INTRODUCTION
Hello again Old Schoolers! We’re back with a new publication of the #12months12decks challenge. This time we will talk about one of my favorite win conditions: Titania’s Song. I think it’s one of the most elegant old school ways to end alongside milling your opponent’s library, and this time we have both in the same deck!
We could summarize that the strategy consists of stopping the rival’s game and controlling the battlefield thanks to the many artifacts we have to, when the time comes, cast the sweet song of Titania and destroy everything with a withering blow. And it was thanks to the sage advice of my friend Joserra that the deck took a surprising turn, and adding just two cards made it a combo deck with a second win condition. Let’s see everything as a whole.
DISCUSSION
- The first thing we are going to look at is the choice of points, where we find a lot of competition. If something differentiates 7pts Singleton 93/94 Old School, apart from the fact that it´s a singleton format, it´s that you will not be able to put the best cards as you please, but rather you will have to rack your brain to know which cards are to include. The first decision is choosing which colors to play. It´s clear that green has to be one of them because Titania’s Song, the card on which the strategy revolves, is green. If we look at the key card for the second win condition – Power Artifact – we see that it’s blue, so we have the second color. I chose white because it has the best anti-creatures in the format, Balance, Swords to Plowshares and Wrath of God, although we could choose black for Demonic Tutor and The abyss, or red for Fireball and Disintegrate but, as we would have to choose Braingeyser –or so I think– because they no longer give us the points to include all the cards we wanted. With this we already have the colors with which we are going to play: UGW, and among these colors there are many cards on which we can invest the seven points.
- Within the blue we have Timetwister, Control Magic, Mana Drain, etc. But for now we are going to make sure of Braingeyser and Recall, which will be essential in our strategy: 4 points. White offers us Balance and Moat, but we must discard the latter because it invalidates our main win condition, which is to kill with Titania’s Song. Land Tax doesn’t work if our curve is big or we don’t have enough accelerators. We point Balance for one more point, without a doubt one of the best Magic cards. We have spent 5 points. Green gives us Regrowth, Sylvan Library or Channel, all three are very interesting, for now let’s write down Regrowth, since like Recall, the cards in our graveyard will be very important. We have spent six points, we only have one point left… we have to choose well. Let’s take a look at the colorless cards. Traditional Titania Prison decks run Winter Orb for playing multiple Icy Manipulator and Relic Barrier, but here with a copy of each it seems pretty risky, because we’re going to need a lot of free mana to use our artifacts. The jewerly are running out of points, so we are going to move on to the lands, and we find Maze of Ith, Karakas and Mishra’s Workshop, the latter could be a good choice since we play a lot of artifacts. Karakas is good if we have some legend to interact with in the style of Rasputin, Stangg or Hazezon Tamar, but if not, it’s not worth taking it, and we come to Maze of Ith, and here we enter a dilemma, because previously we have left Sylvan Library behind, important draw engine, but the Maze helps us endure those turns until Titania arrives, and here it´s up to each one, the three cards are valid for the strategy but only one can enter, I went with Sylvan Library because it’s a cheap draw engine that hopefully you can take down from second turn, and it pairs well with Mirror Universe, Skull of Orms, Jalum Tome, or Howling Mine, it helps us dig deeper into the deck to find the pieces of the combo. Another option would be to remove Braingeyser and we would have free points, to, for example, include Workshop and Maze, but Braingeyser in this format is God, when your opponent has a card and you draw six, the card advantage it provides is overwhelming and, therefore, if that were not enough, it serves as a finisher with the Power Monolith combo. So we have already configured our points, a decision that as you can see is not a trivial matter, in fact, the game begins here.
- The concept on which the deck is based is to develop our game by accumulating the greatest amount of resources and controlling the battlefield with them, until we play a lethal Titania’s Song, including a second victory condition that allows us –with a combo– to kill our opponent without having to attack him with a creature. You can comb by either milling with Braingeyser, or gaining infinite life with Alabaster Potion, or doing infinite damage with Rocket Launcher. To get to this we need the deck to have elements that help us draw, accelerate, and control. Since we’re only going to have one of each card, we can’t fit two Wrath of God, so recursive cards will be vital. Power Artifact and Titania are both enchantments so Skull of Orms should go into the strategy in case they go to the graveyard. Balance will not only remove creatures from us, but it will also be able to clean the opponent’s hand, because we don’t have to worry about keeping cards in hand, since we don’t play counters, we can develop our game until we draw a Balance and clean the battlefield and hand. imagine a Balance or Wrath of God and then, on the same turn, Titania… let’s see some more tricks:
- Disrupting Scepter is an annoying card for us, but if we have the skull in play we can cancel it, we always raise the same enchantment to the hand in response to its activation and thus draw a new card.
- Ring of Maruf is one of our tutors, and if we copy it with Copy Artifact it can be a double tutor.
- Mirror Universe is a third pseudo-win condition because if we’re short on lives and we manage to trade it in time we might be able to kill with Rocket Launcher or a simple Aeolipile, or even with Mishra’s Factory.
- Referring to the latter, before I said that we don’t have creatures but we do have one, Mishra’s Factory, and I include it for a reason, and that is that there will be times when we have the opponent blocked with Nova Pentacle, and so that he can kill us with a fireball or similar will have to kill its own creatures first and that’s where the factory comes into play, which in these situations can become a creature to be able to redirect the damage with Nova Pentacle.
- Power Artifact doesn’t just give infinite mana with Basalt Monolith, you can also use it on other artifacts like Rocket Launcher. If you have managed to exchange life points with Mirror Universe, the logical thing is that the opponent has less life, and with the Rocket each mana you have counts as a point of damage so if you have many lands you can use it as if it were a Fireball, or even better, because if you perform the Launcher trick you will do double damage. It’s slow, but for the speed of the format it’s fine.
- If you play Weakstone and Bone Flute at the same time you will see how you control the weenies decks, a combination for which the deck earned the nickname «dog-flute deck” (Spanish argot) among the Madrid community.
- If you have Skull of Orms and Chaos Orb or Aeolipile on the table and you’re going to play Copy Artifact, with enough mana you can continuously copy these artifacts and add the enchantment to your hand with the skull every turn.
Possible cards
Drop of Honey, Arboria, Urzatron, Aladdin´s Ring, Amulet of Kroog, Fountain of Youth, Control Magic, Steal Artifact, Counterspell, Desert twister, Flood, Circles, Jade Statue, Knowledge Vault, Meekstone, Ring of Immortals, Ring of Renewal, Stone Calendar, Urza’s Miter, Forcefield, Blue and White Batteries… the list is long, we are going to put the magnifying glass on the most relevant ones.
- I tried Drop of Honey and it didn’t bother me but I don’t think it’s a substitute for The Abyss, because the trigger is on your upkeep there’s always a chance that you’ll be attacked at least once first; I found it slow.
- Arboria isn’t the card we’re looking for to defend ourselves since, since we always have to develop our game, we’re never going to be able to activate it, discarded.
- Fountain of Youth and similars. There are various artifacts that help us gain lives, such as the Fountain, Amulet of Kroog, or Conservatory, these last two go well with Titania, but in the end there was no room for everything, and they have no synergy with Mirror Universe.
- Steal Artifact is an interesting card to try out that works well with the skull.
- Counterspell; at the beginning I played one counter but we can’t be saving mana, we have to use all the mana each turn if necessary, I preferred the plan of developing our game without worrying about what the opponent did, also all these discards can be included in the “sideboard” from Ring of Maruf.
- I prefer to include the circles of protection in that “sideboard” we were talking about, since playing them as a base seems risky to me in the sense that they will be a dead card in the middle of the games.
- Jade Statue was in the first version I played. You can do a lot of shenanigans with it, with Balance and with Wrath of God, but I ended up removing it because all the removals that the opponent left in hand played it them against him, this is an interesting topic to discuss, since we do not have creatures –only one Mishra’s Factory– and the opponent’s draws are going to be worse because each removal he draws will be a dead card, and with it a lost turn. So I decided to take zero creatures for that to happen and I can say that it worked.
