Against the Odds: I Built a Deck to Never Lose to Prowess (Standard)

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! One thing people have asked me about lately is what a deck would look like if it was only focused on beating the monster of Standard: Izzet Prowess. So today our goal is simple: build a deck that never loses to Prowess, regardless of how it performs in other matchups. Thankfully, I've been wanting to build a deck around various Elspeths and Deification, to make the Elspeths impossible to kill, and the two plans happen to work perfectly together! Our deck today is overloaded with anti-Prowess cards ranging from High Noon to Temporary Lockdown to Authority of the Consuls to make sure aggro can't do much of anything, and then our unkillable Elspeths come down to close out the game! Can the plan work? Will we beat Prowess? Is Deification a playable card thanks to multiple powerful Elspeths in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!

Against the Odds: Elsepth Deification

Wrap Up

So did the plan work? Mostly. The good news is that we did manage to never lose to Prowess, going 4-0 across our matches, which is great! The bad news is that overall we won just 37% of the time, which I guess means that if the goal is to have a positive overall record just beating Prowess isn't enough if we lose a big percentage of our other matches to control and midrange. As far as the Elspeth Deification plan, it was a bit hit or miss. We had some games where it was hilarious, with our Elspeths being unkillable thanks to Deification, but we also had games where we'd draw Deification without an Elspeth, and it's basically a dead card that does nothing. Basically, Elspeth Deification was powerful when it worked, but overall a bit inconsistent.

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.