Friday, August 7, 2020

Winota and the Amazing Human and Non-Human Army!

 My strategy in MTG Arena has generally been an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude. I'll see deck archetypes that pop up and do my best to recreate them with wildcards, and then tweak them to my liking.

One that I've seen crop up time and time again is a deck built around Winota, Joiner of Forces, a "how is this not banned" kind of powerful mythic rare, which is probably only not banned because the rest of your deck needs to be kind of funky for her to work properly.

Winota is a 4/4 human warrior for 2WR with the following complicated legend:

Whenever a non-Human creature you control attacks, look at the top six cards of your library. You may put a Human creature card from among them onto the battlefield tapped and attacking. It gains indestructible until end of turn. Put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your library in a random order.

Under ordinary circumstances, one might have one or two non-humans out there, and boom, two new humans.

But there are a couple cards that interact really well with it. For example, spells like Call to Arms or Skyknight Vanguard create Soldier tokens, which, while clearly implied to be human, don't actually have the creature type, and thus will trigger Winota.

I found that Krenko, Tin Street Dodger, is a pretty good token-generator.

Selfless Savior, a 1/1 Dog that you can sacrifice to give another creature indestructible until end of turn, is a great utility player in the deck, allowing Krenko and other high-value but low (at least to start with) toughness attackers to survive delving into the fray.

When working at its best, you go extremely wide, which also makes Embercleave a solid addition to the deck.

The version I have is WBR (I know that it's called Mardu, thanks to Tarkir, but as someone who has gotten into the game again with Ikoria, I think of it as "Savai") and uses General's Enforcer to ensure that Winota, as well as Tajic and Judith from Ravnica will stay in the game. I imagine there might be a more efficient version of the deck that's pure Boros (that I know!) and runs with Alpine Houndmaster and their dogs, though I've found that the dogs on their own in a Mardu/Savai deck kind of crowd out better cards, so I cut them.

The last game I won before my client crashed (as it still does very regularly) was against a pretty standard Heliod life-gain deck (Linden, Steadfast Queen, Ajani's Pridesmate, Inspired Orator, Healer's Hawk - you know this deck) and I found myself at 3 health facing down a 9/9 Healer's Hawk, an activated Heliod, and a 10/10 Pridesmate, and a couple other things, and, figuring that I was doomed, just attacked with everything, which, as it turned out, was just enough for me to deal the 37 damage I needed to win the game.

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