The biggest dream for any competitive Magic player is to play a powerful and unknown rogue deck in a major event like a Pro Tour or Worlds and do well with it. Well, we were so close!

Sam Pardee put a ton of work into Agatha's Soul Cauldron, but unlike the Cauldron decks that did show up at Worlds, it was not a combo deck. Rather, they were aggressive synergy decks built around +1/+1 counters and Voldaren Thrillseeker, as putting a Thrillseeker under the Soul Cauldron allowed you to sacrifice any creature you had in play with a counter on it. The best of the bunch was a Naya build.

With the creatures that pass their counters off when they die like Iron Apprentice, Enduring Bondwarden, and Quirion Beastcaller, this often resulted in a chain reaction of Fling effects that would kill your opponent on the spot! And aside from this, there's a really awesome +1/+1 counter aggressive core backed by Ozolith, the Shattered Spire.

Time Stamps:

03:20 - Match 1

26:31 - Match 2

41:37 - Match 3

Counter Cauldron Fling | WOE Standard | Sam Pardee

• Creatures (30)
• 2 Questing Druid
• 4 Botanical Brawler
• 4 Enduring Bondwarden
• 4 Iron Apprentice
• 4 Knight-Errant of Eos
• 4 Ollenbock Escort
• 4 Quirion Beastcaller
• 4 Voldaren Thrillseeker

• Artifacts (7)
• 3 Ozolith, the Shattered Spire
• 4 Agatha's Soul Cauldron

• Lands (23)
• 1 Plains
• 1 Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire
• 2 Sundown Pass
• 3 Copperline Gorge
• 4 Battlefield Forge
• 4 Brushland
• 4 Razorverge Thicket
• 4 Secluded Courtyard

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Destroy Evil
• 4 Invasion of Gobakhan
• 3 Extraction Specialist
• 3 Knockout Blow
• 2 Haywire Mite

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As you saw in the games, this deck has some serious explosive potential. The ability to just have really big, size-up creature draws is great, as is the potential combo finish. Sometimes just throwing a 6/6 at your opponent with Voldaren Thrillseeker is good enough too!

The only real downsides here are that the deck is very hard to play, similar in a lot of ways to the old Ravager Affinity decks, and it does lack interaction for the many powerful creatures in the format or big blowout cards like Sunfall.

Still, while it wasn't quite consistent enough for us to play at Worlds, it's still an awesome deck that can be very successful, as you saw in the games here!