Against the Odds: I Can't Lose the Game, and You Can't Win! (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Standard to see if we can make a board state where we can never lose the game and our opponent can never win, with the help of Herald of Eternal Dawn! The power of Herald of Eternal Dawn is that as long as we can keep it on the battlefield, it's quite literally impossible for us to lose the game, which means all we need to do to win is keep the Angel alive. But can we actually keep the seven-drop on the battlefield forever? What are the odds the plan works? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Herald of Eternal Dawn
Discussion
Our deck's plan is surprisingly simple: get Herald of Eternal Dawn on the battlefield and keep it there forever, which wins us the game by making it so we can never lose (unless our opponent also happens to have a Herald of Eternal Dawn, which is unlikely but theoretically could lead to a game of Magic that would never end). Sooner or later, our opponent will draw their deck and run out of cards, assuming they don't give up and concede first.
But how do we keep the seven-drop on the battlefield forever in our removal-heavy Standard? By getting two copies of Restricted Office // Lecture Hall on the battlefield! Since Lecture Hall gives all of our other permanents hexproof, if we can get two on the battlefield, they'll give each other hexproof, creating a hexproof lock that will keep our opponent from killing our stuff with targeted removal forever (or at least until they draw Nowhere to Run, which is a problem but one we hopefully can solve). Ghostly Dancers is key here since it allows us to unlock Lecture Hall on the cheap (or get it back from our graveyard if it dies).
The problem with the hexproof lock (outside of Nowhere to Run) is that, even with hexproof, Herald of Eternal Dawn can die to a sweeper like Sunfall or a random edict. This is where Three Steps Ahead comes in, giving us a catch-all answer to anything that might kill the Angel through the hexproof lock.
As far as the deck's record goes, we won 41% of the time across nearly 30 games, which isn't a great win rate but also isn't bad for an Against the Odds deck. More importantly, we saw some hilarious Herald of Eternal Dawn wins along the way, winning at negative life or with more than 10 poison counters! The only disappointing part of the deck was that Herald of Eternal Dawn was almost too good. I was imagining games that went on for 40 turns while our opponent couldn't break out of the lock before they finally gave up. But in practice, we usually only needed the lock for a few turns because our opponent just died to Herald of Eternal Dawn beats. I'm sure it would happen eventually in a game where our opponent had big fliers to keep us from attacking with the Angel, but the situation didn't arise once across 29 games, even though we still got some pretty spicy wins with Herald!
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.
