Friday, August 21, 2020

I Put Ugin, The Spirit Dragon in a Deck and I Feel Like a Criminal

 Weighing in at 8 mana, Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, is not to be trifled with. The colorless planeswalker (I think Karn's the only other one) is one of the profoundly ancient elder dragons (even if he didn't show up in Legends like his twin brother Nicol Bolas) and is one of the most powerful entities in Magic lore.

And when he shows up on your opponent's side of the battlefield, you're going to have a bad time.

Ugin, in this version of him, is a truly nasty lock-down card for control decks. He starts with a whopping 7 loyalty. His first ability is +2: Deal 3 damage to target creature or player. A free lightning bolt (at sorcery speed) every turn and it charges him up? And you get two loyalty? Not bad.

His next ability is the real kicker: -X: exile every permanent with converted mana cost X or less that has at least one color.

So you won't be nuking lands, some artifacts, or Ugin himself, but most other things get swept away.

And remember, he starts at 7 loyalty. So chances are, you're going to be able to more or less erase the board if you want to.

I crafted two copies to toss into my Standard 2021 version of Sultai Ramp (I never really had the original, as I only had one Hydroid Krasis and with Ravnica rotating out of standard, I wasn't about to craft more) and just played against a sort of Boros version of white lifegain, with folks like Heliod and Daxos and a strictly-worse version of Ajani's Pridemate (a human cleric, I believe, that costs the same and works the same but starts at 1/1) and Outlaw's Merriment.

Because it's got black and green and I apparently still want to make Garruk, Cursed Huntsman happen (I happen to have three copies) the initial game was the opponent trying to get past my 2 wolves a turn to take out Garruk before he could get his ultimate (which I never actually wound up doing.) I actually wound up losing the first Garruk, only to play him again after some judicious Extinction Events.

Having more or less stabilized, I eventually got enough mana to cast Ugin, and dear lord did I feel guilty. Setting X to 5 to take out his Baneslayer Angel, I also got Heliod, Outlaw's Merriment, and I think some other, lesser creatures. (My surviving Garruk, at 6, was the only other nonland permanent to survive the slaughter.)

After one more turn of my opponent figuring out how screwed they were, as I had four Garruk wolves and an Escaped Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, they eventually conceded.

So, Ugin.

Generally, when I see this card come out, I just concede. It might not be a literal "I win" card, but it comes damn close. That late in the game, most decks are pretty committed to the Battlefield - you're probably not holding back your central cards by the time people are at 8 mana. And given that you can wipe out nearly every non-land permanent with a cost of 6 or less and still have Ugin up to punch for 3 damage a turn (which then makes it easy for him to do his board-wiping move yet again - I haven't even touched on his ultimate, but do I even need to?) building up at all to recover from that wipe is nearly impossible.

There's not much you can do to stop Ugin - unless you can counter him, he's going to come into play and the player with him can just wipe things. If you have a direct planeswalker killer, it's too late to prevent them from using him once. It's a tool that says that aggro decks basically have 8 turns max to win.

Is it broken? I'm not sure.

In highly competitive Magic, an aggro deck that hasn't won by turn 8 isn't really an aggro deck. But this does seem to really hamstring any kind of midrange deck. Having been on the receiving end of Ugin, I can tell you it doesn't feel great for your entire strategy to be wiped out by a single card.

While Throne of Eldraine had a fair number of artifacts, the growing trend of colorful artifacts means that even an artifact-based deck wouldn't necessarily be able to get around Ugin. (I don't know if or when we're likely to get another artifact-centric set - New Phyrexia seems like a real major event that likely wouldn't come this shortly after War of the Spark, though Kaladesh seems potent enough for a revisit.)

Still, it seems Ugin doesn't hit Oko-levels of insanity, and that 8-mana price tag is pretty rough (though the fact that it's all generic mana means that Ugin can fit in any control deck.) I think this might be just a case of a really powerful character being represented by a very powerful effect.

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