I Killed my Opponent with my Bare Hand | Brewer's Kitchen
Well, hello there! Brewer’s Kitchen here and today’s win condition is our hand size. Now this either sounds like a different card game or you immediately know which card I’m talking about.
The Gameplan
And this card is Triskaidekaphile. A two-drop that lets you have no maximum hand size and “At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have exactly thirteen cards in your hand, you win the game”. So, how do we get all of these cards in our hand as fast as possible? We could use its activated ability to pay 4 mana for every card… or we just throw Triskaidekaphile into a shell that is optimized to speedrun our way into a 13-card hand as fast and as sneaky as possible. Our opponent will get suspicious once the Triskaidekaphile hits the board so we got to hit them out of nowhere.
That shell is a mono blue artifact shell centered around Emry, Lurker of the Loch, Sai, Master Thopterist and cheap artifacts.
As you can see in the decklist, we’re only running 20 lands. The deck runs ten 0-drop and twelve 1-drop artifacts. This way we can flood the board with artifacts starting on turn one. Moonsnare Prototype and Springleaf Drum become mana neutral if we have creatures or artifacts to tap with them. All these artifacts will reduce the cost of Emry, Lurker of the Loch and Thought Monitor to only a single blue mana, providing a steady flow of card advantage.
But not nearly enough to have 13 cards in our hand, and that’s where one card ties everything together: Paradoxical Outcome
Paradoxical Outcome will return all these cheap permanents to our hand at instant speed and draw a card for each of them. Not only will this allow us to recast them all to trigger Sai, Master Thopterist for Thopter tokens, it’s also a sneaky way to fill our hand up to 13 cards at the end of our opponent’s turn to win with Triskaidekaphile.
And that’s the whole gameplan. Sure, you can flood the board with Sai’s thopter tokens as an alternative win con, and you can grind out games by sacrificing Witching Well and Thought Monitor to recast them with Emry to keep the card advantage going. But the main goal is always to pull off the 13-card hand. Is it a good deck? No. But it’s certainly a unique way to win a game, and the explosiveness of casting 2-3 spells on turn one feels like we’re playing legacy sometimes. But just keep in mind: Don’t expect to win a Pro Tour with this.
There is a Jegantha, the Wellspring in the decklist that wasn’t in the list I played in the video. The deck just meets the companion restriction and can technically cast it with Springleaf Drum so it’s literally free to include… which is why companions as a whole is a stupid mechanic and probably should have never been printed.
Wrap up
Ok, not gonna lie, this is one of my gimmick decks. It is quite fun to play because of the explosive play pattern of playing ceap spells and drawing loads of cards, but having the win hinging on Triskaidekaphile can be close to impossible in some matchups, especially if the game goes long and the opponent knows what we’re up to.
If you have questions or ideas for this or any other deck, you can reach me on Twitter @Brewers_Kitchen or at brewerskitchen@mtggoldfish.com.
