As we continue considering cards which say "you win the game" on them, one jumped out I just had to do. This is the kind of focused trick deck I absolutely love building and can be great fun to have around. When your opponents don't know the deck, they will be stunned when it does its thing; when they do, it becomes this fun race to see if they can beat you through your gameplan. (I have this Purphoros, God of the Forge deck I drag out every once in a while. When I do, the question is always "can we deal 40 damage to him before he makes 20 Creatures?" It's a toss-up most of the time!)

So, what are we up to today? This l'il dude.

This 3/3 for gives us a maximum hand size of 20, and he wants to attack with a friend in order to get both bigger and draw us cards. That's great, but we're really interested in the last bit. Whenever this dude attacks, if he has 20+ counters on it or if we have 20+ cards in Hand, we win. That's it. No combat damage, nothing tricky. He attacks when one of those things is true and poof! We win. I love it.

Now, if I were even more of a prankster, there's a fun deck here where we load the Toad up with every kind of counter we can find in order to trigger his ability. I love the idea of its attacking with a Trample counter, a Vigilance counter, a Verse counter, an Omen counter - all these wild counters from throughout the game. Figuring out how to find him and do that would be a fun puzzle. But today's deck isn't that deck either, because I actually want to try to win with this deck. How? With this Siren.

Maeve does a few things for us. The first is she's a 3/4, which is a decent size for four mana and can hold off a lot of stuff: random damage from a Llanowar Elves, a Golem Token, that sort of thing. But more importantly, we can pay some mana to Goad another target, forcing Blightsteel Colos-sus and Eldrazi Titans other directions. I toyed with the idea of a Commander who drew us more cards, but finding ways to draw cards isn't the problem. Keeping everyone off our backs while we do so is. Maeve helps with that.

The gist is this: every turn, we're going to play a Land. Occasionally, we're going to play something on our turn, but it'll be rare. If we do, it's likely one of three things: another roadblock to killing us (like Propaganda or Meishin, the Mind Cage), a Spellbook (like Spellbook or Library of Leng), or a really BIG card draw spell like Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn or Finale of Revelation.

Most of the time, though, we're going to play that Land and pass the turn. If we feel threatened by a large Creature, we can Goad it with Maeve, but otherwise we wait until the end of the turn right before us and cast a card draw spell at Instant speed. We have literal dozens of these. Many of them draw two, some draw three, a few draw four, and the very best of them draw X, where we can just dump whatever we have left into the draw and get a bunch of cards.

Our 40 Lands are mostly basic Islands, though we have a few nonbasics worth mentioning. War Room is a great use of excess mana when we either can't afford the card draw spell we've got or just have a little extra. Mystifying Maze and Maze of Ith both help with the keeping people off our backs plan. Castle Vantress is another use of mana should we have excess, and can help in the endgame a lot making it easier to find our final piece by digging deeper. Urza's Cave is here for one purpose: find Reliquary Tower (we have Expedition Map and Tolaria West for this very purpose as well). Reliquary Tower is our very best way of not having a maximum Hand size, so if we can find it, we want to.

Thought Vessel is our only real ramp, and it's not here to ramp but to offer no Hand size. It's possible we want a Tribute Mage to facilitate finding this as well, but I haven't seen the need. Keep it in mind, though. In addition to Reliquary Tower, we have a number of other ways to get a bigger-than-normal Hand size, including that Library of Leng (a weird old card which also makes it so we discard funny!), Venser's Journal, Folio of Fancies, and Proft's Eidetic Memory. Wizard Class is particularly fun, and don't ever bother going to Level 3 with it so you don't freak people out.

A play note: I highly recommend using your free mulligan at least if you don't have one of these in your first seven cards. You really, really, really, really, really need one for the deck to work, so it's worth it to dig a bit and see if you can get one of these pieces. Any one will do; by the time it's destroyed it's quite likely you'll have another one you can play. But having one in your opening Hand will make things a lot easier on you.

The thing we will do most often is draw a flurry of cards at the end of someone else's turn. Check each one and make sure you're following the rules; often they have different effects depending on the set and what we've done thus far. Mysteries of the Deep, for example, draws an extra card if we hit Landfall this turn - this does not make it worth it to cast on our turn, because we want to sandbag our mana for as long as possible. Glimmer of Genius Scrys 2 first, which is awesome. Case the joint gives us a weird sense of what's coming. You see the point.

Don't worry too much about saving the X spell ones till super late to grind out more value. If you can draw four cards for seven mana, that's probably worth it to keep cards flowing. The ones to save are the ones with options like Archmage's Charm. Don't save it if you can't draw cards any other way, but if you can, use those last, so you keep the Counterspell in reserve for as long as possible. Count your mana and draw as many as you can every turn. There are so many draw spells, you'll draw into more.

I wish we could run five copies of Aetherize, but alas, we can't. We just get the one, though Illusionist's Gambit does a decent second chair. However, to aid in the effort, we have Propaganda and War Tax just to make things a little harder, especially for decks which go wide. Web of Inertia may not stop everyone, but some decks really won't want to do that. Curse of Verbosity will hopefully send some damage another direction and net us some cards in the process, and Meishin, the Mind Cage will always be minus-a-lot, because we'll almost always have lots of cards in our Hand. A 0/11 Colossus isn't nearly as scary.

