Much Abrew: 127 Card Mono-White Prison (Premodern)

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week we're heading to Premodern to play one of the funniest decks I've ever seen: 127 Mono-White Prison! The deck has almost zero win conditions, instead just overloading on stax pieces and wraths, based on the big-brained theory that if we play twice as many cards as our opponent and we lock them out of the game hard enough we'll win eventually, either because our opponent scoops or because they'll run out of cards! Can the plan actually work? Is playing 127 a genius move to a hilarious flop? Let's get to the video and find out!

Much Abrew: 127-Card Mono-White Prison

Wrap Up

Welp, that was an experience. Technically we finished our league 1-4 with the deck, although that doesn't tell the true story of 127 Mono-White Prison. Our biggest struggle with the deck wasn't gaining control of the game, the deck was actually pretty good at that, instead the problem was actually finishing the game before running out of time. In match one we lost 0-1 by running out of time in a dominating position to win game two. Match two was even worse, we lost 1-0 by running out of time in game two when we were very close to 100% to win. In game three the tables turned. We played against Storm and our opponent didn't think to check and see if we were playing 127 cards, which made them do some super time-consuming loops to actually be able to Brain Freeze #2 Encyclopedia us for enough cards to mill our entire deck, and they ended up running out of time with a likely lethal Brain Freeze #2 Encyclopedia on the stack. 

So if you are counting so far, in our first three matches we lost one that we might have won, then we lose one that we 100% certainly would have won, but then we also won one that we were almost 100% certain to lose. The final two games were less exciting, they actually finished in time with us losing to a snowbally draw from Elves and then by getting our hand picked apart by The Rack, which lines up hilariously well with our Grafted Skullcap #296 card advantage plan. 

Is 127 Card Mono-White Prison a good deck? Is it a real option for Premodern? I'm not convinced, mostly because the risk of timing out seems so high if your opponent doesn't scoop. I didn't think I was playing especially slowly, the problem is that locking our opponent out of the game requires a lot of clicks each turn using things like Rishadan Port #246 Foil and Icy Manipulator #225 to tap our opponent's lands. Doing this every turn for a very long game adds up. If you do decide to try the deck you need to keep in mind that you are fighting two opponents: your actual opponent and the clock. Just beating your opponent isn't enough, you also need to beat them in a way that allows you to finish the game before running out of time. Of course, this doesn't matter in paper, which makes me think the deck might actually be a good option for tournament play since you can try to win game one and then if you never finish game two that's fine, you'll end up winning the match 1-0, but for MTGO in specific, if you want to try the deck practice being fast and looking for somewhat sub-optimal lines that let you win the game quicker, because it's surprisingly hard to win by forcing your opponent to play through their entire deck without running out of time!

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.