I Challenge You!

There has never been, and likely never will be, a more powerful line of text on a Magic card. Think of the most broken, degenerate, and absurd cards that have ever been printed. TinkerSkullclamp.Yawgmoth's Will. Those cards still aren't better than the actual printed text "You win the game."

Of course, it's never really that easy. To get such a dramatic, powerful, and, well, truly game-endingeffect, you have to jump through some hoops. Usually blazing hoops made from piranha teeth that have winged cobras circling above.

In this case, you just have to pay  and wait until your upkeep.

...and have 200 or more cards in your library.

I received plenty of decklists this week. You'll see them later on—Planeswalker control, Stuffy DollTezzeret, and all kinds of Rancor decks showed up, just to name a few.

But a Battle of Wits? For the princess?! To the death?!?

Challenge accepted.

Battle of Wits decks are a ton of fun because they give you a good excuse to play with a lot of different cards. And hey, sometimes you can just win the game on turn five. Potential Hall of Fame inductee Huey Jensen played a Battle of Wits deck at Grand Prix Milwaukee and said it was one of the most fun decks he had ever played—then promptly made Top 8 of the tournament!

Since the time meddler of Magic 2013 has brought Battle of Wits back to us, players once again have a chance to relive that experience!

How powerful is it this time around? Well, spending so much time just shuffling a deck in our internal playtesting is a poor use of company time. So who knows, maybe it's totally broken. I guess it's time to find out!

Three plucky readers sent me their Battle of Wits decklists. Let's start this week by taking a look over each of them, and then I'll get into the details.

First up, Jack Champagne's take on the archetype:

Add new comment

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <p> <iframe>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.