- I played Knowledge Vault in the early versions, but I realized that this was not their strategy, since you could have the situation of having one of the combo pieces in your hand and the other under the artifact, and if you were played a removal to the artifact you were «forced» to activate it, so there was always the risk of one of the pieces going to the graveyard. Not for this type of deck.
- Something similar happened with Ring of Renewal, there were times when I couldn’t discard because I was waiting for the next combo piece to combo in a single turn and on top of that it has an expensive activation, so it didn’t work either.
- The mana batteries did work, I found it interesting to be able to accumulate mana and also be an accelerator, and then become a 4/4 with Titania, but I ended up replacing it with Sand Silos because it was more difficult to «destroy».
- Aladdin’s Ring is a card that gave me good results at first and became one more win condition, especially when the monolith combo went down and I didn’t have any of the cards to win in a single turn, its very high cost makes it unplayable in most strategies but here you can give it a try.
Some strategies
- I finally find a deck in which Ring of Maruf works, its cost is high and you will almost always give your opponent a turn before you can use it, since you will need at least twelve mana if you intend to use it in the same turn in the game that enters, but if the opponent does nothing and leaves it on the battlefield, the possibilities are almost endless, and here another factor that I love about this deck comes into play, imagine being able to make the sideboard you want, almost without limit, well that himself offers you this card.
- Some of the cards are alternative cards to the combo, since you cannot search for a card that you already have included in the deck, Fireball, Disintegrate, Stream of Life, for example. Also alternative cards to Wrath of God or Balance, such as The Abyss, Earthquake, etc, or cards against certain colors in particular, such as circles of protection, or Karma. It´s also interesting to be able to search for point cards because the rule allows you to skip the 7pts rule, it´s always interesting to be able to search for any P9 card.
- We have another important tutor who is Transmute Artifact and who will look for an artifact for us; like, of course, Basalt Monolith, which will be our main objective, Chaos Orb, Relic Barrier if we already have the Mine in play, Jayemdae Tome, Icy Manipulator, Aeolipile if we need to scratch those 2 life points, Rocket Launcher if we already have the Power Artifact combo, or Mirror if we see that we need to change life points.
- An important part of the strategy is graveyard retrievers. Reconstruction, Skull of Orms, Regrowth and Recall. We carry all we can. Recall is undoubtedly the best of all as it can take more than one card from the graveyard. The Skull sometimes seems useless because you may not have enchantments in the graveyard but basically it´s there to recover the Titania or the Power Artifact, it can always be used to feed the Jalum Tome or to sacrifice with the Transmute Artifact.
- Deck enemies are mainly decks with red, also the decks with counters or Disenchant can hurt us. Then the deck works very well against control and midrange, unless they play red, which for us is the most dangerous color, that’s why Mirror Universe is important.
- Winter Orb is very annoying, Shahrazad, which is becoming fashionable now, also beats us, Millstone takes away our combo pieces, Shatterstorm blows us up, Dust to Dust does a lot of damage, Manabarbs annihilates us in a couple of turns…
Mana base
- We have 26 mana sources plus Fellwar Stone. They may seem too many, but this deck cannot get stuck, the most important color is white since without it we cannot defend ourselves, but when it comes to kill with our combo, blue is the one we need, that’s why the accumulation land, Sand Silos, is blue. Green, even though it’s the one that gives the deck its name, only has four cards, so we have fewer. I tried the urzatron lands and, although they didn’t bother me, I decided that it was better to have colored lands because they were often more necessary, apart from the fact that of all the times I played them I couldn’t link the urzatron in any game. We also carry the land of rigor, Mishra, Strip Mine and Desert.
Conclusion
If you like to suffer in games and make epic comebacks, this is your deck. Mix of control and combo, with a multitude of rarely played cards, quite spicy, but combined they work perfectly. It can feel like you’re doing nothing the whole game and suddenly you’ve won in one turn, that’s magic. You can see the report they did in the LMOS about the 7pts world championship held in Madrid and in which I made top8 with this list and I won the most spicy winner award that you can see in the photo.
If you want to tell me something you can do it through the comments or on my Instagram account: @retroplayermtg
Until next time!
P.S: the deck is the same as the one I played in the 7pts world championship, the last change of points has not affected it.
Liga Madrileña Old School MTG 