Odin incredibly scary, making it so unless our opponent has a removal spell they are 100% dead the turn after we play it.
We've also got a reanimation plan to help speed up our Summon: Primal Odin kill. In theory we can use Zombify to reanimate Primal Odin on turn four and have just enough mana to make it unblockable with Rogue's Passage the following turn. While Zombify is pretty sweet, Coiling Rebirth is even sweeter. The reanimation spell is super powerful since if we gift our opponent a card we'll get a bonus 1/1 copy of the creature we reanimate. The problem is that it only works with non-legendary creature and, until now, the best reanimation targets were legends like Atraxa, Valgavoth and Etali. But with these new non-legendary Summon creatures, Coiling Rebirth is incredibly powerful. Getting two copies of Summon: Primal Odin means our opponent will need multiple removal spells to stop the combo. Plus, Summon: Primal Odin is a must-kill threat from our opponent's perspective, which makes our reanimation especially important since it gives us a way to keep getting Summon: Primal Odin into play if our opponent manages to kill it.
Rounding out our creatures, we have Summon: Bahamut as a backup reanimation target that is also absurd with Coiling Rebirth. While not a one-shot kill like Summon: Primal Odin a 9/9 flier that blows up multiple permanents is a great way to close out the game if we can't win with Odin. Plus, as a Mono-Black deck, we're not great at killing things like artifacts and enchantments, and Summon: Bahamut gives us a way to answer these permanents. Meawhile, Harvester of Misery gives us early game removal that can potentially turn into a sweeper later and Overlord of the Balemurk let's us will our graveyard early in the game and get back Summon: Primal Odin later.
Finally, we've got some more ways to fill our graveyard. Collector's Vault let's us loot away our big finishers to reanimate. Liliana of the Veil and Bitter Triumph give us removal that also lets us discard a reanimation target and Cruelclaw's Heist let's us do a hand check to make sure our opponent doesn't have a way to kill Summon: Primal Odin, and if we're feeling frisky we can gift our opponent a card to steal what we Thoughtseize].
Wrap Up
Record wise, Summon: Primal Odin crushed it. We went 5-1 with the deck for an 83% win percentage, and I came away from our games feeling like Summon: Primal Odin might be pretty underrated at the moment. We saw time and time again the the card puts the opponent under an absurd amount of pressure to have a removal spell, and some percentage of the time they don't. Plus, even if they do, our deck is really good at getting Summon: Primal Odin back into play, and sooner or later our opponent will run out of removal and we'll get them with the one-shot kill.
One thing I really like about the deck is that while it is technically a reanimation deck, it doesn't really have to be. After game one our opponent is likely to bring in graveyard hate, and we can respond by taking out some of our reanimation and some copies of Summon: Primal Odin and plan to win by hardcasting Summon: Primal Odin. Having a card that is powerful when reanimated but also cheap enough to hard cast is really helpful in playing around the hate.
So should you play Summon: Primal Odin in Final Fantasy Standard? I think the answer is an easy yes! While our sample size isn't huge, our deck posting a solid record and was super fun to play! If you like grinding our value with black decks, keep Summon: Primal Odin in mind, the card is way better than most people think!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinons and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
