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Against the Odds: Temur Mirror Box (Standard)


Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 322 of Against the Odds. Last week, we had our first all–Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Against the Odds poll, and Mirror Box took home a pretty easy win. As such, we're heading to our new Standard format today to see how many copies of the same legend we can stack up on the battlefield with the help of Mirror Box and Bard Class! What absurdities does Mirror Box allow? Let's get to the video and find out in today's Against the Odds; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Against the Odds: Temur Mirror Box

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The Deck

The hardest part of building around Mirror Box—by far—was narrowing down all of the possibilities. In fact, Mirror Box might be the new Panharmonicon, in the sense that it's a colorless card that can support a ton of different decks. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more of it in the not-too-distant future, not just in Standard but in other formats as well. Anyway, after trying a bunch of different possibilities, I landed on Temur Mirror Box as the build that could do the most spectacular things. Here's the plan:

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The two most important cards in our deck are our legendary-matters support cards Mirror Box and Bard Class. Our namesake Mirror Box lets us keep multiples of the same legend on the battlefield, which can do some pretty absurd things with legends that generate mana or draw cards, but more on this in a minute. It also pumps our legends, which is a nice bonus but not the primary reason we're playing the artifact. Meanwhile, Bard Class gives us the ramp and card draw we need to flood the board with an insane amount of legends, making it the perfect backup to Mirror Box.

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While our deck is overflowing with legends, the most important of the bunch are the ones that make mana or draw us cards, which allow us to snowball through our entire deck (or, at least, most of it) with the help of Mirror Box and Bard Class. Magda, Brazen Outlaw and Birgi, God of Storytelling are both powerful cards on their own, but they get really out of control when we have multiple on the battlefield thanks to Mirror Box. Magda, Brazen Outlaw makes a Treasure token whenever a Dwarf becomes tapped (which is where Esika, God of the Tree comes in, allowing us to tap Magda, Brazen Outlaw without sending it into combat). With two Magdas on the battlefield, we can make a ton of Treasure mana each turn since each copy of Magda triggers the others to make a Treasure. Meanwhile, Birgi, God of Storytelling makes mana as we cast spells. With multiple on the battlefield, many of our cards essentially become free, and some even turn into rituals by generating mana! Together, these cards help ensure that once our deck gets going, we have all of the mana we need to cast every card that we can draw. Speaking of drawing cards...

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Since our deck is planning to make oodles of mana, we need oodles of cards to cast with the mana, or else it's worthless. For this, we have a few options. Toski, Bearer of Secrets is another card that is powerful as a one-of but gets really out of control in multiples, when each creature we deal combat damage with draws us multiple cards. Gretchen Titchwillow lets us turn our extra mana into cards, giving a mana sink for all of our Magda and Birgi mana. Finally, Jacob Hauken, Inspector is mostly a fun-of and might be better as another copy of Gretchen Titchwillow but offers some early-game looting and then free spells later if we manage to flip it (which isn't difficult with the amount of mana our deck can make). 

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The final important piece of the deck is Goro-Goro, Disciple of Ryusei. The idea is that after we make a ton of mana, draw a ton of cards, and play pretty much all of the legends in our deck, we can finish our turn with Goro-Goro, give everything haste for just a single mana, and close out the game with a massive surprise attack!

The Matchups

Temur Mirror Box's biggest enemy is often itself. Our deck is really dependent on having a Mirror Box on the battlefield and, to a lesser extent, Bard Class. Things can go pretty poorly if we don't draw these cards or if our opponent can counter or destroy them because of the legend rule. There's always a risk that we make a bunch of copies of the same legend only for our opponent to kill Mirror Box, leaving us to sacrifice most of our board. As far as specific matchups, I think the deck has a shot against everything if it runs well, although, based on our matches, it seems to do better against midrange and control (since we have a bit more time to find Mirror Box and get things set up) than against aggro (where we sometimes can get clunky draws and get run over without doing much of anything). 

The Odds

Record-wise, we finished 4-3 with Temur Mirror Box, which is solid enough for a pretty wacky brew. More importantly, we did some pretty crazy things with the deck. Having multiple copies of Toski, Bearer of Secrets on the battlefield was as awesome as it sounds, and we even had one game where we got six copies of Birgi, God of Storytelling on the battlefield at the same time! While consistency (and the risk of Mirror Box getting killed) probably keeps a deck like this from being top-tier competitive, it was a blast to play and good enough to win a lot of games as a bonus!

Vote for Next Week's Deck

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There's still a ton of sweet Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty cards that we haven't gotten a change to play with yet. Let's try another one next week, but which one? Click here to vote! 

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.



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