As Sid Meier put it, “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” This idea can certainly be seen in Magic. While deckbuilding is theoretically a sandbox with infinite horizons, most players abide by rigid mathematical rules intended to optimize performance. In this way, those horizons close in until we’re painting on a very confined canvas.
Every so often, however, a deck comes along that reminds us of those early days, when what was ‘best’ was far from our minds. Last weekend, one such deck actually put on a competitive performance. At a Modern RCQ in New Jersey, someone piloted a 240-card Battle of Wits deck all the way to the Top 8.
Battle Of Wits In Modern?!
That someone’s name was Ryan Gassaway, a regular tournament player known for running Control and Hardened Scales decks. He’s also a big advocate for Battle of Wits, playing the deck at multiple serious events in the past. Previous finishes include a Top 256 at NRG Series Indianapolis and a Top 16 at SCG Con Richmond. This past weekend marked a new high for Gassaway, however, as he reached the Top 8 of an RCQ in New Jersey with the deck.
For those unaware, Battle of Wits is a deck built around the M13 enchantment of the same name. That card lets you win the game on the spot if your deck has 200 or more cards in it. To accommodate this, players build decks far above the standard 60-card threshold.
Gassaway’s Top 8 list, for example, ran 240 cards in total. With so many slots to play with, the deck ends up as a kind of five-color Control list in most cases. Gassaway’s build certainly fell into this category, packing plentiful removal, countermagic, and tutors to help find Battle of Wits itself.
It’s pretty rare for players to run a Battle of Wits deck at all, let alone at a competitive event. This makes Gassaway’s Top 8 all the more remarkable. As reported by stillman_steve on Twitter, there was a good amount of luck involved in the result. In the Swiss round of the RCQ, Gassaway faced a Mill deck. A deck whose win condition involves reducing the opponent’s deck to zero cards came up against a deck with four times as many cards as usual. That opponent conceded on the spot, which gave Gassaway a nice boost. While it’s undoubtedly a sore spot for the Mill player, it’s hard to deny how funny such an unlikely matchup is.
Some Truly Wild Card Choices
Sadly Gassaway couldn’t take the deck all the way, ultimately losing out in the quarter-finals of the event. Considering the deck’s borderline meme status, that’s still an incredibly impressive feat. The problem with Battle of Wits is ultimately one of consistency. With 240 cards, your chances of hitting what you need at any given time are fairly slim. On the other hand, having so many card slots available lets you make some truly bizarre deckbuilding choices.
Gassaway’s list contained a single copy of Panglacial Wurm, for example. This is ultimately just an overcosted Trampler, with a fun upside if your deck tutors a lot. Gassaway’s certainly does. Not only does it run a staggering 44 Fetchlands (playsets of each plus Prismatic Vista), but it also runs other tutor effects too. Sakura-Tribe Elder, Traverse the Ulvenwald, and Wish all appear. While Panglacial Wurm looks like an inexplicable meme card, it has actually proven quite potent for Gassaway. In stillman_steve’s thread, he notes how Gassaway has five confirmed kills with the card in different games.
Wurm aside, his deck also included some other surprising additions. When you have 240 cards to work with, pet cards are a luxury you can definitely afford. Emrakul, the Promised End is a bit of a curveball, typically only seeing play in Ramp or combo decks that can cheat it out. Battle of Wits can definitely go long, however, and it uses enough card types to get an Emrakul out when needed.
Omnath, Locus of Creation is another spicy inclusion. It’s a staple card in Control and Landfall lists, and given the sheer number of Fetchlands available here it makes sense. Its abilities can get you out of many tricky situations in the kinds of long games Battle of Wits is geared towards.
An Uphill Battle
As cool as the cards it uses are, Battle of Wits is just not a competitive Magic archetype that sees consistent success. As I mentioned above, the biggest reason for this is consistency. Players like Gassaway can scale their mana bases to theoretically support a deck of 240 cards, but the innate variance of the game is magnified on this increased scale. Your chances of drawing nothing but lands or nothing but nonlands are heightened, essentially.
For this reason, despite this major success, don’t expect to see Battle of Wits at your next Modern event. Or even your next FNM, for that matter. It’s a very cool deck, which plays out totally differently from game to game. Huge kudos to Gassaway for mastering it enough to reach a Top 8, but I suspect that’s the ceiling for how high this deck can climb in a serious sense.
In a way, this is fairly sad. An ideal world would have innovative, boundary-pushing decks like this be genuine contenders. Unfortunately, as our ol’ pal Sid Meier foretold, players have optimized a lot of the fun out of MTG deck building. Pro players discover the most powerful lines through intense testing, then share them with players online, who run the same lists with minor modifications.
Asking for this to change now would be foolish. You can’t put the net decking genie back in the bottle, and even if you could the end results would likely be the same, players would just arrive at them slower. For better or worse, Magic is a heavily optimized game now. This makes exceptions like Gassaway’s Top 8 all the more remarkable when they happen.
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