We also have a couple of Counterspells, all of which are as cheap as they can be while still countering just about anything. Some of the value of this deck is tied up in Mana Drain; Cancel will work nearly as well for a lot less money. Don't worry too much about which counters you run, just run a couple and deploy them carefully. As you look at your Hand of 26 cards, people will be convinced you have the Counter - lean into that.

If you're really struggling, you could consider Silent Arbiter or even something like Crawlspace, and maybe the Mage to find Crawlspace. Depends on how good you are at politicking and convincing people you're not the threat, or how lucky you are to get Propaganda before you really need it.

Somewhere along the way, we're going to draw a way to give a Creature Haste. This will be in the form of Lavaspur Boots, Lightning Greaves, or something. You can play that out whenever you feel safe to do so; they're all cheap to Equip, which is really what we want.

Eventually we'll draw into Twenty-Toed Toad, most likely after we have 20+ cards in Hand. We'll play it out, Equip it, and attack, winning the game immediately. Hopefully we have a Counterspell or two to stop anyone who tries to stop us, but if they're successful, we're done. We can't possibly win the game with nothing but card draw spells, and we're not running a Thassa's Oracle or Lab Man Hail Mary. Nope, we win with the Toad or we lose, and we'll be proud of what we achieve.

Maeve, Insidious Singer | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Maeve, Insidious Singer

• Creature (1)
• 1 Twenty-Toed Toad

• Instants (36)
• 1 Aetherize
• 1 Archmage's Charm
• 1 Behold the Multiverse
• 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
• 1 Case the Joint
• 1 Chemister's Insight
• 1 Commander's Insight
• 1 Comparative Analysis
• 1 Contact Other Plane
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Deprive
• 1 Diviner's Portent
• 1 Drown in Dreams
• 1 Even the Score
• 1 Glimmer of Genius
• 1 Gush
• 1 Hieroglyphic Illumination
• 1 Illusionist's Gambit
• 1 Inspiration
• 1 Intellectual Offering
• 1 Into the Story
• 1 Jace's Ingenuity
• 1 Mana Drain
• 1 Meeting of Minds
• 1 Metamorphic Blast
• 1 Mysteries of the Deep
• 1 Opportunity
• 1 Precognitive Perception
• 1 Pull from Tomorrow
• 1 Quick Study
• 1 Soul Read
• 1 Spellgyre
• 1 Stroke of Genius
• 1 Tragic Lesson
• 1 Unfathomable Truths
• 1 Weave Fate

• Sorceries (2)
• 1 Finale of Revelation
• 1 Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Collective Restraint
• 1 Curse of Verbosity
• 1 Meishin, the Mind Cage
• 1 Proft's Eidetic Memory
• 1 Propaganda
• 1 War Tax
• 1 Web of Inertia
• 1 Wizard Class

• Artifacts (12)
• 1 Chariot of Victory
• 1 Expedition Map
• 1 Folio of Fancies
• 1 Lavaspur Boots
• 1 Library of Leng
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Ring of Valkas
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 The Magic Mirror
• 1 Thought Vessel
• 1 Venser's Journal

• Lands (40)
• 31 Island
• 1 Castle Vantress
• 1 Maze of Ith
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Scavenger Grounds
• 1 Tolaria West
• 1 Urza's Cave
• 1 War Room

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A few more things to note. Finale of Revelation really should be cast for X=10 or more, and it and Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn will hopefully be the last spell cast before wining the game. However, be careful - at least once in play-testing, casting Sea Gate would have milled me and I would have lost to my own draw triggers!

Be very, very careful with when and how you Goad, and remember you can Goad in response to some-one moving to Combat. Forcing people to attack when they weren't otherwise going to, or forcing them to attack someone else when they weren't going to attack you anyway - these are ways to make a table annoyed at you. Use the ability as necessary, but don't just throw it around unless you must. This deck is an exercise in politics more than anything else. How well can you convince people to stay away from you, that you're not the threat? Eventually the bloom will be off the rose because anyone with 30 cards in their Hand will look like a problem, but early on at least you might be able to gain some good will by simply leaving everyone alone and drawing your cards.

This deck is a one-trick pony, and it's unlikely it'll ever be anything else. I can imagine a deck (like, say the second deck I ever built for this website, 10 years ago, and upgraded at the beginning of this year) which draws a bunch of cards wanting to run the Toad as a backup win-con, but this deck is completely fo-cused on winning with the Toad and nothing else.

As previously mentioned, Mana Drain could just as easily be Cancel. Addi-tionally, Sea Gate Restoration could be as simple as any other draw-two Instant, and Collective Restraint could be a simple bounce spell. The deck will also probably run fine without Venser's Journal; consider Trinket Mage to serve as a tutor for Spellbook or Library of Leng instead. Cutting those four cards will lower the cost of the deck substantially, and it should still do its thing well.

Thanks for reading.