Against the Odds: Geometric Doubling (Secrets of Strixhaven Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week we're heading to Secrets of Strixhaven Standard to see what crazy things we can do with the combo of Doubling Season and Applied Geometry! By itself, targeting a Doubling Season with Applied Geometry will give us two 48/48 Fractal Doubling Season creatures, which is pretty powerful all by itself, but once we add some more pieces to the mix like Echocasting Symposium and Oko, the Ringleader things can get absurd pretty fast! How good is Applied Geometry? What are the odds of winning by popping off with it and Doubling Season in Secrets of Strixhaven Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Geometric Doubling
The Deck
Applied Geometry is an interesting card. By itself, it's essentially a four mana 6/6, which is pretty far above the curve, with the upside that you can potentially use it to copy something with an enters trigger or an activated ability (if you copy a land you essentially make a four mana 6/6 mana dork) but the downside that if your opponent can kill the thing you target before Applied Geometry resolves you end up with nothing. I could imagine a world where a deck would want to play Applied Geometry fairly, but that's not this deck because we're trying to use Applied Geometry to do the silliest things possible!
On one level, our plan today is pretty simple: ramp into Doubling Season using mana dorks and Badgermole Cub and then cast an Applied Geometry on the Doubling Season. If we can pull this off, the end result will be two 48/48 Fractal Doubling Season creatures, because the original Doubling Season will give us two Fractal token Doubling Seasons rather than just one, and then all three Doubling Seasons will be on the battlefield when the +1/+1 counters are added, which means rather than just six +1/+1 counters, each will get 48!
Often this will be enough to win the game all by itself. It turns out that making 96 power and toughness for four mana is pretty good, even in 2026 Magic. This said, the Fractal Doubling Season can be blocked and they do die to removal, so if just making two 48/48's with a single Applied Geometry isn't enough to win the game, things can get even crazier...
We've also got Echocasting Symposium, the blue paradigm that for six mana creates a token copy of a creature we control and then we'll get to cast it again at the beginning of each of our first main phases from exile! With a Doubling Season (or three) on the battlefield, Echocasting Symposium becomes incredibly strong, potentially making several copies of our best creature each turn, which sometimes means making even more mana by copying Badgermole Cub or Spider Manifestation (the latter works super well with paradigm since the paradigm spells are cast on our first main phase which means we can float mana with all of our Spider Manifestations and then Echocasting Symposium will untap them when we cast the copy from exile) or if we don't need more mana we can copy our card draw to keep churning through our deck.
For card draw we have two new Secrets of Strixhaven cards. Emeritus of Ideation is one of the most hyped cards from the set, it turns out that being able to cast a literal Ancestral Recall, even one that requires extra steps, is pretty exciting. In our deck, we're mostly playing Emeritus fairly, ramping into it and using it to draw cards, although being able to copy it with Echocasting Symposium, potentially every turn, ends up generating a huge amount of card advantage. Our second card draw spell is Mind into Matter, which for two and X draws us X cards and lets us put a permanent of mana value X or less into play tapped. The idea of Mind into Matter is that we can cast it early like a bad Growth Spiral to ramp (technically you can cast it for x=0 just to put a land into play from our hand, which isn't great, but can be useful in some situations) and then later once we have a bunch of mana we can cast it to refill our hand and put something like Doubling Season into play uncounterable and for free!
The final piece of the puzzle is the forgotten Oko Oko, the Ringleader. The four mana planeswalker does a bunch of things, but the important one for our plan is the ultimate, which creates a token copy of each other nonland permanent we control. Normally building around a planeswalker ultimate is a bad idea because it's hard to get enough loyalty to ultimate a planeswalker, but Doubling Season changes this equation by giving Oko enough loyalty that we can ultimate the very turn we play it! If we can do this after we Applied Geometry a Doubling Season, the end result is a spectacularly huge board where we'll get a ton of copies of all of our nonland permanents, which should be more than enough to win us the game by attacking the following turn, although we can often use this combo to win the game right away assuming we have a Badgermole Cub on the battlefield. If we make a bunch of copies of Badgermole Cub each one will earthbend 1 of our lands, but thanks to our many Doubling Seasons, rather than putting a single counter on a land we'll add a ton of counters. In one game we ended up with two 14,000 powered earthbend lands, which let us kill our opponent the turn we comboed off, but even in less spectacular situations we can usually make a land big enough to voltron kill our opponent so we don't have to pass the turn and risk getting blown out by a wrath or sweeper of some kind!
Wrap Up
And that's the deck. Record-wise, we won somewhere around 50% of the time (I don't really pay super close attention to records on early access day, since it's more about testing and doing cool things than trying to be as spikey as possible), which I guess isn't a surprise since we know that Badgermole Cub is a very powerful card, but the combo itself was super impressive. We did have one game where we made the two massive Doubling Season Fractals only to lose to a Conciliator's Duelist blinking them away, but otherwise the 48/48's were pretty much always enough to win the game. We also just had some absurd games with the deck, like the one where we had access to a literal full hand of Ancestral Recalls in Standard, or the massive 14,000 power lands game! Is casting Applied Geometry on Doubling Season a more effective way to win the game than just casting a Ouroboroid? Probably not, but it is a much more epic and funny way to win! If you like drawing tons of cards and building some of the strangest massive boards imaginable, give Geometric Doubling a shot!
Conclusion
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.
