Against the Odds: 16 Goyfs (Historic)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Recently, Wizards released a couple of new Anthologies on Arena, which included some pretty spicy cards, including two new Goyfs in Barrowgoyf and Pyrogoyf! As such, we're heading to Historic today, for the first time in a while, to play 16 Goyfs! The idea is to overload on as many Goyfs as possible, then play a mostly even split of other card types to help power up our Goyfs once they hit the graveyard, and trust that our big Lhurgoyf beaters will get the job done! How many Goyfs does it take to win in Pioneer? How strong are new additions Barrowgoyf and Pyrogoyf? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: 16 Goyfs
The Deck
There was a time not that long ago when Tarmogoyf was considered among the best and certainly most iconic creatures in all of Magic. It was one of the best cards in Modern, a Legacy staple, and, at one point, over $200 a copy! In more recent years, though, the two-drop has fallen on hard times. Today, it's certainly not the best creature in any format, and rather than $200, it's more like $8 a copy. As a result, Wizards decided to juice up Goyfs a little bit in Modern Horizons 3.
In the main MH3 set, we got Nethergoyf, which is honestly the worst of our 16 Goyfs just because it only cares about cards in our graveyard, which makes it harder to grow. But it's often a one-mana 2/3 or 3/4, which isn't bad, especially once you toss in some Goyf synergies.
More importantly, we got Barrowgoyf and Pyrogoyf in the Modern Horizons 3 Commander precons, which might be the strongest Goyfs ever printed. Barrowgoyf is literally Tarmogoyf, but it's three mana and black. Oh yeah, and it also gets deathtouch, lifelink, and a damage trigger that fills our graveyard and digs for more Goyfs. It's a super-strong standalone card and even better in a deck full of Goyfs that really like having a graveyard full of cards to grow the Goyfs. Meanwhile, [[Pyrogoyf] is our finisher. It's a four-mana red Tarmogoyf that lets itself and any other Lhurgoyf deal damage equal to its power to any target when it enters. This not only lets us snipe annoying creatures on our opponent's side of the battlefield but also lets us burn our opponent out of the game directly as we play our other Goyfs. In the late game, it's pretty easy to have our Goyfs end up with five or six power, which means we don't need to play many Goyfs to kill our opponent with direct damage once Pyrogoyf hits the battlefield!
The rest of our main deck is pretty funny. We're essentially a Tarmogoyf tribal deck, so how can we power up our 16 Goyfs best? Because Goyfs want different card types in the graveyard, the best way of doing this is by playing a mixture of card types. So, we have exactly one planeswalker, one instant, one sorcery, one artifact, and one enchantment (along with lands, of course) to try to maximize our Goyfs' power. For a planeswalker, we have Wrenn and Six, which is a bit awkward in Historic because real fetch lands are banned. But thanks to Prismatic Vista, Fabled Passage, and cycling lands like Tranquil Thicket, it's still a very powerful card-advantage engine.
For our artifact and enchantment, we have a bunch of card draw and filtering, with The One Ring to draw even more Goyfs and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker to rummage cards into our graveyard to grow our Goyfs.
Finally, we have some interaction in Fatal Push (which is especially good in our deck thanks to all of our fetch lands and Wrenn and Six making it easy to trigger revolt) and Thoughtseize, which is great with Goyfs since it ends up putting two cards into the graveyard while also picking apart our opponent's hand and making sure they don't have removal to kill our Goyfs.
Wrap-Up
First off, why Historic rather than Timeless? While I'm a Timeless fan (in fact, this is the first time I've played Historic since Timeless was released like two years ago), this deck specifically seems better suited for Historic, just because Timeless seems too fast and unfair for a midrange deck like Tarmogoyf Tribal.
The good news is that Goyfs seem pretty strong in Historic! We went 7-3 with the deck in Diamond on Arena, which is a super-solid record. The new Goyfs are really, really good. Pyrogoyf won us a ton of games out of nowhere, and Barrowgoyfs combo of lifelink and card advantage makes it solid against both aggro and control. More importantly, we played a ton of Goyfs, which was our overall goal for the day. This included a game where we managed to get all four at the same time, which was pretty hilarious! If you are a fan of Tarmogoyf but feel jaded by our hero's fall from prominence, give 16 Goyfs a shot! Maybe all Tarmogoyf needed was a few friends to help it along the way!
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.
