Against the Odds: Massacre Girl (Standard)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! A little while ago, we were streaming and played against someone running a Massacre Girl, Known Killer deck, and we ended up getting crushed. Chat said we needed to build a Massacre Girl deck, so that's what we're doing today! What are the odds of winning by snowballing Massacre Girl, Known Killer in Standard with the help of a bunch of strange –X/–X removal spells? Let's find out on today's Against the Odds!
Against the Odds: Massacre Girl
Discussion
Massacre Girl, Known Killer is an interesting card. As a four-mana 4/4 menace, it has decent stats, and more importantly, it has two potentially powerful abilities: giving all of our creatures wither and making it so whenever a creature an opponent controls dies, we get to draw a card if its toughness was less than 1 (which mostly means it died in combat thanks to Massacre Girl's wither or died to a removal spell that gives the creature –X/–X). Our deck's goal today is to try to snowball these abilities to generate a huge amount of card advantage until we eventually overwhelm our opponent and win the game!
Our primary plan for this is using a bunch of odd removal spells that give a creature –X/–X. If any of these cards kill a creature, we get to also draw a card if we have Massacre Girl, Known Killer on the battlefield. Perhaps my favorite card of the bunch of Bloodline Culling. Boros Convoke is one of the most popular decks in Standard at the moment, and Bloodline Culling is hilarious in the matchup since it can wipe away an entire board full of tokens at instant speed for three mana, which can also generate an absurd amount of card advantage with Massacre Girl. Meanwhile, we can use the other mode in other matchups to kill bigger threats like Sheoldred, Aclazotz, and friends!
The primary plan of our deck is to chain these cards together with Massacre Girl on the battlefield—we cast one to kill something, which will (hopefully) draw us more removal, which lets us kill more creatures to draw more cards. Eventually, our opponent will be left with an empty board while we'll have a hand full of cards to close out the game!
The other thing that Massacre Girl, Known Killer does is give our creatures wither, which does two things. First, it allows us to chump attack our small creatures into bigger threats. Sure, our opponent can block our Tenacious Underdog with their Sheoldred, and our creature will die, but it will also shrink significantly thanks to wither from Massacre Girl. This means on the next turn, we should be able to attack through it or, even better, kill it with our removal. The second thing the wither ability does is make it so that if one of our opponent's creatures dies in combat, they'll trigger Massacre Girl, Known Killer to draw us a card, giving us another way to snowball our namesake four-drop to victory!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we ended up 4-4 with the deck for a 50% match-win rate. More importantly, we got to see the power of Massacre Girl, Known Killer! While Massacre Girl's power is somewhat dependent on our opponent's deck and them having creatures we can kill to draw cards, at her best, we got to see some games where Massacre Girl would come down and then refill our hand following turn by drawing us seven cards! While it does require playing some janky removal spells to power up the mythic, in general, these spells were still pretty powerful, even if they aren't especially popular in Standard! If you want to be aggressive while still drawing oodles of cards, Massacre Girl, Known Killer just might be the Standard card for you!
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.
