Against the Odds: With Great Power...Comes Living Forever in Standard
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds. Spider-Man (and Through the Omenpaths) is here, and this week, we're trying to live forever in our new Standard format with the help of With Great Power... or, on Arena, Chosen by Valgavoth. (A quick note: For the rest of the article, I'm just going to use With Great Power... as the card's name, but once you get into the gameplay, it will be Chosen by Valgavoth, which definitely isn't confusing at all.) The idea is pretty simple: stick With Great Power... on an indestructible creature like Ketramose, the New Dawn so all damage that is dealt to us is redirected to the enchanted creature instead. But that creature can never die since it's indestructible, which means we can never die to damage either! How good is With Great Power...]? What are the odds of winning (by never losing) with the combo? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: With Great Power...
The Deck
I've always loved Pariah. Redirecting all the damage dealt to you to a creature is such a cool and adjustable effect, and now we essentially have a Pariah in Standard for the first time in many years. Sure, With Great Power... costs one more mana, but it helps make up for this by also pumping the creature it's attached to, which isn't really important to our deck's plan but is a nice bonus, at least.
The goal of our deck is super simple: Put With Great Power... on an indestructible creature—ideally Ketramose, the New Dawn, but we also have a single Barbed Servitor as a backup in case we can't find Ketramose. Once we get With Great Power... on Ketramose, any damage that would be dealt to us goes to Ketramose. But Ketramose can never die, which means we can never die to damage either! While it is still possible to lose the game even through the lock, to alt win conditions like mill or a "win the game" card, or to drain (sadly, cards that say "lose life" don't count as damage, which means a Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER or Parker Luck can still get us), most decks are looking to win with damage. This means we should be able to live forever as long as we can keep both lock pieces on the battlefield, which means we'll win eventually when our opponent draws their deck and dies to milling out!
Two other important cards help support the combo. First is Restoration Magic. While it might seem a bit weird to need to protect a creature like Ketramose, the New Dawn that is already indestructible, bounce spells like Into the Flood Maw or exile removal like Ride's End can still break our opponent out of the lock. Plus, even if our opponent can't kill Ketramose, they can use enchantment removal to kill With Great Power... itself. Restoration Magic solves this problem for just a single mana by giving any permanent hexproof and indestructible. And if we get enough mana, we can even gain some life by tiering it. Meanwhile, Feldon's Cane is just a one-of to solve a very specific (and maybe not even real, but more on this later...) problem: milling out. If we can keep the lock on the table, we may end up in a situation where we can't kill our opponent but our opponent also can't kill us, which means whoever runs out of cards first and draws on an empty library will lose. Since Ketramose, the New Dawn draws a ton of cards once it gets going, it's very possible that we may run out of cards first. But Feldon's Cane fixes this by shuffling our graveyard back into our library, which should ensure that our opponent dies to milling, not us!
The rest of the deck is basically Mazemind Tome for card draw and filtering, a bunch of exile-based removal to deal with our opponent's threats and trigger Ketramose, the New Dawn, and Deadly Cover-Up as a wrath. Deadly Cover-Up specifically is really strong in the deck thanks to its collect evidence ability to exile all copies of a card in our opponent's graveyard from their hand and deck. I like to think of this deck as similar to Lantern Control in Modern. Our goal is to set up a lock and then make sure to cut our opponent out of any outs to that lock. Deadly Cover-Up helps support this plan in two ways. First, just being able to look through our opponent's deck is huge since it lets us know how many answers to With Great Power... or Ketramose our opponent has access to, if any. Second, being able to exile all copies of something is a great way to get rid of things like Scrapshooter or Summon: Bahamut that could otherwise answer our combo!
Conclusion
Record-wise, we finished slightly under a 50% win rate with the deck, although the record doesn't really matter all that much since we were playing on early-access day. While the lock is pretty hilarious and some opponents were just straight up drawing dead to it, the deck can also be a bit slow and clunky if we don't draw Ketramose, the New Dawn or With Great Power.... Really, though, my biggest disappointment with the deck is that once we got the lock set up, our opponent usually died within a couple of turns, either by scooping in frustration or because it turns out that a 6/6 Ketramose, the New Dawn is actually a pretty good way to get the opponent's life total to zero. I considered not attacking to keep our opponent alive, but that just felt wrong. Regardless, we never had the infamous 60-turn game where we won by shuffling our graveyard back in with Feldon's Cane to make our opponent mill out. Still, we got to see that With Great Power... comes the ability to never die to damage in Standard, which is pretty sweet!
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.
