Against the Odds: Eon Hub

Tweet by SaffronOlive // Mar 10, 2016

video Against the Odds

Hello everyone and welcome to episode twenty-six of Against the Odds. During last week's poll, Eon Hub came out the clear-cut winner, bringing in 32% of the 5,000+ votes cast. Perhaps the bigger surprise was that our Legacy option, Battle of Wits, came in second, meaning it will return for another chance at glory, along with Liquimetal Coating. Both our Standard options, Felidar Sovereign and Undergrowth Champion, came in at the bottom of the pile and will drop from the poll. As such, this week we are building around Eon Hub, which might be the most challenging card featured on Against the Odds since Tainted Remedy!

We'll talk more about Eon Hub 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: Eon Hub Intro

Against the Odds: Eon Hub Games

The Deck

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One thing I learned while building Eon Hub is that most of the cards that do something on our upkeep are beneficial, making tokens or drawing us extra cards. As a result, finding a way to abuse Eon Hub in Modern was extremely difficult. One option was to play undercosted creatures with cumulative upkeeps (e.g. Phyrexian Soulgorger or Jotun Grunt), but this direction felt like a (much) worse version of the Inverter of Truth / Torpor Orb deck we played a few weeks ago. Instead I decided to go with a more controlling build which uses Eon Hub to turn otherwise so-so cards into some of the most broken spells in the game.

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For example, we get to play Pact of Negation which, with an Eon Hub on the battlefield, is a strictly better version of Force of Will. Since Pact of Negation requires us to pay five mana on our upkeep, and Eon Hub makes sure we never have an upkeep, we end up with a free counterspell. Even better, we can use Pact of Negation to help force through our Eon Hub on turn five or counter our opponent's first play after we cast Eon Hub.

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With an Eon Hub on the battlefield, Cover of Winter becomes a cross between Ensnaring Bridge and Ghostly Prison, with a little bit of Worship thrown in for good measure. Since our deck is exclusively running snow lands, we can put a ton of age counters on Cover of Winter and lock our opponent out of ever dealing combat damage with their creatures.

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Probably the best way to abuse the lack of an upkeep step is to play spells that require a cumulative upkeep. Since no upkeep step means we never have to pay the piper, pretty much anything with a cumulative upkeep becomes way better with a Eon Hub on the battlefield. Krovikan Whispers turns into Control Mage when you don't have to pay for the upkeep costs.

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Vanish into Memory might be the sweetest card in the entire deck with Eon Hub. Not only does it exile any creature forever, it also does a weird Sphinx's Revelation imitation since it draws us cards equal to the creature's power (and sort of gains us life, since the creature cannot attack us).

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Finally, we have Delay which normally (as its name suggests) delays a spell for three turns by exiling it and giving it suspend. However, suspend counters are removed during upkeeps, so with an Eon Hub on the battlefield Delay becomes a strictly better version of Counterspell. Not only does it cost less blue mana, it exiles the spell. One of the sweet tricks in our deck is that we can use Delay before we have an Eon Hub on the battlefield, because as long as we resolve our Eon Hub before the suspend counter countdown hits zero the Delayed spell will stay in exile forever (or at least for as long as we have Eon Hub).

Of course, all of these shenanigans come with a heavy dose of risk. Most of our cards say "at the beginning of your next upkeep," so if our opponent can get rid of our Eon Hub, our next turn is going to be rough. We'll have to pay for all the Pacts we cast throughout the entire game, discard our hand to Vanish into Memory, and if we somehow survive all of this, we'll mostly likely lose all of our permanents with cumulative upkeep.

The Matchups

In theory we have a good matchup against decks that are slow and don't have ways to removal artifacts or enchantments. Unfortunately, I spent 20 minutes looking over the Modern metagame, and I couldn't find a single deck that fit into that category. The biggest problem with our deck is that Eon Hub costs five mana, and Modern is well-know to be a turn four format (and closer to a turn three format at the moment), which means a decent percentage of the time the game is over before we get to start doing anything. It wouldn't matter how we built Eon Hub, this problem would remain, so we just have to roll with the punches and hope for the best.

The Odds

We didn't win a single match, and came out on top in just 2 of our 14 games, giving us a match win percentage of zero and a game win percentage of 14. Even worse, we didn't even come close to winning most matches. There is a pretty good argument that we shouldn't have won some of the games we did win. While we did manage to hardlock Dredge in game one, in our final win against Scapeshift it's likely our opponent could have beat us if they simply gave up on the Scapeshift plan and just waited until they naturally drew enough Mountains to ping us to death with Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.

All in all, Eon Hub has to be one of the most difficult cards to build around. It is just too slow and even when it's good (which, as we learned, is rare), it comes with a lot of risk. When things go wrong the blowouts are epic.

Votes for Next Week's Deck

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Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter (or MTGO) @SaffronOlive.