Much Abrew: Your Doom Has Been Foretold (Pioneer)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing. Prison decks are some of my favorite in all of Magic, but they are also slowly fading from the game. Way back in the '90s, locking your opponent out of playing Magic was common, but over the years, Wizards has gone out of their way to minimize this play pattern. As a result, there isn't really a true prison deck in Pioneer. The Possibility Storm deck we played a while ago was about as close as it gets. But today, we've got another contender for the title of premier Pioneer prison deck: Doom Foretold! In some ways, Doom Foretold is like Smokestack for Zoomers. It can touch lands and will only ever make people sacrifice one permanent a turn. But it can still be pretty brutal, eating away your board little by little, turn by turn, until nothing's left. The idea of our deck is to break the symmetry of Doom Foretold by overloading on cheap permanents that do something when they enter the battlefield, like Hopeless Nightmare, Trial of Ambition, and Treacherous Blessing, which we can later sacrifice to Doom Foretold to keep it on the battlefield eating away our opponent's permanents. Ideally, we'll eventually win by our opponent giving up in frustration, although if we actually need to win the game, we do have a single Harmless Offering we can use to give our opponent a Demonic Pact, to force them to lose the game! Is Doom Foretold Pioneer's premier prison deck? How many permanents can it make our opponent sacrifice? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
Much Abrew: Doom Foretold
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Doom Foretold was solid. We ended up going 6-4 with the deck, good for a 60% match-win percentage. While the deck can be slow, which sometimes makes aggro an issue, especially if we don't draw into any of our (many) cheap removal spells, it also has a lot of inevitability. If we can stabilize the battlefield, Doom Foretold will show up sooner or later to eat away our opponent's board and hopefully give us the win.
While Doom Foretold might be the most "fun" card in the deck, it's really Beseech the Mirror that makes the deck function. Since we have so many cheap enchantments in the deck as sacrifice fodder for Doom Foretold, we usually have something to bargain. This lets us consistently find one-ofs like Kaya's Wrath, Slaughter Games, and Harmless Offering when we need them, which is super powerful. Plus, Beseech the Mirror also works as additional copies of Doom Foretold in matchups where it is good!
Speaking of Harmless Offering, it's in the deck to combo with Demonic Pact. While the Cat Pact combo (which is back in Standard thanks to Foundations!) isn't our primary goal—instead, we're playing Demonic Pact because it's great with Doom Foretold, and once we are playing Demonic Pact, we might as well have a Harmless Offering for its free win potential—we did manage to win a couple of games with it, mostly thanks to Beseech the Mirror. In general, though, the deck wins by taking control of the game, eating away our opponent's resources, and putting them in a position where they can't possibly win, at which point they (hopefully) scoop!
So, should you play Doom Foretold in Pioneer? If you like slow, grindy decks with lots of weird little tricks and synergies, I think the answer is yes! While I'm not sure Doom Foretold is a top-tier deck, it did feel competitive, and we got to see some brutal games where Doom Foretold was absolutely devastating! It turns out that some decks really struggle to win while sacrificing a permanent each turn. Who would have guessed?
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
