MTG Salvation

I've been toying with Battle of Wits in a variety of formats for some years, and generally I feel that it gets a harsher reputation than it deserves. Before we get to the list, I want to just get some potential misconceptions out of the way:

1. It is definitely possible to upscale to this deck size while having a reasonably cohesive plan. This build was Scapeshift-Ramp, but I've also had success in testing with Battle of Wits variants of Melira-Company, Grixis Control, and Esper Control. I think that Scapeshift has been the best of the group so far though. The key is to just think of the deck as a normal deck multiplied by four. If you have enough extra "duplicate" pieces available, you can maintain ratios. 240 cards has been the sweet spot in my experience, both for the ease of deck design, and as a size that does not really put you at risk of turning off Battle.

2. While it is possible to build competitive versions of decks at the 240 card size, there are differences from normal Magic. Most importantly, while the average draws are equal across sizes, the tails of the distribution grow significantly longer as you increase deck size. You have a hundred lands and one hundred and forty non-lands; all your worst nightmares on mana-screw and mana-flood have not even scratched the surface of what's possible. This sculpts deck-building decisions in that you need to design with a greater eye to being able to ride out flood or screw than a normal 60-card deck would. This mindset can be seen in variety of build choices in the deck below.

3. Shuffling is hell. There have been articles in the past talking about how it is impossible to play Battle of Wits at Comp REL and Pro REL. I have experience playing at those levels and am a judge as well, and with that knowledge base, I think that the articles mostly have it right. The burden on shuffling is prohibitive. My method on shuffling was this: Shuffle the section of the deck that I saw, then split it into four stacks. Split the still-unknown part of the deck onto those four stacks. Shuffle each of the four stacks independently. Take one of those stacks, split it into four new stacks, then split each of the remaining three stacks into the four new stacks. Shuffle each stack independently. Stack the four stacks on top of eachother, present to opponent. This is what is required to fully randomize the deck. Notice that it is an 8x multiplier on shuffling, AND that's before you consider how labouriously long the search through the deck for the card [likely singleton] you just found was. If you are BLAZINGLY fast, you can play this at CompREL, but good luck with that. I was extremely conscientious of time, shortcut my fetches aggressively (I would say "Crack misty, fetch untapped breeding pool, cast rampant growth, find basic plains, go." and then execute the actual physical actions while play continued) and played very very fast to compensate for this time sink. If I were playing a normal deck at this speed, I'd have finished with 35+ minutes on the clock every round. As it was, I had 15-20 minutes on the clock at the end of every round and probably would still have received slow play warnings at higher rules enforcement levels simply due to the amount of time searches could take. These time considerations also make Battle of Wits an even more problematic issue in my main constructed format, Legacy, due to the longer and more interactive games there compared to Modern.

4. In line with the shuffling, I think the deck needs to be designed to not Sideboard. I've built it in the past with sideboards of tutorable bullets, and it's just not effective enough to be worth the time searching for the card you need to pull out. A friend pushed me to a Glittering Wish sideboard and it's both played better in general and greatly improved the time issue with boarding (now you can just start shuffling up the moment the prior game ends, and hopefully be ready by the time they finish boarding).

4. I do not think Battle of Wits can be done effectively on a budget. This is a deck style with which to experiment if you have a collection that stretches back well over a decade or if you have an extremely gracious friend who is okay with you borrowing massive amounts of cards.

5. Be careful with sleeves. More than any other deck, you want to have sleeves that stop sliding around after a short break-in (240 double-sleeved cards falls over quite easily after first sleeving) but are resilient with no markings after a lot of play (you do not want to resleeve this kind of thing. I opted for Dragonshield Matte Black with KMC perfect fits, but if you're taking this on yourself, I'm sure that you have sleeves that you have experience with and like for the purpose.


Anyway, here's the deck:


I'll happily discuss any card choices (and I get that a number are probably head-scratchers), but due to list size, I'm not going to try to do so absent questions.

Deck looks awesome and really fun to play. Yeah I don't like all the shuffle effects, seems like it could be a great deck online though.

I like the idea, but as an avid large deck scapeshift toolbox player I find a couple things wrong with your list.

You want at least 1 Bring to Light in the side to fetch from glittering wish, also you have a bunch of random cards that don't really work with the strategy of the deck.

