Long-time readers of my 75% articles will know that I am very fond of cards that say "You win the game" because, as I'm sure you know, when you get those cards to work, you win the game. Occasionally, those cards begin to bore me - Laboratory Maniac has gotten the cold shoulder increasingly over the years, but for the most part, those cards have difficult enough criteria that they're challenging, fun, and most of the time they reward you for things you were trying to do anyway. I think there are quite a few cards in the most recent set that help you achieve those objectives and I want to talk about them and the kind of shell I think they fit into. Also, there is a new "You win the game" card in the set and it's useful to talk about the older cards that synergize with it. Let's get started, shall we?

Simic Ascendancy

There are a lot of counter-based decks like Pir and Toothy, Vorel of the Hull Clade, Animar, Soul of Elements and Atraxa, that Simic Ascendancy can be a very potent win condition for. However, it can also be a source of +1/+1 counters if your deck isn't spitting out the cards you need. I think Ramos, Dragon Engine is a good destination for this, and it pays to look beyond decks that use counters in a typical manner. What about Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca decks? The Mimeoplasm? Experiment Kraj? There are a lot of potential homes for Simic Ascendancy and winning the game with its 20 growth counter clause is difficult, disruptable, broadcast in advance, fair, slow (sometimes) and fun. If you are new to reading about 75% and see some incongruity with an ethos you thought was supposed to be "fair" and discourage "feelbads" then just know it's a bit more nuanced than that and we not only embrace, but steer hard into cards that have "you win the game" clauses on them.

Fathom Mage - Pay two mana to put a counter on Mage, grow a bruiser, draw a card and put a counter back on Simic Ascendancy? In a deck with a lot of countermagic to protect your Ascendancy, drawing extra cards keeps your hand full to protect your investment and there are lots of ways to make creatures with counters on them trample or be unblockable, making Mage less a Mage and more a Fathom Hydra.

Forgotten Ancient - Why rely on your own deck to give you occasion to put counters on creatures with Simic Ascendancy? With Taurean Waller over here, you can get a trigger every time they play a spell. They won't enjoy that.

Rishkar, Peema Renegade - Any of your creatures with static abilities or which you don't necessarily want to involve in combat can get additional utility with Rishkar, encouraging you to distribute counters far and wide. Don't leave home without him.

Sage of Hours - This may draw some heat, but 10 mana for an extra turn is a good rate in a 2 card combo. Add a third card like Hardened Scales to do it for 40% less mana.

Crystalline Crawler - In a mana-hungry deck like this, being able to turn counters back into mana is great. If you can add an extra counter, you can use two mana from Crawler and only have to cough up one mana to put two counters back on and repeat until you have 20 counters on Ascendancy. That's nifty.

Are you getting some brewing ideas going? Ascendancy doesn't have to be a boring Atraxa staple - with much more exciting shells for the deck like Ezuri, Claw of Progress or Kumena, you have a lot of options and the cards that synergize with the rest of the deck also synergize with Simic Ascendancy. This means this card rewards you for what you were doing already, and that's a great card to have in your deck.

Smothering Tithe

Tithe is one of my favorite Magic cards to come along in a long time. Even as new copies get busted in packs by players, opened in drafts and rooted out of store inventories, the price of the foils seem steady-ish. I'm reminded of Anointed Procession and it's good to see White get those two cards plus Divine Visitation for Commander players to be excited about for years to come. Tithe isn't a card that wins the game on its own, but it does fuel quite a few of them.

Revel in Riches - Revel is a great card in its own right and while Tithe doesn't directly synergize, it builds a pile that Revel is also building and once that pile is high enough, the game is over and you're the victor. MaRo revealed that Treasure tokens are "deciduous" which means they're not evergreen but they will pop up from time to time meaning Smothering Tithe and Revel both have the chance to interact with new cards in the future. Tithe punishes them for drawing a lot of cards and if your deck with both of these cards is Orzhov-colored, you can't do much to force them to draw (Teferi's Puzzle Box, maybe) but Tithe is still a great source of mana and people are very unlikely to pay the tithe early. You should slam this as early as you can when you can and let that plunder accumulate, or use the mana to windmill more nasty enchantments like Grave Pact and Necropotence to make sure you are so far ahead you don't even need Revel in Riches to win. This pairing has been doing work in my Teysa deck.

Hellkite Tyrant - Hellkite Tyrant rewards you for all artifacts, not necessarily those you have plundered. This means clue tokens, Treasure tokens, the little artifacts you get from the card Diamond Kaleidoscope all work. It's very 75% to steal their stuff, though, and Hellkite Tyrant does double duty as one of the swipers and also the win condition. This deck wants to run another new pet card of mine, Aladdin, to steal artifacts from their side permanently. Tithe is just fine if you don't get any pay-off cards because Boros deck struggle to ramp a little bit and Tithe is a perfect way to put you over the top. If you're running Land Tax type effects (And non-Smothering Tithe to boot) this is a nice supplement. I like winning the game with Hellkite Tyrant and if you have someone drawing a ton of extra cards, Tithe can help you get there in a hurry.

Mechanized Production - Similar to my past deck that included using this to copy a clue token, I think Smothering Tithe can spit out enough value on its own to win via production. You don't need a deck with a ton of cards that generate clue tokens because you basically only need Smothering Tithe. In a deck that can play wheels to make the opponents draw, you are likely to dig deep enough to find your Production and your Tithe, making a two-card combo less silly.

Wilderness Reclamation

Wilderness Reclamation is a bit of a pauper's version of Awakening, but the redundancy will give you a much easier time making sure you have lots of "free" mana. That is, of course, provided you can always tap out and use all of it. One card in particular I thought of was, well... if you know me it's obvious.

Helix Pinnacle - Kruphix, God of Horizons, Omnath, Locus of Mana, and other big mana decks can really use a card like Wilderness Reclamation on top of the effects they have already to keep untapping their lands to feed the mana into Pinnacle. If you have a decent number of lands like you do in my Tatyova deck, which already runs Pinnacle, you can usually get it done in a turn cycle or two, which is handy because you're going to become the table's main focus pretty quickly when you start untapping a whole swath of lands with Pinnacle out.

Angel of Grace

Near-Death Experience -I don't have a ton to say about this one, but setting your life total to exactly one can be very useful with NDE, a card I don't use much but which certain decks like Selenia, Dark Angel and other decks where you pay a lot of life and then play cards like Axis of Mortality or Reverse the Sands. I like that this plus Worship take your life total from any unknown number under 1, which would be hard to dial in, to exactly 1 which is where you need to be. Angel on their combat step right before your turn into untapping and winning is the dream, and if you lay a Near-Death Experience, you best believe you're getting swang at, so come correct and try to cheese them with the angel.

Mirror March

Chance Encounter - I mean, obviously. Still, I would be remiss if I omitted this.

There are plenty more fun cards that win you the game. Biovisionary, Epic Struggle, Mortal Combat, Azor's Elocutors, etc. While none of the cards in the latest set interact with them per se, I think it's worth revisiting this pile of fun, fair and every 75% win conditions to see if our old piles need an update. It will be a long while before I do this again, so keep a list of these cards handy and try to win early and often.

What's your best "You win the game" story? Rite of Replication on Biovisionary? Sower of Temptation to give you the last two creatures you needed for Epic Struggle? Reverse the Sands to win with Test of Endurance? Whatever it was, leave your story in the comments section below and I'll pick the best one and send you a prize. Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next week!