Against the Odds: Teaching Arena Zoomers about Owl and Creature Locks
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! There's nothing I love more than keeping opponents from playing Magic. Thanks to Bloomburrow, we have an exciting new hard lock that can not only kill all of our opponent's creatures but also keep them from playing more creatures forever! The plan of our deck today is simple: First, we have Maha, Its Feathers Night as our commander, so we'll always have access to the five-drop that gives all of our opponent's creatures base toughness of one. Second, we need to tutor up Night of Souls' Betrayal (or Kaervek, the Spiteful, which is basically a Night of Souls' Betrayal that dies to creature removal) to give all creatures –1/–1, which will wipe our opponent's board while also making it so they can't play other creatures (well, they technically can, but they'll die immediately upon entering) for as long as the lock remains on the battlefield. The last piece of the puzzle is finding Awaken the Erstwhile to deal with our opponent's hand. The sorcery makes each player discard their hand but then gives them a 2/2 Zombie for each card discarded, although sadly for our opponent, all their Zombies will immediately die thanks to Maha, leaving us with an empty-handed opponent with no creatures and little possibility of doing anything for the rest of the game! How brutal can Maha, Its Feathers Night be as a commander if you're willing to build it as mean as possible? Let's teach some Arena Zoomers about Owls and not being able to play a creature ever again, and find out!
Against the Odds: Owl Lock
Discussion
Record-wise, Maha Lock was solid. While Brawl isn't the most competitive format, we managed to win 65% of the time with the deck across about 20 games. More importantly, the deck was as brutal as we hoped! While pulling off the entire combo of locking with Maha, Night of Souls' Betrayal, and Awaken the Erstwhile doesn't come up very often, it's hilarious when it does. Plus, we don't need the full lock that often since most opponents end up scooping once we lock their creatures out of the game with our Owl.
The deck's only downside is that I think it might be in the hell queue since we played against a lot of strong Commanders along the way, although that's probably fair considering how brutal Maha can be. If you're looking for something different to play in Brawl and don't mind being the bad guy, Maha is a super-brutal and hilarious option!
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.