I have been working on a deck for the past year or so and both our decks have a lot of similarities. The deck has a lot of inspiration from the 150card scapeshift deck that won the poro-tour MTGtop8 poro tour. After doing massive amount of research, playtesting, data analyzing, and of course taking channel fireballs article into consideration this is the list that I have came up with. Main key points about the deck vs a battle of wits deck is, it's consistent as well as easier to shuffle. My win rate from play testing has been really high, and is very resilient against hate cards. As for speed for the deck, it's not as fast as R/G scapeshift, but similar pace as a BTL scapeshift list.

I plan on making a primer to showcase the deck as well as place to dump all of my information and research that I have done.

The most fun thing I find about my list is that you have to really know and understand the list. You're trying to assemble multiple sides of a big puzzle at the same time while holding off vultures trying to win by turn 2 lol



Obviously there are multiple combo win conditions in the deck and I will go through them in a different post if people are interested in it.

Looks interesting. I look forward to seeing your thread aretherk. But let's not loose focus on this. The idea of doing what you are doing in your smaller deck while also having an I win card is pretty awesome.Both have merits.

Quote from megatog201 »

Deck looks awesome and really fun to play. Yeah I don't like all the shuffle effects, seems like it could be a great deck online though.

Yeah, I think online is a much better place to run this (assuming the client can handle it -- I know in the past it used to have some trouble). Shuffling really sucks for this in paper.

Quote from Aretherk »

I like the idea, but as an avid large deck scapeshift toolbox player I find a couple things wrong with your list.

You want at least 1 Bring to Light in the side to fetch from glittering wish, also you have a bunch of random cards that don't really work with the strategy of the deck.

I have been working on a deck for the past year or so and both our decks have a lot of similarities. The deck has a lot of inspiration from the 150card scapeshift deck that won the poro-tour MTGtop8 poro tour. After doing massive amount of research, playtesting, data analyzing, and of course taking channel fireballs article into consideration this is the list that I have came up with. Main key points about the deck vs a battle of wits deck is, it's consistent as well as easier to shuffle. My win rate from play testing has been really high, and is very resilient against hate cards. As for speed for the deck, it's not as fast as R/G scapeshift, but similar pace as a BTL scapeshift list.

Glittering Wish for Bring to Light has generally not been attractive to me. If I'm looking for a combo kill with a ton of mana off a Glittering Wish, I can just get wargate, which is a more useful spell anyway, since it makes all glittering wishes capable of curving into T3 ramp or of being a 5 mana land destruction spell or grave hate. I'd rather have Bring to Light be a more efficient tutor in the maindeck and then just overpay a little more if I really am in the position to go for a straight kill from Wish. If I change my mind in the future, I'll just swap a MB Bring to Light with the SB Wargate.

I saw that list when it attained success. More power to the pilot, but I don't think it's really related to this. I get that it's oversized, but I think that the difference of 90 cards really results in a major difference of potential construction styles and limits the effectiveness of all-in strategies. Additionally, I've got no interest in traumatizing myself with Battle of Wits. If I'm playing above 60 or 61 cards, I need a real selling point, and to throw away the potential for a Battle Kill for a probablistic flashback kill doesn't seem great to me.

Battle of Wits functions in a number of strange niches. You're trying to cast a 5 mana spell in a competitive format, so outside of Standard, that mean you must be ramp, control, or rather optimistic midrange. Past builds of this ran Remand and Mana Leak, but I found too often you had to decide between hoping they played something relevant or advancing your board. I ended up cutting them and focusing on what the deck can do well. It can ramp well and cast good mid-high cost threats and present a formidable grinding strategy. There is some natural toolboxing, but it needs to be viewed in the context of the rest of the strategy. Yes, you got the "I win" buttons, but at 240 cards, you can't reliably go all-in on them.

If you have any specific comments or questions on cards that look random, by all means ask, but I don't think I can interpret, clarify, or respond to your assertion of issues with the list when your statement remains so broad.

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Unrelated to the above, I made a slight tweak to the above list (dropping thundermaw, upping goblin dark-dwellers to the full playset). Testing it without life from the loam.

ExpiredRascals I believe we are going to need a card by card breakdown to really have a good idea of how strong this deck can be. 😁😉
Other than that I don't see why you wouldn't want a Bring to Light in the board.having 7 copies of it to win off if in a deck this size seems like a good idea. That effectively gives you 11 scapeshifts.
I've never really been into the scapeshifts decks TBH. What is the minimum number of lands needed to deal 20 damage? And how does that work?

Quote from megatog201 »

ExpiredRascals I believe we are going to need a card by card breakdown to really have a good idea of how strong this deck can be. 😁😉
Other than that I don't see why you wouldn't want a Bring to Light in the board.having 7 copies of it to win off if in a deck this size seems like a good idea. That effectively gives you 11 scapeshifts.
I've never really been into the scapeshifts decks TBH. What is the minimum number of lands needed to deal 20 damage? And how does that work?

