Against the Odds: Inverter of Truth

Tweet by SaffronOlive // Feb 25, 2016

video Against the Odds

Hello everyone and welcome to episode twenty-four of Against the Odds. During last week's Against the Odds pool, Inverter of Truth finally broke through, coming away with a three percent victory over Legacy Upheaval! As a result, we get a sweet two-for-one this week on Against the Odds. Not only are we playing Inverter of Truth, but long-time runner up Eater of Days gets a chance to shine as well! Meanwhile, Upheaval will return in next week's poll, along with Felidar Sovereign. Mirrorpool and Cranial Extraction drop off the poll due to their poor finishes.

A quick bit of housekeeping before the videos. Starting this week's poll I'm going to use the CAPTCHA option on Strawpoll. Someone brought to my attention last week that it is possible to manipulate the poll with the help of a bot if CAPTCHA is not activated, which might explain some of the really odd comebacks in recent weeks. This week I'm going to test CAPTCHA out. It shouldn't make the voting process too cumbersome (it only adds one click), and make sure to let me know in the comments if there are any problems with the new system.

We'll talk more about Inverter of Truth in a minute. First let's get to the videos. A quick reminder. If you enjoy Against the Odds and other video content here on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel to keep up with the latest and greatest.

Against the Odds: Inverter of Truth Intro

Against the Odds: Inverter of Truth Games

The Deck

The one thing that surprised me the most in building an Inverter of Truth deck for Modern is just how many different possibilities exist. Obviously, one option is to go the Laboratory Maniac route and look to use Inverter of Truth and / or Leveler to exile our library, draw a card, and win the game. While this combo does have a certain charm to it, it didn't really excite me that much. The Leveler / Laboratory Maniac combo has been around for years, and the Inverter of Truth version is arguably worse since we can't have cards in our graveyard if we want to empty our library. Another option was to build some sort of suicide Black deck that played a bunch of efficient beaters along with some discard and removal. You know, play Inverter of Truth fairly. Sure, we exile our library, but hopefully we can kill our opponent before we kill ourselves. This build seemed a little bland. Finally, I realized we could have a pretty sweet two-for-one on Against the Odds by building a Torpor Orb deck that included both Inverter of Truth and Eater of Days. Here's where we ended up:

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The upside of Inverter of Truth is that it is huge for its mana cost. Plus it's evasive so it offers a good way to close games out quickly. When things go wrong it blocks pretty much everything in the format (yes, even most Eldrazi). The downside is that its "enter the battlefield" ability can literally lose us the game. While we can mitigate the drawback by getting a bunch of cards in our graveyard, I decided to eliminate this problem by canceling out all "enters the battlefield" abilities.

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Between Torpor Orb, Hushwing Gryff, and Muddle the Mixture (which can tutor for Torpor Orb) we have 10 cards that allow us to play our Inverter of Truth without worrying about the potentially lethal "enters the battlefield" ability. With one of these cards on the battlefield, Inverter of Truth becomes a 6/6 flier for four mana, which is way above the curve, even in Modern. Since we have ten Torpor Orb effects, we get to play some other creatures with dangerous "enters the battlefield" abilities as well.

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With any of our Torpor Orb effects on the battlefield, this suite of creatures is insanely powerful. Hunted Horror is a two mana 7/7 with trample, Eater of Days is 9/8 flying, trample for four, and Dust Elemental is huge and has flash. Of course, if our Torpor Orb gets killed with any of these creatures on the stack, we (more or less) lose the game, but that's a risk we are willing to take. These creatures give us redundancy, and we will almost always have some huge, evasive creature to play the turn after we play Torpor Orb or Hushwing Gryff.

The Matchups

This one is more about the cards than the matchups. As I mentioned a moment ago, one of the biggest risks of our deck is that someone will kill our Torpor Orb with one of our fatties on the stack. A maindeck Abrupt Decay is a card that we really want to avoid. Path to Exile is rough, since it is one of the few playable removal spells in Modern that takes down our creatures. As far as decks go, Tron seems horrible, mostly because Karn Liberated can exile anything we play and come down a turn earlier than Inverter of Truth or Eater of Days. Fast combo like Burn and Infect can also be dicey because they can close out the game before we get our creatures online.

On the other hand, our deck can win really fast once we've assembled our combo of a Torpor Orb and an Inverter of Truth. We put our opponents under a lot of pressure to have the right answer and to have it fast, which means we can beat just about anyone with the right draw. Oddly, we also randomly hose some decks thanks to Torpor Orb. A good example is our victory over the Primeval Titan build of Scapeshift. With Torpor Orb, Thought-Knot Seer is much less scary, and decks like Abzan Company and Kiki-Chord have a really hard time winning.

The Odds

Amazingly, we won exactly 50% of our games, counting one off-camera loss in game three against GR Tron. We also won two out of our five matches, which is a great record for an Against the Odds deck. At the same time, we are a high-risk, high-reward type of deck, so I'm not really sure how this game win percentage would hold up over the long haul. In a couple of games we got real lucky, beating turn three Karn Liberated into turn four Wurmcoil Engine against GR Tron, and winning after skipping two turns with Eater of Days. It's possible that winning half of our games is unrealistically high. That said, the deck felt competitive in every single match we played and actually has an extremely high power level when we run well, so maybe it could keep winning.

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Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. As always leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments. You can reach me on Twitter (or MTGO) @SaffronOlive.