Much Abrew: Opposition Agent is Coming for Your Fetchlands (Timeless)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! You know me. There's nothing I like more than making people not play Magic, and we just got an exciting new way to do this in Timeless, with Opposition Agent coming to Arena for the first time in Through the Omenpaths. The three-drop lets us control our opponent whenever they search their library and even lets us cast whatever card we find for them! While Opposition Agent is a notoriously salty Commander card, it feels like it should be pretty absurd in Timeless too, where many decks are overloaded on fetch lands and some combo decks (like Storm) play a lot of other tutors as well. How good is Opposition Agent in Timeless? Can we get a Turn 1 win by Dark Ritualing it into play against a fetch-land deck? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Opposition Agent
The Deck
The primary plan of our deck is simple: get Opposition Agent on the battlefield as quickly as possible to keep our opponent from being able to crack fetch lands. In some ways, Opposition Agent is almost like Blood Moon. If we can get it on the battlefield on Turn 1, it can just win us the game all by itself (at least in some matchups) by ruining our opponent's mana. And we've got multiple ways to cast Opposition Agent on Turn 1. The easiest is Dark Ritual, which happens to make exactly enough mana to cast a Opposition Agent, but Chrome Mox with Ancient Tomb can also get the job done.
The one downside of Opposition Agent is that it is somewhat matchup dependent. If we run into a deck without any fetch lands or other tutors, it's still a 3/2 flash, which is something. In these matchups, we'll often end up sideboarding out at least some copies. But when Opposition Agent is good, it can be game-breakingly good.
The rest of our deck is good and hateful black cards. Dauthi Voidwalker hates on the graveyard, hits for three a turn thanks to shadow, and can sometimes let us cast something massive from our opponent's deck for free with the help of discard. Orcish Bowmasters hates on card draw and is just generally a solid card. Meanwhile, Barrowgoyf keeps growing on me the more I play with it. Its body is big, and the combo of lifelink and deathtouch makes it both necessary for our opponent to interact with but also difficult to interact with, at least in combat.
We've also got a scammy discard package with Grief, Reanimate, and Thoughtseize. The primary idea is that we can evoke Grief into play on Turn 1, take the best card from our opponent's hand, and then Reanimate Grief to Thoughtseize our opponent again, although sometimes we Grief to make our opponent discard a bomb and Reanimate that instead. Plus, we can always just reanimate something like Opposition Agent or Barrowgoyf in a pinch.
Last but certainly not least, we have The One Ring because, well, it's The One Ring. Thanks to our fast mana, it's possible for us to cast the artifact as soon as Turn 1, and the card advantage it generates is absurd. The card shouldn't exist, but as long as it does, you need a good reason not to play it, especially in a deck with Ancient Tomb, Chrome Mox, and Dark Ritual.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, the deck was great! After finishing the video, I kept playing the deck for fun and ended up hitting Mythic with it, with a 17-10 record, good for a 63% win rate. More importantly, we had some awesome Opposition Agent wins, including hard-locking some opponents out of the game but also fizzling combo kills against Beseech the Mirror Storm! While we did sideboard it out on occasion, overall, it felt really good, and I wouldn't be surprised for it to at least have a role in the Timeless meta while also making some Brawl players incredibly unhappy.
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.
