Against the Odds: Turbo Fog (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Today's episode is a little bit different and starts with a viewer-submitted Turbo Fog deck from kacyhasthecandy. I love Turbo Fog. It's such a unique archetype, but it hasn't been able to work in Standard for years as Wizards has minimized the number and power of Fogs in the format. As a result, the deck caught my eye, and I knew I had to give it a try! So today, we're going to start with kacy's Turbo Fog list, play a couple of game,s and then make some updates to see if we can get Turbo Fog to work in Standard! What are the odds of winning by casting a Fog each turn until the opponent gives up or runs out of cards? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Against the Odds!
Against the Odds: Turbo Fog
The Deck
Turbo Fog's game plan is super unique. We let our opponent build a big board of creatures but try to make sure that they can never damage us by Fogging their damage each turn. While we technically only have one traditional Fog in Standard in Eerie Interference, cards like Aetherize (which no one will ever expect in Standard) and Stall for Time can mostly do the same thing. Meanwhile, Time Stop is like a super Fog, not just preventing damage but also making our opponent skip their entire turn!
Of course, we also have a couple of sweepers in our deck, with two Day of Judgments and one Sunfall. One of the challenges of Turbo Fog is that Fogs don't impact the battlefield, so our opponent's board will grow each turn. This means that in the mid- and late game, we're likely to die if we miss Fogging for even a single turn. Our wraths give us a little breathing room if the board gets too big and typically buy us a couple of turns before we need to start Fogging again.
While the Fog plan is sweet, a couple of other cards in the deck were what really caught my eye. The first is Stormchaser's Talent, which we already know is powerful from various self-bounce decks, but we're using the card in a very different way. We don't really care about the Otter token, and we don't have cards like This Town Ain't Big Enough to combo with it. So, why are we playing a playset? The main idea is that Stormchaser's Talent is even more copies of Fog. Once we get up to seven mana, we can activate Stormchaser's Talent to go to level two and return something like Eerie Interference to our hand to Fog for another turn. The third level also gives us a backup win condition, although it's pretty rare in practice that we fully level it up. Basically, in our deck, Stormchaser's Talent is just more Fogs!
As far as winning the game, our plan is to mill our opponent out with Aether Syphon, Teferi's Tutelage style. The problem is we need to get to max speed for us to be able to mill our opponent, which is tricky since, outside of our Otter tokens from Stormchaser's Talent, the only creature in our deck is Scrawling Crawler, and that's just a one-of. So, how do we get to max speed?
Very slowly, with the help of a crime land! The deck's plan for getting to max speed is to play an Aether Syphon to start our engines and then play Lonely Arroyo to damage our opponent and increase our speed. We also have Arid Archway specifically to bounce Lonely Arroyo back to our hand and increase our speed again. While the plan isn't fast, it should get us to max speed eventually, and by this time, we should have some Clues, Deduces, or other card draw ready so we can mill our opponent out of the game in just a couple of turns!
So, that's the original build of Turbo Fog. Overall, we won 33% of the time in a relatively small sample size. While the deck felt solid, there were three areas that I really wanted to update and three problems to fix, which is what led us to rebuilding the deck a bit. Here are the three problems the rebuild was trying to solve.
- No free wins. If you look at the best decks in Standard, most have some sort of nut draw that allows them to just run away with the game. Turbo Fog isn't like that. Even when we win, it takes a lot of grinding, time, and effort. While having a "free win" draw isn't 100% necessary, it is helpful. Plus, the card I wanted to add to the deck was Jace, the Perfected Mind, which seems perfect for Turbo Fog. It's the best mill card in Standard, and we're trying to win by milling, so it should speed up the kill. It's also another card-advantage engine, which Turbo Fog also wants. Oh yeah, and in its own weird way, Jace offers a "free win" draw where we sometimes draw two or three copies and mill our opponent out super quick.
- Not enough ways to get to max speed. While the land plan for getting to max speed works, it's also really slow, and Aether Syphon isn't great without max speed. As such, Fountainport seems like the perfect addition to the deck. It's a good card in a controlling deck anyway; plus, the Fish token it makes gives us another way to damage our opponent and increase our speed. While we're updating the mana base, I also added a 25th land since missing land drops is basically an auto-loss with this deck, making 24 risky.
- Odd sideboard. Now, I'm not saying the original sideboard was bad. It actually has a good mix of removal, and Authority of the Consuls is great against red decks. However, I think the sideboard did have one big problem: it's almost all stuff for creature-based aggro decks. In theory, creature-based aggro should be our best matchup since our Fogs are most impactful there. On the other hand, if we run into a creature-light combo or control deck, we have a ton of dead Fogs that we really need to sideboard out. As such, to improve our bad matchups, I trimmed back on some of the sideboard removal and added some counters and Ghost Vacuum for graveyard decks (which is even more important since we're milling our opponent, which can help graveyard decks). The end result of the rebuild left us with this deck:
Turbo Fog 2.0 basically is the same as the original but with four Jace, the Perfected Mind and some updates to the mana base and sideboard. While the updates did seem to do their job, I played a bunch of games with Turbo Fog 2.0 and finished with a 31% win rate, almost exactly the same as the original build, so I'm not sure how much more competitive they actually made the deck.
Oddly, aggro decks felt like our worst matchup, when traditionally Turbo Fog should crush aggro, but decks like Mono-Red or Gruul are so fast (and our Fogs are so expensive) that it's hard to get things set up before dying. On the other hand, we crushed slower decks like Zur Overlords.
It's also worth mentioning that kacyhasthecandy sent me their untapped.gg stats and had made Mythic with the deck, winning 70% of the time. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. For me, the deck was fun but below average in win rate, but kacy's been killing it with their version. Maybe it's a weird MMR thing, or maybe I'm just playing the deck wrong somehow.
Anyway, should you play Turbo Fog in Standard? I honestly don't know. I found the deck to be hilarious—there's nothing quite like blowing out Standard players with random Fogs and Aetherizes that they aren't expecting even a little—but meh in terms of how competitive it was. But it seems like other people have had more success with it. The good news is that it's pretty cheap to put together, with the original version taking just 26 rare and mythic wildcards on Arena, and you could probably cut that back even more if you want to. If you decide to give it a try, let me know how it goes because I'm really curious why my win rate with the deck was so much worse than kacy's!
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.
