Against the Odds: Meek Attack (Lorwyn Eclipsed Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week we're heading to our new Standard format to play the sweetest enchantment of Lorwyn Eclipsed: Meek Attack! At first glance Meek Attack looks like a bad Sneak Attack thanks to its "total power and toughness of five or less" restriction seemingly limiting it to cheating small creatures into play, but we have some tricks to get around that, with the end result being a deck that can potentially Meek Attack essentially our entire deck into play on a single turn! What are the odds of winning with Meek Attack in Standard? What are the best things to cheat into play with the enchantment? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Meek Attack
The Deck
Our deck today is built around Meek Attack, our new Sneak Attack that's limited to cheating creatures with total power and toughness of five or less into play, although as I mentioned before, we have some sweet tricks to get around this restriction.
Step one for our deck is getting Meek Attack with enough mana to activate it once or twice on the battlefield as quickly as possible, which means in the early game we're mostly ramping with Llanowar Elves, Gene Pollinator and Badgermole Cub. If you think about Meek Attack, the sweet spots mana wise are really five and seven, because ideally we'll be able to play Meek Attack and activate it in the same turn to dodge our opponent's interaction. Five mana lets us play Meek Attack and activate it once, while seven mana lets us do it twice, and our mana dorks let us get to these numbers as quickly as possible.
Oddly, the next step is making our lands enter untapped, which isn't exactly intuitive, but will make sense in a minute once we talk about our finishers and how we win the game. For this we have Spelunking and a single The Wandering Minstrel which we can tutor up with Formidable Speaker when we need it.
So why do we need our lands to enter untapped and what are we looking to cheat into play with Meek Attack? We have two big finishers. First we have Famished Worldsire, an eight mana 0/0 that devours 3 lands when it enters, which means it's often a 15/15 or even a 21/21, depending on how many lands we have on the battlefield, and then lets us look at the top x cards of our library where x is its power and put all the lands into play tapped (which is where Spelunking and The Wandering Minstrel come in). Famished Worldsire is always the creature we want to Meek Attack into play first, although the real goal of our deck is to Meek Attack multiple things in one turn.
Our second Meek Attack target is Prime Speaker Zegana, which is a 1/1 but enters with +1/+1 counters equal to the greatest power of other creatures we control and then draws cards equal to its power. What this means in practice is that we can Meek Attack Famished Worldsire into play as something like a 15/15 or more, use it to put a bunch of lands into play (ideally untapped thanks to Spelunking) and then use that mana to Meek Attack Prime Speaker Zegana into play to draw 16 cards, which should find us more copies of Famished Worldsire and more copies of Prime Speaker Zegana.
Even if we get unlucky and whiff on drawing another Famished Worldsire or Prime Speaker Zegana that's fine, because we're playing a ton of tutors to find them in Formidable Speaker and Fierce Empath, either of which can find our two big finishers.
Anyway, back to the combo turn: once we cheat a Famished Worldsire into play and then a Prime Speaker Zegana to draw a ton of cards, we should be able to Meek Attack essentially our entire deck into play. We can use another Prime Speaker Zegana to draw most of the rest of our deck and then cheat in three more massive Famished Worldsires (along with random Badgermole Cubs and such), giving us something like 100 hasty power split up between a bunch of bodies to beat down and win the game!
Wrap Up
Record wise we went 9-7 with the deck for a 56% match win percentage, which is pretty solid for an Against the Odds deck. More importantly, the deck did some spectacular things! We had a bunch of games where we essentially Meek Attacked our entire deck into play, and won with some massive Famished Worldsire and Prime Speaker Zegana. In fact, we only had a single game where we "did the thing" and still lost, and that was against Simic Spew where our opponent managed to have so many chump blockers that they managed to block all of our massive finishers (which is the one downside of our finishers, that they have no evasion), although overall this wasn't really a problem since the combo was good enough to win every other time and we did it a bunch of times. If you decide to try the deck my one piece of advice is to play it patiently. When I first started playing the deck I had a couple of games where I tried to Meek Attack and Famished Worldsire without having the Prime Speaker Zegana and it was never enough to actually win the game. We usually get one shot at our big combo turn, and we need to make it count. As such, rather than trying to mini Meek Attack without all the pieces, it's better to spend the early game developing our mana and tutoring up our combo pieces while we wait to find Meek Attack along with a Famished Worldsire and Prime Speaker Zegana to win the game!
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.