Regarding Scapeshift:
7 lands is 18 damage (which is typically lethal in Modern). 8 lands is either 36 or 21 damage, depending on how you fetch.

So breakdown:
The deck doesn't just gun for a scapeshift kill. I don't think that you quite have the density of land-based acceleration to make that the best option. If you think scale this down, we're at the equivalent density of 8.5 land-specific ramp spells in a normal 60 card deck (with maybe an arguable functional 11 due to snapcaster mage, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, and goblin dark-dwellers) -- in this count I am including Hour of Promise and Wargate, but I'm not including Primeval Titan. It's like you built your scapeshift deck and said after Sakura-Tribe Elder and Farseek "well, seems like enough to me". So yeah, you can make it easier to bring to light for Scapeshift, but I don't think that's a powerful enough reason to deny yourself the 4th maindeck bring to light which can efficiently go for cards like Wrath of God or Crumble to Dust when you don't have your lethal land count. Primeval Titan is it's own kill without scapeshift, so I didn't count it in the ramp total since it's not germane to the real question being posed.

Scapeshift may be our best and most common specific kill, but it's not one that is well suited for us going all-in on.

The deck itself hits 5-6 mana quite well, and it's built to be able to stabilize there. You'll notice that there's a lot of very effective threats that play well on defense while being able to hit quite hard. Godo, Bandit Warlord is a great example of this, since he represents 14 damage attack, but also is resilient to removal (no matter what, you probably have a blocker).

Primary kills might be characterized as follows: Scapeshift (including Bring to Light for it), Primeval Titan (note the ability to go for Tolaria West + Simic Growth Chamber, or valakuts, or man-lands), Battle of Wits, and Gifts Ungiven (for Unburial Rites).
Secondary kills are the more dual-purpose cards that are meant to be multifunctional or stabilizing. This includes stuff like Goblin Dark-Dwellers, Thragtusk, Batterskull (and by extension: Godo, Bandit Warlord, and Nahiri, the Harbinger (normally the ultimate fetches Primeval Titan or Inferno Titan).

My interest is in keeping the deck's ability to function in the early-mid game at its best. We're probably not losing the late game to most decks in the format, and we need to get there, which means being as efficient as possible and keeping open to us those toolboxes we do have at affordable rates.

To comment on a couple of the weird cards:
Crumble to Dust and Slaughter Games are concessions to weaknesses against combo decks and decks that can out-ramp us. With 4 maindeck bring to light, these singletons give us some outs (especially slaughter games since it's also available off glittering wish).

Samut, Voice of Dissent is a role-player. She's a vigilant haste threat that is fetchable off Mystical Teachings, Summoner's Pact (and by extension, Tolaria West), and Bring to Light. This is both an out to planeswalkers if they're left undefended (meaning that you can go positive on value compared to just fetching Hour of Devastation with Bring to Light. Her granting haste to everything else hasn't come up too often, just by the nature of being a singleton, but it's been sweet when it does.

Supreme Verdict/Wrath of God/Day of Judgement/Hour of Devastion is mostly just diversification in case you need to Gifts Ungiven for a sweeper. Anger of the Gods, Sweltering Suns, and Engineered Explosives could be included in this group as well (and with them, note that you can gifts for a sweeper that costs no white mana, which sometimes matters).

Walking Ballista is a card that is generically good, but also tutorable off Tolaria West. It's one of the more flexible slots in the deck. It also does a good job of scaling from 2 or 4 mana to larger numbers.

Panglacial Wurm is a concession to the danger of mana flood, especially in a deck this size. This makes a fetchland or ramp spell represent a threat or surprise blocker. The card is not great, but as a singleton in a 240 card list adding resilience and an extra feature to well over 40 other cards? It does its job.

Simic Growth Chamber is there to pair with Tolaria West and Summoner's Pact to allow a Primeval Titan to self-protect via a ready replacement in the way that should be familiar from Amulet Bloom. This comes up more than you'd think.

Summoner's Pact is only a singleton because I've not liked the way it's played out in practice when in multiples in this deck. You're simply not as willing or interested in going all-in on Primeval Titan as Amulet and RG Scapeshift are.

Boreal Shelf et al are there to allow Into the North to fetch duals. Snow lands in general are chosen to enable Into the North, and to a lesser extent, Mouth of Ronom