Much Abrew: If You Cast a Spell, You Die (Historic)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! As you probably know, one of my biggest goals for Wilds of Eldraine is to build a deck around each of the Enchanted Tales (at least, the higher rarity ones) that are new to Magic Arena. Well, Lost Caverns of Ixalan is almost here, so it's almost time to move on. But today, we have one last spicy Enchanted Tales deck, this time built around Forced Fruition. At first glance, Forced Fruition looks like one of the worst cards imaginable—it costs a massive six mana and makes it so whenever our opponent casts a spell, they get to draw seven cards. Normally, letting your opponent refill their hand every time they cast a spell would be a bad thing, but we're trying to turn Forced Fruition into a game-ending combo piece by setting up a board state where, if our opponent casts a single spell to trigger Forced Fruition, they lose the game on the spot to a huge pile of card-draw-punishing triggers from Orcish Bowmasters, Underworld Dreams, and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse! Can the plan work? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
Much Abrew: Forced Fruition
The Deck
The plan today is simple: manipulate the game in a way that we can play Forced Fruition with a board state that makes it so if our opponent casts a single spell (and draws seven cards thanks to Forced Fruition), they'll lose the game immediately, before the spell even resolves!
The way we do this is by stacking up effects that punish our opponent for drawing cards. For this, we have three different options. First up, Orcish Bowmasters. While Orcish Bowmasters went from being one of the best cards on Arena to mostly unplayable thanks to its recent rebalancing, it still works fine for our deck since our Forced Fruitions force our opponent to draw a bunch of cards. Sure, its ETB trigger no longer exists, but it's still solid as a combo piece. Underworld Dreams just pings our opponent for one whenever they draw a card, while Sheoldred, the Apocalypse drains for two. In general, we need two of these effects on the battlefield for a single Forced Fruition trigger to be lethal, although a single Sheoldred sometimes can get the job done thanks to the power of its trigger.
While getting our opponent with Forced Fruition is our primary plan, we do have a janky backup plan in Seizan, Perverter of Truth. Its ability forces each player to draw two cards and lose two life on their upkeep, which offers another way to trigger our Orcish Bowmasters, Sheoldreds, and Underworld Dreams.
Otherwise, we have a bit of ramp in Utopia Sprawl and Sanctum Weaver to help us actually get Forced Fruition on the battlefield in a timely matter. This is especially important in Historic, which can be a pretty aggressive format.
Otherwise, we round out our deck with The One Ring to help us draw through our deck and find our combo pieces, and a bunch of removal and discard to help us stay alive while we are getting our combo pieces online.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, our Forced Fruition deck was very much an Against the Odds–style deck. In over 30 matches with the deck, we managed a 39% win rate, which isn't horrible but also isn't good enough to realistically rank up or anything like that. On the other hand, the deck was good at achieving its goal of putting opponents in the position where they would lose the game if they cast a single spell. It was hilarious to watch opponents slowly realize what was happening. They would hover over Forced Fruition, hover over our card-draw-punishing effects, and then some of them would simply scoop, realizing they were locked out of the game. Some didn't figure out what was happening and aggressively sling spells only to realize that they had made a huge mistake and die on the spot! While the deck is a bit slow and clunky to really be competitive (we literally can't cast our namesake card in a lot of situations because, without the setup of having some card-draw punishment on the battlefield, Forced Fruition is more likely to lose us the game than win it), it is a really funny way to pick up some wins by making opponents choose the unthinkable.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Next week, we'll move on from Wilds of Eldraine and start exploring new Lost Caverns of Ixalan cards! 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.
