Against the Odds: I Extinguished All Their Lands (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds. Back in the early days of Magic, powerful land-destruction spells like Sinkhole, Armageddon, and Stone Rain were everywhere. But in more recent years, Wizards has mostly removed the ability to blow up lands from the game. (See: Cityscape Leveler, which can level cities but apparently not a land...) As a result, Extinguisher Battleship blowing up any nonland permanent (and also dealing four damage to each creature) is an oddly exciting card, just because land destruction is so scarce. So, our goal today is simple: prove that Wizards made a mistake by putting land destruction back into Standard by trying to blow up all of our opponent's lands! Is LD back? How good is Extinguisher Battleship? What are the odds of blowing up all of our opponent's lands in Edge of Eternities Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: I Extinguished All Their Lands
The Deck
Extinguisher Battleship is quite the card! While it does cost a ton of mana, when it hits the board, it deals four damage to all creatures and also blows up a noncreature permanent, which, for our purposes, hopefully will be a land! While one Battleship is pretty cool, our goal today is to make an entire fleet of them, which should allow us to blow up all of our opponent's lands and eventually beat our opponent down with a hilariously big board of 10/10 fliers!
Of course, we need to get up to eight mana to cast Extinguisher Battleship for any of this to work, which means we need to do some ramping. For this, we're using a Lander ramp package from Edge of Eternities, in part because I'm curious just how good the plan really is. We have Sami's Curiosity to make a Rampant Growth Lander token; Biomechan Engineer, which does the same thing and also offers some late-game card draw and token production; and Larval Scoutlander, which is especially strong when supported by our other Lander producers since if we can sac a Lander rather than an actual land, we essentially get to double ramp for three mana, which is pretty busted.
We also need to find Extinguisher Battleship and the rest of our combo pieces, so we have Stock Up and Consult the Star Charts for card draw. Ill-Timed Explosion offers some card filtering that can also wrath away our opponent's board. It's especially powerful in our deck since we've got a bunch of expensive cards like Extinguisher Battleship we can discard to maximize its damage in a pinch.
Let's say we find Extinguisher Battleship and get it on the battlefield. How do we turn it into a game-ending, blow-up-all-your-lands combo piece? We have two plans. My favorite is Extravagant Replication, which can copy one of our nonland permanents on our upkeep. If we can get both on the battlefield, we can copy Extinguisher Battleship each turn, blow up another land, and (hopefully) wrath our opponent's board. This will eventually eat away all of our opponent's resources and make it impossible for them to do anything! If we need to speed things up, we also have a couple of copies of Doppelgang, which can make a bunch of copies of Extinguisher Battleship all at once, potentially giving us a one-sided Armageddon that also wraths away our opponent's board for the flawless victory!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we ended up 4-7 with the deck, good for a 36% win percentage. It turns out that the deck is a bit slow and clunky against aggro, especially if we don't draw a bunch of ramp early in the game. The good news is that we got to blow up a ton of lands! While the lock with Extravagant Replication was tricky to set up since getting a six-mana do-nothing enchantment on the battlefield isn't easy and some opponents just blew it up with cards like Get Lost, it was as glorious as I hoped once we finally got it assembled! We also had some absurd Doppelgang games where we managed to make six or more Extinguisher Battleships at once, which felt pretty unbeatable! All in all, the deck didn't feel super competitive—as I mentioned before, it's a bit too slow—but the wins with the deck were incredibly satisfying. There's nothing like getting a flawless victory and blowing up all of our opponent's lands in Standard!
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.
