The recent 20 Ways To Win Secret Lair deck hasn’t met with the best reception from players. Despite actually offering some reasonable financial value, people just don’t seem convinced. This is likely mainly due to the innately clunky premise of a deck with 20 disparate win conditions. The fact that it had to follow on from the wildly popular Marvel Superdrop probably doesn’t help either. You may have been holding out hope that the Bonus Card for 20 Ways to Win would salvage the situation, but it’s here now and this doesn’t look to be the case. Like the rest of the deck, this card feels like a bizarre MTG in-joke.
20 Ways To Win Bonus Card
- Mana Value: 5WW
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Type: Sorcery
- Card Text: Search your library for an enchantment card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle.
Epic (For the rest of the game, you can’t cast spells. At the beginning of each of your upkeeps, copy this spell except for its Epic ability.)
The card in question is Enduring Ideal. This was revealed via a Facebook post by Dendem MTG earlier today. Even if you’re a long-time player, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of this card before. That’s because it was part of an ill-fated cycle that never really took off in any Magic format.
Enduring Ideal, you see, is an Epic spell. This was a mechanic from back in Saviors of Kamigawa, printed on only five cards in total. Epic spells are unique in that they repeat their effects every upkeep after you cast them once. In exchange for all this value, however, they prevent you from casting any other spells for the rest of the game.
Needless to say, this downside proved too steep for most players and most decks. The Epic cards are all essentially considered memes at this point, only being added to lists for sheer novelty value rather than power. Enduring Ideal is no exception. Granted it is occasionally included in Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin decks, which 20 Ways To Win technically is. This happens so rarely that it hardly feels worth mentioning here, however.
The card isn’t any more exciting on the financial front. Despite only having one previous printing, copies of Enduring Ideal currently go for around $3. As always the Secret Lair markup should apply to this new version, especially given how cute and colorful the art is. I really wouldn’t expect too much from this one going forward, however. It’s an incredibly niche card, even here in a deck it’s ideally suited to.
What Were They Thinking?
Disappointing Bonus Cards are nothing new for Secret Lair, of course. Enduring Ideal is disappointing on two fronts, however. Not only is it a low-value, low-utility card in general, but it also doesn’t live up to the promise of the deck’s unique concept.
Given that the deck is all about alternate win conditions, most would’ve expected another one of those in the Bonus Card slot. Sure that would’ve taken the total above the titular 20, but it also would’ve felt like a more worthy addition to the deck. Given that the deck currently counts combat damage and Commander damage as separate conditions, and counts Twenty-Toed Toad twice, there’s an argument this wouldn’t be an issue.
There are plenty of other good win cons to choose from, too. Laboratory Maniac is a pick with value in cEDH, for example, and wouldn’t be too powerful in the deck as it comes. Azor’s Elocutors adds a fun little Monarch-esque mini-game to proceedings, while Mortal Combat is a nice bit of inevitability in long games.
There were better options for this Bonus Card, in other words. In fact, you could argue that Enduring Ideal is actively detrimental to the deck if you choose to include it. It opens up the possibility of a Shrine-based value game, but it also locks you out of most of your alternate win conditions at the same time. For a deck built around such conditions, this feels like an odd misstep.
At the end of the day, it’s not hugely important what the Bonus Card for 20 Ways To Win, or any other Secret Lair drop, is. These are ultimately fun extras, after all. It is worth pointing out that we could’ve gotten something much better in this slot, however.
