Brewer's Kitchen: I Spent 11 Hours Flipping Coins ... and This Happened
Hello there, Brewer’s Kitchen here with another fresh brew.
As in any of my decks, we are going to get some quality value, but this time, we have a chance to hit the jackpot. There’s a reason the deck is called “The Value Lottery.”
The whole idea started when Crimson Vow blessed us with one of one of the most exciting Clones of all time: Mirrorhall Mimic. On its front side, it clones any creature on the battlefield. On its backside it becomes Ghastly Mimicry, an aura that creates a token copy of the enchanted creature. Now there is one creature in the Arena card pool that really wants to get copied… The purest form of value… One of the most beautiful triggers to put on the stack: [[Risen Reef].
But as satisfying as it is to copy [[Risen Reef] with the Mimic, in the end, it will just create a single copy. And while a second copy already creates two of these beautiful triggers, these are rookie numbers. How about getting so many triggers that we put our entire library into our hand and all of our lands on the battlefield? For this, we just need two things: Mirror March and a bit of luck… ok let’s be real here, we might need quite a bit of luck. But as you saw in my video — wait, you didn’t watch it yet? Uhm… spoiler warning. It’s not unusual to luck out on a flip and end up with our deck in our hand. And while Risen Reef technically doesn’t “draw” cards and doesn’t result in drawing an empty library, we do have to find a way to end the game before our next draw step.
Now back in the day this would be the moment to mention the one-off Thassa's Oracle to win off an empty library… but since it is banned, how about we ignore Jace, Wielder of Mysteries as an alternative and just rely on winning even more coin flips for our win condition as well? Terror of the Peaks is probably the most devastating creature to copy. It ends the game on the spot as soon as we win two flips with Mirror March. It’s also a great target for our clones if it’s already on the battlefield.
And that’s how we are going to luck our way to victory. But as fun as this sounds in theory, our opponents won’t just wait until we play a six mana enchantment and let us untap with it. Our deck needs to ramp, regain the value that is lost by playing a 6 mana do-nothing- enchantment and stay alive along the way. All while preferably playing only creatures so we can take full advantage of Mirror March. Let’s ignore the whole coin flip plan for a second and talk about the early game:
The Early Game
Half of the deck is dedicated to ramping out Mirror March as fast as possible. Gilded Goose and Llanowar Elves allow us to follow up with Risen Reef on turn two. That sequence is so good in this deck that it’s worth aggressively taking mulligans to get it. Otherwise, we have Tangled Florahedron and Prosperous Innkeeper to ramp on turn two as well. Once we have a Risen Reef on the battlefield, we either clone it with Mirrorhall Mimic and Glasspool Mimic or play Seasoned Pyromancer to trigger the Reef with its Elemental tokens. After a couple of turns spent cloning and triggering Reefs, we will end up with massive amounts of lands on the battlefield and cards in hand. That’s when we switch over to phase two of the gameplan.
Playing the Lottery:
We usually try to avoid tapping out for Mirror March and hope we untap with it. It’s worth copying and triggering Risen Reefs until we can play Mirror March with enough mana left to test our luck on the same turn. Every spell in the deck besides the March is a creature. In theory, as soon as we have Mirror March on the battlefield, every creature we play can win us the game on the spot. But this is all just assuming we get lucky… how lucky? Well, I guess it’s time to talk about probabilities. Before I go over the chances and outcomes of the important creatures to copy, I must give an important warning: Half of the time, we will lose the first flip and Mirror March will do absolutely nothing… I know, it’s boring… With this sobering fact out of the way, let’s talk about getting lucky:
Instead of just listing the probabilities to win a certain number of flips in a row, I’ll go one step further and tell you what will happen when we win that many flips with different creatures.
Creatures that tap for mana can be activated right away due to Mirror March giving haste. Winning one flip on a Llanowar Elves will break even on mana, every additional flip we win will create extra mana. But ramping alone doesn’t get us anywhere. There are three creatures that will create an insane amount of value for every additional copy we can create:
Risen Reef
Risen Reef in the main engine of the deck. As you can see in this table, the triggers quickly stack up with every additional copy. As soon as we win six flips, our library will likely be gone. I’m not going to tell anybody not to spend their last three mana on a Reef in case you get too lucky… just keep in mind that you might literally die from too much value in the next draw step.
| Flips Won | Triggers | Chance |
| 0 | 1 | 50% |
| 1 | 3 | 50% |
| 2 | 7 | 25% |
| 3 | 13 | 12.5% |
| 4 | 21 | 6.25% |
| 5 | 31 | 3.125% |
| 6 | 43 | 1.563% |
| 7 | 57 | 0.781% |
| 8 | 73 | 0.391% |
| 9 | 91 | 0.1953% |
| 10 | 111 | 0.0977% |
| 20 | 381 | 0.0000954% |
Prosperous Innkeeper
Prosperous Innkeeper serves two roles in this deck: Ramping and life gain. Both get pretty crazy once we start copying it. While every copy will create an additional treasure, each copy will trigger off each other when it comes to the life gain ability. Once we win a couple of flips and use the treasures to follow it up with some more creatures to gain life, our opponents will have a hard time closing out the game while we run away with our value engine.
