Against the Odds: The Brothers' Family Therapy Session: Can We Avert The Brothers' War? (Standard)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 359 of Against the Odds. As you probably know, even though Urza and Mishra are brothers, they sort of hate each other, to the point where they might throw the multiverse into a potentially devastating war. Today, our mission is simple: bring Urza and Mishra together for a little family therapy session to help them work through their issues, hopefully replacing The Brothers' War with some brotherly love, and maybe even save the multiverse along the way! Can we bring Urza and Mishra together and save the world (or, at least, win some games of Standard)? 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: The Brothers' Family Therapy Session
The Deck
Our goal today is simple: bring Urza and Mishra together and help them work through their deeply held issues. Of course, our goal is also to meld our two namesake cards with Phyrexian Dragon Engine and The Mightstone and Weakstone to build a massive threat that can win us the game.
For our plan to be successful, we're going to have to take the two warring brothers back to childhood and find the root of their issues, and then also examine their relationship through the years. Back in the day, the two brothers weren't all that different, both looting away useless cards to make extra mana. But over the years, they've grown further and further apart...
...or have they? Both brothers love their massive artifact war machines, and if we can't win directly with the brothers themselves, we can also run our opponent over with Cityscape Leveler or reanimate our way to victory with Portal to Phyrexia. On a less flavorful level, both cards are super synergistic with our various Urzas and Mishras. The uncommon brothers can discard them for mana, which lets Mishra, Tamer of Mak Fawa unearth them on the cheap. Meanwhile, once we get one of the big artifacts on the battlefield, Urza, Prince of Kroog can copy them for just six mana!
For removal, we have some bro-themed options in Mishra's Command and Urza's Command, alongside cards like Infernal Grasp and Go for the Throat. We also have Bloodtithe Harvester, which might look a bit strange. Why is a random Vampire sitting in our Mishra and Urza therapy session? I have no idea, but considering it's now canon that Optimus Prime and the rest of the Transformers are part of The Brothers' War, I'm not going to apologize...
The Matchups
After playing a bunch of games with the deck, I still don't have a really good sense of the matchups. Both the Urza and Mishra meld pairs are strong enough to beat essentially any deck in Standard, although it can be hard to actually get both pieces on the battlefield at once to meld. Overall, Urza and Mishra felt like a solid-ish midrange deck that has a chance against most of the popular archetypes in the format but probably isn't heavily favored (or even favored at all) in any of them. It's more about the specific draws.
The Odds
Record-wise, we went 4-3 with our The Brothers' Family Therapy Session deck, which I think means we saved the multiverse from destruction. While we did manage to meld both brothers at different times, we never managed to have both meld on the battlefield at once. The big problem is that either a melded Mishra or a melded Urza is often game-ending, so once our opponent saw a meld coming, they would just scoop rather than stick around to let us meld the other brother. The good news is that the brothers were working pretty well together by the end of our matches. At one point, we had four different Urzas and Mishras on the battlefield at once! While it will take some hard work and commitment from the brothers to keep their relationship strong moving forward, at least for now, it seems the possibility of a catastrophic brothers' war has been averted and the world is saved. Even more impressively, we did it without any help from Optimus Prime at all!
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Will add.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck! 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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