Hello everyone! Welcome back to The Magic Hole. We are once again dipping our toes into the Explorer format. The Explorer format has slowed down a bit after the banning of Winota a few weeks back. With the big bad of Explorer being banned, what doors does that open for silly little combo players like me?
Well, Transmogrify has a text box that stimulates the part of my mind that is responsible for shenanigans. And not the cheeky, fun shenanigans either. The type of shenanigans that leads to a turn three Agent of Treachery. You might find yourself asking how you yourself can achieve such a degenerate feat. And I’m here to tell you it's pretty simple, really.
Transmogrify allows us to exile a creature and that creature's controller reveals cards from the top of their library until they reveal a creature, and then they put that onto the battlefield. So, naturally we are only running one creature, and that's Agent of Treachery. So how do we exile a creature if we only have the Agent? Cards like Courier’s Briefcase. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, and Esika’s Chariot make sure we have a creature token on the battlefield to exile to Transmogrify. We also have some extra backup in the creature department with our 2 man-lands Lair of the Hydra and Den of the Bugbear. These come in real handy if our board got wiped and we have nothing to Transmogrify, but they also just add value to our beatdown plan if things go really south.
It's also worth talking about Shark Typhoon as a finisher as well, of course we can cycle it to get a creature, but we can also just slam it for its six mana cost, and since almost all of our spells are non-creatures, we can make a huge army of flying sharks. What a way to lose a game of Magic. Getting beat down by a (hilarious) joke card all while I’m stealing literally ALL of your permanents.
So we make tokens, turn those tokens into our opponents worst nightmare, and then what? Just swing in with our opponents cool stuff? I guess that could be the plan, but why stop there? After bathing in the tears of our opponents, it's time to really kick things into gear. One permanent is not enough for me, so once our Fable of the Mirror-Breaker flips, we start copying our Agent of Treachery with Reflection of Kiki-Jiki. Every turn we get to steal a permanent from our opponent. And if things go really well, we’re copying those tokens with Esika’s Chariot. Once the dust settles, we will have all of our opponents permanents and will be on the way to a perfect game.
We posted an impressive 5-2 in the gameplay footage. The first two games were rough, but we went on an absolutely crazy run at the end. The deck could definitely use some improvements. Croaking Counterpart is definitely not optimal, but I’m going all in on the ‘copy Agent of Treachery at all costs’ plan. Don’t let me be a bad influence though, if you decide to run this deck it can definitely go. One thing is for certain however, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is an absolute house in this deck. It's very good on its own, but does literally everything this deck wants it to do. The Reflection is great, it makes an early token that can ramp us, and helps us filter through our deck to find our combo pieces.
Thank you all for hanging out in The Magic Hole! Don’t forget to check out the gameplay footage on YouTube and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Have a great week and I’ll see you next time!
