Wizards of the Kitchentable: TurboFog

When I was in college, my friends and I used to come together on Friday evenings and play Magic at the kitchen-table of whoever was hosting that evening. The evenings pretty much always had the same recipe: play some Legacy while drinking beer. After a few beers, the number of misplays became too high, and we'd switch to casual free-for-all multiplayers. Nowadays, we still try to have these Friday nights together, but since real life has caught up, they are unfortunately far less frequent. However, over these past years, we've created a lot of casual multiplayer decks. In this new article series, I am going to discuss some of these decks. This first instance is posted as trial: since this article is non-finance related, we'd like to know if you enjoy these kind of articles. Meaning that every type of feedback is greatly appreciated!

In our playgroup, we have a few unwritten rules about our multiplayer decks:

• They should be fun. If a deck it too overpowered or too prison-y, it should be amended.
• We adhere to the Legacy ban list. However, occasionally we do allow a card as 1-off from the Legacy ban list, and there's even one deck where we allow a single Unglued card.

For this first article, I figured I'd take a deck I play nowadays myself. It's based on the Turbo Fog archetype we used to see in Standard in 2013. I always thought it was fun to try to make a multiplayer variant. The result I'm playing now is as follows, but it had a few different forms before ending up here.

The idea of the deck is to play artifacts and enchantments that forces players to draw extra cards each turn and making them mill themselves. Cards like Howling Mine and Font of Mythos take care of this, while Rites of Flourishing also makes sure everyone can make extra land drops. Meanwhile, you make sure you can't be attacked by playing Fog-like spells, which you always have, since you're drawing a LOT of cards.

Fogging attacks

The problem in multiplayer, is that you might need multiple fog effects before your next turn. Our playgroup consists of 5 players, so chances are you need more to survive. In the first iteration of the deck, I used to play Orim's Chant, Peace Talks and even Sunstone to make sure I could break attacks. However, that usually left too little mana to play spells during my own turn.

I've always loved and played Island Sanctuary in this deck as a cheap Moat. But it has an upside: I can choose to not draw cards in my turn, and skipping one of them when you have to draw 6 cards, is a reasonable price to pay. I'm allowed to activate it multiple times in my draw step, but honestly, it rarely happens that I don't want to draw cards. In the last iteration of the deck, I've added Chronomantic Escape as recurring anti-attack-tech. If you have all 3, you can never be attacked again (unless someone counters one obviously).

In multiplayer games, it's worth it to play Blunt the Assault and Riot Control. They're a bit more expensive than Fog, but there are usually quite some creatures on the battlefield, making you able to gain a lot of life and survive future attacks.

Constant Mists in combination with Crucible of Worlds makes sure that I can recur this spell a lot if needed. Also, Crucible makes it fine for me to discard lands. Also Moment's Peace is a reusable fog effect.

Winconditions

Our main win condition is to mill everyone, however I don't want to run out of cards myself, so I play a single Emrakul, the Aeons Torn which I can discard once I draw it and shuffle everything back in. Worst case, if someone can't be milled (because of their own Emrakul for example), I could eventually hardcast Emrakul and swing a few times.

The second win condition comes from Waste Not. Since everyone is drawing a lot of cards, they also have to discard a lot of cards, netting me an advantage.

How does it play?

I like this deck. Because everyone is drawing a lot of cards, and making extra land drops, it speeds up the game, but makes games very reactive. Everyone's strategies are deployed faster, and everyone always have the best cards in hand, making games hilarious. Games can become so delightfully absurd that we have to keep two dice in the middle of the table: one indicating the number of cards to draw and the second the number of land drops you can make. The metagame in our group also adjusted to this deck, where all of the sudden decks spawned that focus more on direct damage, rather than attacks, to get around some of the fog effects, the Chronomantic Escapes and Island Sanctuary.

The deck certainly has a fun factor, but also can derail games, since spells are being flung everywhere all the time.

Usually when I play against creature based decks, I have a pretty good matchup. As long as I can draw sufficient cards and find more and more fog effects, I can take a few hits the first few turns while I set up Howling Mines. The deck has some problems against direct damage. I am able to keep some at bay with Riot Control, but usually that isn't enough. Also mass artifact removal is an issue, but not very widely played in our metagame.

Future changes

To be honest, Waste Not is rarely good in the deck. Especially since we're splashing black for it, and people are discarding lands a lot. Currently, I'm considering to remove black altogether from the deck, and splash blue, to be able to play Sphinx's Tutelage and Dictate of Kruphix instead. Since I'm kind of weak against direct damage, I might add one or two Leyline of Sanctity or Witchbane Orb.

What do you think about this deck? Fun? Not fun? Do you think there are better options for future improvements? Let me know on Twitter. Also, I'd love to get feedback on this article and whether you would like to see it turned into a monthly series.