Budget Magic: $100 Maze's End (Foundations Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! While the new cards from Foundations are pretty sweet, my favorite part of the set by far are the reprints, which include some of my all-time favorite build-arounds from Magic's recent-ish past. As such, we're heading to our new Standard format today to play a classic in Maze's End! We've played Maze's End in various formats before, but it's been a long, long time since the "win the game if you have enough Gates" land has been legal in Standard. I'm super curious to see if it can work this time around. The bad news is that we're missing some of the strongest Gates payoffs, like Gates Ablaze and Guild Summit, which are traditionally some of the best cards in a Maze's End deck. On the other hand, the ramp in our current Standard format is absurd. Spelunking might be the best Maze's End card printed in a decade. Plus, we have cards like Circuitous Route, Omenpath Journey, and Titania's Command, all of which can tutor multiple Gates directly to the battlefield! Does the ramp make up for the lack of Gates payoffs? Can Maze's End win in 2024 Standard on a $100 budget? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Maze's End
The Deck
Maze's End is a fairly unique archetype. Probably the best classification for the deck would be combo-ramp. Our goal is pretty simple: live long enough to get 10 differently named Gates on the battlefield, and then activate Maze's End to win the game on the spot.
As far as our Gates themselves, there are exactly 11 different ones in Standard: all 10 of the common Guildgates and then Thran Portal. While this does give us more than enough to get 10 different Gates on the battlefield to win with Maze's End, there isn't much wiggle room. In general, this shouldn't matter, although only having 11 different Gates (and playing only a single copy of some of them) does mean that, at least in theory, our opponent might be able to disrupt the win with something like Demolition Field, assuming they draw a few of them and know which Gates to target.
A quick note in case the deck actually takes off. If you play against Gates, the best target for your Demolition Field effects probably isn't Maze's End. We're playing the full four copies, so we'll draw (or ramp) into another one sooner or later. On the other hand, if you snipe off-color Guildgates (like Boros Guildgate or Dimir Guildgate), it is possible that you could destroy enough of them to keep us off the Maze's End kill, at least before sideboarding, where we can bring in Conduit of Worlds to fight through land hate.
Winning with Maze's End is actually pretty straightforward: we need to ramp aggressively to get enough Gates on the battlefield while also presenting enough defense to survive our opponent's attacks as we ramp. We've got several ramp spells in the deck (the more, the better), but Spelunking deserves a special shout-out for just how good it is with Maze's End. On level one, Spelunking is just another ramp spell: we play it, draw a card, and put an extra land into play, which is fine. The real power of Spelunking, though, is letting all of our lands come into play untapped. Not only does this erase the downside of our endless Guildgates, all of which normally enter tapped, but it also makes Maze's End itself so much better. Maze's End entering untapped means that we can play and activate it right away, which speeds up the kill greatly. Plus, in the late game, it lets us activate a single Maze's End multiple times in a turn. We can activate Maze's End to ramp out a Gate, return it to our hand, and then immediately play it and activate it again, which lets us win the game by surprise even if we start the turn with only seven or eight Gates on the battlefield!
As for the rest of our ramp, it's a bit different from what you normally see in Standard since we need ramp spells that can find non-basic lands like Gates. Circuitous Route is pretty straightforward, ramping us by two Gates for four mana. Omenpath Journey is weird. Its upside is high, potentially ramping up to five Gates for four mana over the course of a few turns. But its downside is also huge since if our opponent blows it up, we'll lose the lands we exiled forever. As such, I generally try to grab Gates that we have multiple copies of rather than the one-of Gates, so that if our opponent has enchantment removal for Omenpath Journey, we'll still have enough Gates in our deck to win with Maze's End. It's also worth pointing out that we can choose fewer than five lands with Omenpath Journey, which means we can use it to snag just Maze's End in a pinch and guarantee we'll get it on our next end step. Finally, Titania's Command ramps any two lands for six mana, which is a lot, but it helps make up for this by making a couple of 2/2 Bears to chump block or, against graveyard decks, nuking the graveyard while gaining us a bunch of life.
As far as staying alive until we can get the Maze's End kill lined up, we have Get Lost as targeted removal and Split Up and Day of Judgment as sweepers. I'm still not 100% sure how good Split Up really is, but it's way cheaper than Temporary Lockdown and mostly serves the same purpose against aggro while also potentially killing bigger creatures in other matchups.
Finally, we have Mazemind Tome for card draw, which is fine, although it does make me miss the power of Guild Summit, which is incredibly powerful in a deck full of Gates. While the artifact isn't as strong, the combination of card filtering, card advantage, and eventually a bit of lifegain makes it very solid in the deck, as a way to find our ramp spells and removal at the right time.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we shockingly went 4-1 with Maze's End, which is way better than I was expecting. I think we got a bit lucky with our matchups. (We played pretty much all midrange decks, which isn't really that surprising considering how popular midrange is in Standard, but dodging aggro was nice since that is easily our hardest matchup.) But it turns out that decks in Foundations Standard aren't all that good at dealing with lands, which made the Maze's End win feel pretty inevitable in many matchups, assuming we can stabilize the board and survive the early game!
One of the nice things about Maze's End and Gates decks in general is that they tend to be pretty cheap even in optimal form since the mana base is full of commons rather than expensive rare dual lands. As such, not a ton of non-budget upgrades are needed. Switching Day of Judgment to Sunfall might make sense even though Sunfall is technically a turn slower. (Unstoppable Slasher can be annoying, and exiling it forever seems helpful.) And there might be some fringe upgrades to the sideboard. But in general, I'd play something pretty close to this even if our budget were infinite!
A quick note on the Magic Arena budget. The build of the deck we played for the video has 34 total rares and mythics, which isn't exactly cheap. Unfortunately, it's not possible to get this number too low simply because most of our ramp (like Omenpath Journey and Titania's Command) is rare, as are our wraths, and the deck won't function without ramp and sweepers. You can cut the Rest in Peace from the sideboard for a lower-rarity graveyard-hate spell and might be able to switch Get Lost into a lower-rarity removal spell like Go for the Throat if you can make the mana work. But I can't see a realistic way to get the deck down below 25-ish rares / mythics while keeping it at least somewhat competitive. If you're looking for something a bit cheaper on Arena, maybe try the Boros Burn deck we played last week for Budget Magic.
So, should you play Maze's End in Standard? I think the answer is yes! The deck felt surprisingly solid and like it can feast on the endless midrange decks that everyone is playing at the moment. That could be a problem if aggro becomes more popular, but at least for now, I think that Maze's End looks like a very good budget deck in Foundations Standard! If you are a fan of Maze's End in other formats, feel some nostalgia from when it was in Standard a decade ago, or just like ramping or alt-win cons, give Maze's End a shot!
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.
