Against the Odds: The "Play More Win Cons, Standard Players" Challenge
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Standard is in a weird place right now, with a lot of the best decks being super powerful but surprisingly low on win conditions. Take Izzet Lessons, for example. They can kill everything and draw an insane amount of cards, but without Monument to Endurance, how do they actually win the game? Or Badgermole Cub decks: they can make oodles of mana, but unless they find an Ouroboroid, they just have a bunch of random 1/1s on the battlefield. Reanimator? Good luck closing out the game without Superior Spider-Man or Bringer of the Last Gift. Even control decks are leaning hard on just one or two wincons, like Jeskai Revelation or Shiko, Paragon of the Way. As such, our deck today is looking to take advantage of this weird meta and punishing our opponents for not playing enough win conditions as we try to exile every meaningful card from our opponent's deck, making it so that while they can still sort of play the game, they don't actually have any way of winning! What are the odds of winning by exiling all of our opponent's win conditions? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Golgari Exile
The Deck
As I mentioned in the intro, the idea of our deck today is simple: exile every card that our opponent potentially could use to kill us from our opponent's deck and then watch our opponent flail around and draw a bunch of lands from their wincon-less deck! As such, the core of our deck is four cards that can exile all the copies of a single card from our opponent's deck. Ancient Vendetta is the most straightforward. For four mana, it lets us name a card; then, we can exile all the copies of that card from our opponent's hand, graveyard, and library. The Rise of Sozin actually does the same thing with its second lore counter after wrathing the board on the turn it enters play. Deadly Cover-Up is similar, wrathing the board and (assuming we collect some evidence) also letting us extract all the copies of a card from our opponent's graveyard. Finally, The End exiles a creature from the battlefield and then all the rest of the copies that happen to be floating around. All in all, this gives us 16 cards that can exile all the copies of one of our opponent's cards from their deck, which should be more than enough to exile everything our opponent could possibly use to kill us!
Oddly, beyond our extraction cards, the next most important cards in our deck are our two two-mana ramp spells in Glimpse the Core and Shared Roots. Initially, I tried to build the deck mono-black, but our big payoffs—Deadly Cover-Up, Ancient Vendetta, and The Rise of Sozin—felt powerful but a bit too slow. Eventually, I realized that if I added green to the deck, I could speed all of these cards up by an entire turn, which made the deck fast enough to keep up with the current meta. With one of these spells on Turn 2, we can cast a The End or Ancient Vendetta on Turn 3, which gives us enough evidence to exile with Deadly Cover-Up on Turn 4, and then play The Rise of Sozin on Turn 5, which is a pretty brutal curve!
The rest of the deck is basically about being able to clean up any threats that happen to slip through our exile effects. Disruptive Stormbrood is the perfect example. It can kill a cheap creature on Turn 2 while we are getting things set up; then, later, we can cast it as a creature to blow up an artifact or enchantment (like a Monument to Endurance that hit the battlefield before we could exile it). Maelstrom Pulse is similar, giving us the flexibility to blow up any non-land, with some extra upside against tokens. Zero Point Ballad gives us a cheap sweeper against Badgermole Cub decks, and Strategic Betrayal offers some maindeck graveyard hate.
While our primary plan for winning the game is to make it impossible for us to lose the game by exiling all of our opponent's win conditions, if we need to get our opponent's life down to zero, we've got a couple of plans for that, too. Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber is mostly in the deck for card draw, although the 6/6 Demon it makes, combined with the backside of The Rise of Sozin, gives us a couple of big creatures that can close out the game in just a few attacks. Oh yeah, one quick note about Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber: the card-draw mode is actually pretty risky in our deck. Since we don't really have many creatures, our opponents often end up with random removal spells stuck in their hand, which means the Demon token dies a lot, and we can only take two damage for so many turns before we end up in the danger zone. Keep in mind that Disruptive Stormbrood can be used to blow up your own Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber, which is a line that came up a surprising amount with this deck.
The other way we can kill our opponent is with our lands. It turns out that if you exile all of your opponent's threats, literally anything—including a 1/1 Spirit token from Realm of Koh or a 2/2 earthbend land from Ba Sing Se—is enough to close out the game eventually. Especially against slower decks, these cards are a great way to grind out a victory, assuming we can exile most of our opponent's threats.
Wrap-Up
So, how did our plan work? Record-wise, we went 6-2 with the deck, which is great, and we managed to pick apart several of the best decks in Standard. We played against Izzet Lessons and exiled all of their Monument to Endurances, and our opponent scooped. We played against control and took the Jeskai Revelations, and our opponents couldn't really do anything, letting us win with random Realm of Koh tokens. We played against Otters and took all of the Enduring Vitality, making it so they could never execute their combo. Basically, things worked out in practice almost exactly the same as they looked on paper.
While the deck seemed oddly good, we also got to see the bad of the deck when we played against Allies. The worst matchups for our deck are random good-stuff midrange piles that just play a bunch of good cards on curve because against these decks, even if we exile all the copies of our opponent's best card, or even their two or three best cards, their other cards are still good enough to beat us. While having a bunch of wraths does help, especially against creature decks, the extraction plan becomes much less viable in these matchups.
So, should you play Golgari Extraction in Standard? I think the answer is yes, but with two big notes. First, this deck is sort of like Lantern Control in Modern, where, if you want to pilot it successfully, you really need a strong knowledge of all the decks in the meta and what cards in those decks actually matter, so you know what you are trying to exile. If you are new to Standard or don't play very often, you'll probably struggle with this deck. On the other hand, if you know Standard well enough that you can figure out what your opponent is playing by Turn 3 based on their early plays, you'll do just fine. Second, as I mentioned way back in the intro, the deck takes advantage of the current meta. It's really the Izzet Lesson deck with its hilarious lack of win conditions that made me build this deck, and a lot of other popular Standard decks are also light on win conditions. If this shifts in the future and everyone is playing Dimir Midrange or Mono-Red Aggro, Golgari Extraction will get a lot worse. But for now, it's oddly competitive and, at least for me, super fun to play!
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.