| Flips Won | Treasure | Life | Chance |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 50% |
| 1 | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 25% |
| 3 | 4 | 9 | 12.5% |
| 4 | 5 | 16 | 6.25% |
| 5 | 6 | 25 | 3.125% |
| 6 | 7 | 36 | 1.563% |
| 7 | 8 | 49 | 0.781% |
| 8 | 9 | 64 | 0.391% |
| 9 | 10 | 81 | 0.1953% |
| 10 | 11 | 100 | 0.0977% |
| 20 | 21 | 400 | 0.0000954% |
Terror of the Peaks
Terror of the Peaks is our game-ender. Since every copy will trigger off each other, the damage output will get out of hand very quickly. If our opponent is at 20 life, winning two flips is enough to win on the spot.
| Flips Won | Total Damage | Chance |
| 0 | 0 | 50% |
| 1 | 5 | 50% |
| 2 | 20 | 25% |
| 3 | 45 | 12.5% |
| 4 | 80 | 6.25% |
| 5 | 125 | 3.125% |
| 6 | 180 | 1.563% |
| 7 | 245 | 0.781% |
| 8 | 320 | 0.391% |
| 9 | 405 | 0.1953% |
| 10 | 500 | 0.0977% |
| 20 | 2000 | 0.0000954% |
I’ve included the chance to win 20 flips in a row in these tables since it’s the theoretical number where a simple Llanowar Elves will be enough to kill an opponent on an empty board. The chance to hit it is more than one-in-a-million, though. If you watched my video, you will understand why I think that Arena will most likely explode before the coinflip animation even takes place… but good luck with this one…
Plan B
While I have to admit that this deck is clearly on the meme/casual side, it still has a somewhat decent Plan B. Goldspan Dragon is not only a great creature to copy, creating a lot of treasures and making them produce two mana, it’s also a great standalone threat to ramp into. If we ramp on turn one and two, we can start swinging in with a Goldspan on turn three. While our opponent is distracted answering the Dragon, we can use this time to set up our Mirror March gameplan.
The One-Offs
Since part of our gameplan involves putting our entire deck into our hand, we can get away with playing some one-offs. Most importantly, and already mentioned: Terror of the Peaks.
Another good one to have is Timeless Witness. It’s important to have a way to get back combo pieces from the graveyard. And if we get lucky with our coin flips, we can use it to get our entire graveyard back to our hand. Don’t be shy to discard Timeless Witness to Seasoned Pyromancer. While it will not trigger the March, we can still eternalize it from the graveyard to get back what we need later.
Llanowar Visionary is our honorary fifth Risen Reef. In a vacuum it’s even better: It ramps by one AND draws a card. But additional copies will not trigger off each other. I still didn’t cut it yet since it fixed some bad draws for me, but I wouldn’t hold it against you to cut it and just make sure you mulligan into hands that have Risen Reef.
Prevent dying from Value
Now let’s be honest here, as funny as it is to flip your entire library with copies of Risen Reef, it will lose you the game sometimes. While I didn’t include any failsafe in this deck, it’s actually pretty simple to do so. All we need is a single card in our library in our draw step. To do so, it will be enough to put a single copy of Screaming Swarm or Bookwurm into the deck. Once we pull off our big turn we will have way more than seven cards in our hand at the end of our turn. We can then discard the Swarm or Bookworm to hand size and activate its ability before our fatal draw step. This way we won’t draw from an empty library. Both of these cards are also quite nice to copy with Mirror March but didn’t make the cut for the final deck. In my three days of recording, I’ve died three times to my own value. Is it worth cutting a better card for a failsafe? Maybe… I didn’t do it, but it’s a good thing to mention if you don’t like to live dangerously.
Tips and Tricks
We usually want to get as much value as possible from our Seasoned Pyromancer. Especially with a Risen Reef on the battlefield, we want to make sure to discard nonland cards to get the elemental tokes. Timeless Witness and Mirrorhall Mimic can get value from the graveyard, making them good cards to trade in for additional triggers. Otherwise, it’s wise to keep mana dorks in hand in the mid to late game to discard with the Pyromancer.
While Glasspool Mimic can only copy our own creatures, Mirrorhall Mimic can copy any creature on the battlefield. This can make for some pretty wild plays, depending on our opponent’s board. Since the Mimics are nontoken creatures they will trigger Mirror March as well. We usually want to copy our own creatures since our deck is structured around this gameplan, but sometimes we can copy something like a Righteous Valkyrie. If we get lucky with the March on this one, every copy will gain life off each other and will pump our team, creating an insanely large board out of nowhere.
While Ghastly Mimicry seems super sweet on Risen Reef and Terror of the Peaks we do set ourselves up for a devastating two-for-one. It’s usually better to target our opponent’s biggest threat with it to make them remove their own creature to stop us from creating copies.
The last piece of advice: Get lucky!
Wrap Up
And that’s it for the Value Lottery. I hope you enjoyed the video and article. Keep in mind, I’ve recorded gameplay with this deck for days to get these crazy matches. All in all, I played 139 matches for 11 hours and got a 0.1953% hit as my best coin flip. Since Arena already crashed with this one, I’m not sure if it’s even possible to hit a better one without Arena exploding on the spot. What’s your best Mirror March story? Have you hit the one-in-a-million? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @Brewers_Kitchen.
Have a nice day and keep on brewing!
