Much Abrew: 249-Card, No "Real" Land, Oops All Spells Battle of Wits
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're playing one of the wildest Modern decks I've ever seen: 249-Card, No "Real" Land, Oops All Spells Battle of Wits! The idea is to play a 249-card deck so we can win with Battle of Wits but also an all-MDFC mana base (which I honestly didn't know was possible in a 249-card deck) so we can win with the Oops, All Spells self-mill combo of Undercity Informer or Balustrade Spy. Or Selective Memory plus Thassa's Oracle. Or Goblin Charbelcher. Honestly, this deck defies description, so I'm not even going to try anymore. Let's jump into a league and see if this incredibly wild pile actually works!
Much Abrew: 249-Card, No "Real" Land, Oops All Spells Battle of Wits
Wrap-Up
I promised in the intro that I wouldn't try to describe this deck, and I'm going to stick to it. The good news is that we finished with a 2-3 record with the deck, which is way better than I was expecting, and we even managed to win a couple of extra games along the way! Oddly, the deck almost felt competitive.
Of course, it's also incredibly inconsistent. Playing a 249-card deck will do that naturally. But our deck has even another layer of inconsistency thanks to the all-MDFC mana base leaving us without fetch lands or even many dual lands. The end result is a deck that can win as early as Turn 3 with its best draws but also mulligans a ton and sometimes doesn't do much of anything at all.
If you try to pick up the deck, the most important thing is to mulligan aggressively. With 249 cards, we can't simply hope to draw into what we need, and what we need the most is some way of winning the game. Our deck has multiple one-card combo kills. Balustrade Spy and Undercity Informer win us the game, Oops, All Spells style. Goblin Charbelcher also just wins the game. As we mulligan, we're really looking for one of these cards or a way to find one of these cards, like Recross the Paths to stack our deck, or Profane Tutor or Fae of Wishes to tutor up a game-ending combo piece.
The only disappointing part of our experience with the deck is that we never actually won with Battle of Wits, which is what I wanted to do most with the deck. While we did win a bunch of games, this was typically because of the Oops, All Spells combo. There was one game we might have been able to win with Battle of Wits involving a weird line requiring us to blow up our own Chalice of the Void to be able to cast An Offer You Can't Refuse on one of our own spells so we could make some Treasure to make blue mana through our opponent's [[Blood Moon]. While we did end up winning the game, I sort of regret not going for the Battle of Wits kill because it never ended up happening.
So, should you play 249-Card, No "Real" Lands, Oops All Spells Battle of Wits in Modern? Probably not. The deck is hilarious, and it does win more than it should. But it also costs $1,000 to put together, which is a bit much for a meme deck (although, considering that we almost played four decks in one, maybe the price isn't quite as high as it looks?). I think the deck is a great option for a meme deck if you happen to have the cards sitting around already, but I can't recommend going out and spending $1,000 on 249-Card, No "Real" Lands, Oops All Spells Battle of Wits. It's a hilarious backup deck to pull out once in a while, but $1,000 is just too much to pay for a semi-competitive meme deck.
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.
