Mastering Armageddon: A Timeless Strategy for Arena Players

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! One of the big surprises of the Secrets of Strixhaven Mystical Archive is that they included card-ref:Armageddon, perhaps the most notorious mass land destruction spell ever made! This will be the first time card-ref:Armageddon has come to Magic Arena, and you know what that means: it's time to teach some Arena Zoomers the power of card-ref:Armageddon! What are the odds of winning with card-ref:Armageddon in Timeless? Will the Arena Zoomers even know what hit them? Let's get to the video and find out!

Against the Odds: card-ref:Armageddon#

The Deck

Over the past few months Richard and I have been working our way through the Best Standard Deck Ever bracket, and our deck today is somewhat inspired by a super old deck from 1995: Erhnam Djinn-card-ref:Armageddon! The idea of Erhnam Djinn-card-ref:Armageddon was to play a bunch of mana dorks to ramp into Erhnam Djinn and then use card-ref:Armageddon to blow up all the lands. The mana dorks would (hopefully) let you function at least a little bit even without any lands, and Erhnam Djinn's big body would let you close out the game in just a few attacks. Our game plan today is surprisingly similar to the deck from 30 years ago, except with a bunch of powerful upgrades!

card-ref:Armageddon is a simple card. In fact, it only has three words of text: "destroy all lands." The challenge of card-ref:Armageddon is figuring out a way to break the card's symmetry, because while blowing up all your opponent's lands is pretty sweet, card-ref:Armageddon will blow up all of your lands as well.

So how do we break the symmetry of card-ref:Armageddon? Our primary plan is to get a bunch of non-land mana sources on the battlefield, so once we blow up all of the lands, we'll be able to cast our spells while our opponent (hopefully) will not! For this, we turn to a bunch of mana dorks, with Birds of Paradise and Ignoble Hierarch starting our curve on turn one and Badgermole Cub throwing all of our mana dorks into overdrive. Badgermole Cub itself is sort of doubly synergistic with card-ref:Armageddon because, along with supporting our mana dork plan, the land that it earthbends will return to the battlefield after card-ref:Armageddon blows it up, giving us another way to keep one of our resources in play even through our mass land destruction plan.

Along the same lines, we have Chrome Mox, which looks a little funny in a Badgermole Cub deck since it doesn't work with Cub, but the artifact gives us another repeatable source of mana and survives the card-ref:Armageddon. While having to exile a card to it is painful, the fast starts it enables make up for this drawback and then some.

The second way we can break the symmetry of card-ref:Armageddon is by making sure that we are ahead on board when we cast it. If we are behind on board because our opponent has big creatures (for example), we quite literally can't cast card-ref:Armageddon, because if we do, our opponent will almost assuredly win the game while we are attempting to rebuild. As such, removal like Lightning Bolt and Swords to Plowshares is especially important to the deck because it allows us to deal with our opponent's creatures to keep the board at parity so we can actually cast our card-ref:Armageddons.

While being at parity when we cast card-ref:Armageddon is fine, since we should be able to rebuild faster than our opponent, ideally we'll be ahead on board when we resolve card-ref:Armageddon, which should mean that we are able to kill our opponent while they are trying to find more lands to play their spells. Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes is our Erhnam Djinn, a four-drop finisher that, if we can stick before card-ref:Armageddon, should be more than enough to close out the game, except way, way better. The planeswalker is essentially a hasty 4/4 for four with the upside of card-ref:Flinging creatures for even more damage and making more Hamster tokens if our original Boo dies somehow. Thanks to our fast mana, we can potentially be casting Minsc & Boo as early as turn two, although really as long as we can get it in play before we card-ref:Armageddon, we're happy.

The final plan we have for breaking the symmetry of card-ref:Armageddon is simply blowing up all the lands and then rebuilding our manabase faster than our opponent. Here Wrenn and Six is key since the two-drop planeswalker lets us return a land from our graveyard to our hand each turn, making it a great way to rebuild our manabase. Even better, we're also playing a playset of Strip Mine, which we can combine with Wrenn and Six to blow up a land each turn, which should make it more or less impossible for our opponent to rebuild after the card-ref:Armageddon.

Rounding out our deck, we have The One Ring, because, well, it's The One Ring. Thanks to our mana dorks and Chrome Mox, we can get it on the battlefield quickly, and the combination of protection and card draw is hard to beat. In some ways, The One Ring is another Wrenn and Six with card-ref:Armageddon in the sense that if we blow up all the lands while we have an active The One Ring, it should be pretty easy to rebuild faster than our opponent thanks to all of the cards we can draw, although really we're just playing it because it's busted.

Finally, we have Voice of Victory, which is our attempt to solve one of card-ref:Armageddon's biggest issues: as a sorcery, it's super easy to counter. Alongside card-ref:Armageddon in the Secrets of Strixhaven Mystical Archives, we also got two Legacy staple counterspells coming to Arena for the first time in card-ref:Daze and Force of Will, and both cards are everywhere in Timeless right now. Voice of Victory keeps our opponent from casting spells during our turn, making it a great way to ensure that our card-ref:Armageddon will resolve even if our opponent is sitting on a hand full of free counterspells.

Wrap Up#

Record-wise, our card-ref:Armageddon deck did surprisingly well. We went 6-3 for a 67% win percentage, although not all of those wins came from card-ref:Armageddon itself. While we did have some great card-ref:Armageddon games, including using it to beat Dark Depths and getting some salty scoops from suddenly landless Arena Zoomers, we also had some games where we drew card-ref:Armageddon and couldn't cast it without losing the game. It can also be a bit matchup dependent; if our opponent happens to be playing Chrome Mox or mana dorks, it's possible that they'll be able to function even through card-ref:Armageddon.

Overall though, the plan worked the way we hoped, with the mana dorks being a great way to break card-ref:Armageddon's symmetry and the planeswalkers being great finishers, especially once we can blow up all the lands. I was also shocked at how strong Badgermole Cub felt in Timeless. While the card is obviously busted in Standard, it felt like it could keep up in Arena's most broken format, which I wasn't really expecting.

Speaking of Timeless, Secrets of Strixhaven seems likely to bring the biggest shakeup the format has ever seen. So many of our opponents were playing card-ref:Daze and Force of Will that I think we might see the entire metagame shift to look more like Legacy, where a huge percentage of decks are running Force of Will, card-ref:Brainstorm, and to a lesser extent card-ref:Daze, and then as long as you are playing the blue package, you can fill out the rest of your deck with pretty much whatever you want. I'd be surprised if Force of Will wasn't the most played card in the format a month or two from now, or at the very least in the top three, so if you haven't played Timeless in a minute, be prepared for the format to look a lot different the next time you log in!

Conclusion#

Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments.