Every so often a Magic: The Gathering deck comes along that makes you do a double-take; a deck so unusual that you can scroll through the list for hours and still not fully understand all the choices made. Today, we have the mother of all decks in this category. At an RC in China over the weekend, a plucky player took on a Modern event with a combination of two MTG archetypes: Oops, All Spells and Battle of Wits.
For the uninitiated, these are two of the most out there, niche strategies in MTG. Few players run them individually, never mind bundled together into one. The final deck contained a whopping 249 cards, all of which were spells. The end result is a list with more hidden synergies and interactions than multiple Commander decks combined. It’s only March, but there’s a good chance this is the spiciest Magic deck you’ll see all year.
Oops, All Spells! Meets Battle Of Wits
This absolute masterpiece in deckbuilding comes to us via 李 辉, who piloted it to a 3-4 finish in MTG China Open S8 Regional Championship Dragon Shield Cup on Saturday. That doesn’t sound great on the surface, but once we dive deeper you’ll appreciate how impressive it is.
Honestly, it’s hard to know where to start when breaking down a deck this big. A good first step is probably to address the two main MTG gameplans: Oops, All Spells and Battle of Wits. The former is a combo deck that deliberately runs no lands in order to make use of unusual synergies and instant wins. You can burn your opponent out using Goblin Charbelcher, or mill your whole deck with Balustrade Spy and go for a Thassa’s Oracle/Laboratory Maniac win instead.
This archetype has existed for a long time, but the recent addition of MDFC lands has made it much, much better. Now you can play a deck with no lands that does, in fact, run lands. 李 辉’s deck runs 94 MDFCs, which gives it a reasonable ratio of lands overall.
The Battle of Wits half of the deck takes the opposite approach. As you can see above, Battle of Wits is an enchantment that wins you the game if you start your turn with 200 or more cards in your deck. This explains the starting total of 249 in this list; if you can drop a Battle of Wits reasonably early, you can just win on the spot. There are no complex combo lines here, just a good, clean alternate win condition. There are even plenty of tutors in the deck that can grab Battle of Wits, which makes it much more consistent.
Surprising Synergies
So that’s the basic gist of the deck. You spend 10 minutes shuffling 249 cards, and then you try and achieve victory through one of the methods detailed above. Sometimes your draws will support Oops, All Spells, sometimes they’ll be more Battle of Wits. In between these wincons, there’s a huge number of self-contained packages, one-ofs, and specific answers. Beyond the combos themselves, these are by far the most interesting part of the deck.
Take Selective Memory, for example. 李 辉 runs just a single copy, and in this deck it allows you to search your library and exile whatever you want. In this way, you can set up the perfect combo stack for a win next turn. Recross the Paths is similar, letting you reorder your entire deck as you see fit for three mana. Both are massive consistency boosters, though they will eat into your round time like nothing else.
In order to react to your opponent, the deck also runs a Karn, the Great Creator package. This lets you tutor for answers like Engineered Explosives and Defense Grid, or even artifact lands like Mistvault Bridge. Since adding answers to a 249-card deck post-board would have minimal impact, dedicating the sideboard to a Karn suite makes perfect sense in this case.
Beyond these bangers, there’s a ton more going on in the deck. You’ll find the full Oops, All Spells package of Narcomoeba, Vengevine, Sword of the Meek, Salvage Titan, and Creeping Chill, capable of exploding out of the graveyard for 28 damage in the right board state. You’ll also find mysterious one-ofs like Subtlety and Tameshi, Reality Architect, which likely enable one unseen combo or another. As befits its sheer size, it really does feel like there are four different Magic: The Gathering decks crammed in here.
A Feat Of Cardboard Engineering
Ordinarily, this is the point in a deck tech where I’d point out the strengths and weaknesses of the deck in the current meta. This list, however, is a special case. There’s really no way I’d recommend trying the deck out yourself, and not just for practical and financial reasons. This is a gimmick deck through and through, and not one you should seek to imitate if you want results at Modern events.
Hilariously, 李 辉’s performance with the list actually flies in the face of this advice. They went 3-4 overall, which is incredible considering they essentially sleeved up a meme for a serious event. Looking closer at the deck’s matchups on Melee, however, reveals that two of its victories were against Dimir Mill. This is an incredibly fortunate matchup since it’s nigh-impossible for Mill to get through 249 cards. Mill is also not a big part of the current metagame, so it’s safe to say that this Oops, All Spells/Battle of Wits deck got a lucky break here.
That said, it may be unwise to write it off completely. Last year saw an MTG Battle of Wits deck make the top eight in a Modern RCQ. Perhaps this new brew could achieve similar results with some more refinement.
In any case, this is the kind of Magic: The Gathering deck that deserves to be celebrated. Week after week we see the same lists run in big events; it’s a breath of fresh air when something like this comes along. In a tweet highlighting the deck, SaffronOlive called it “perhaps the greatest deck ever brewed.” After poring over the list to write this article, it’s hard to disagree with him.