Against the Odds: Glorious Boros (Modern)

by SaffronOlive // Oct 25, 2018

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 161 of Against the Odds. Last week, we had another all-Guilds of Ravnica Against the Odds poll but with a twist this time: rather than playing the winning card in Standard, we'd be heading to Modern. In the end, Chance for Glory took home first place, beating out Omnispell Adept by just three percent of the vote! As such, we're taking Chance for Glory out for a spin in Modern today, in a deck I'm calling Glorious Boros. The main idea of the deck is to use Chance for Glory and also Glorious End as three-mana extra-turn spells, with some sweet tricks to get around the downside of losing the game at the end of the turn. What's the best way to not die to the drawback of our Glorious cards? What are the odds of winning with Chance for Glory (and Glorious End) in Modern? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Against the Odds: Glorious Boros (Modern)

The Deck

When I realized that Chance for Glory had won the poll, I had a pretty decent idea of what direction the deck would head, since the main challenge of building around Chance for Glory is minimizing the odds that we accidentally kill ourselves with the "you lose the game" part of the card. Thankfully, there are a few different ways in Modern to play Chance for Glory, get a cheap extra turn, and not die at the end of it. So, rather than digging around for synergies, Glorious Boros was more about finding the right mixture of enablers, removal, and finishers to make the deck function.

Glorious Cards

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While Chance for Glory is sweet on its own, one of the reasons it's especially exciting for Modern is that it's very similar to Glorious End, giving us a massive eight three-mana extra-turn spells. Of course, both cards come with a lot of risk thanks to the "you lose the game" clauses, but it usually isn't too much of an issue, considering our deck is designed to work around this drawback. Assuming we have a way to not die after casting them, both Chance for Glory and Glorious End are extremely powerful. Chance for Glory gives us an extra turn for just three mana, while having some fringe upside in making our creatures indestructible, while Glorious End is essentially another extra-turn spell, since we can cast it on our opponent's upkeep and skip back to our turn right away. Glorious End also does some fun tricks with Chance for Glory, since everything on the stack goes away when it resolves. For example, let's say we cast a Chance for Glory to take an extra turn and we are about to die to the "you lose the game" trigger. Glorious End can fizzle that trigger and buy us another turn to find a permanent answer. The main plan of our deck is to find a way to not die to the "you lose the game" trigger of our Glorious cards and then takes a few turns in a row, hopefully beating down with a finisher of some kind to actually close out the game!

"You Can't Lose the Game" Cards

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Plan A for not losing the game to Chance for Glory and Glorious End is Gideon of the Trials. If we can emblem a Gideon of the Trials and keep a Gideon on the battlefield, we're free to take as many turns as we want with Chance for Glory and Glorious End without losing the game to their drawback. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and Gideon Jura give us higher-loyalty backup Gideons to support Gideon of the Trials' emblem. One of the downsides of Gideon of the Trials is that it can die to things like Lightning Bolt if we play it and make the emblem right away. Meanwhile, if we plus immediately, Gideon, Ally of Zendikar starts at five loyalty and Gideon Jura jumps to a massive eight loyalty, making it much more likely that they stick on the battlefield. It's also worth mentioning that all of our Gideons can turn into creatures, which means apart from supporting our Chance for Glory plan, they also work as win conditions while we are taking extra turns, beating down for big chunks of indestructible damage. Finally, speaking of indestructibility, we can even use Chance for Glory to make our Gideons indestructible, assuming we turn them into creatures before casting it. While this is sort of a fringe benefit since our Gideons will still die from having zero loyalty, it does protect them from things like Assassin's Trophy, which is a nice upside.

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Plan B for not dying to our own Chance for Glory and Glorious End is using Madcap Experiment to find the only artifact in our deck: Platinum Angel! Platinum Angel is basically a Gideon emblem on a 4/4 flying body, giving us another "you can't lose the game" card to counteract the "you lose the game" downside of Chance for Glory and Glorious End. The one downside of the Madcap Experiment / Platinum Angel plan is that it's risky. Since we only have two copies of Platinum Angel in our deck, we often end up with negative life after we cast Madcap Experiment, so we can lose on the spot if our opponent can kill Platinum Angel and we don't have another layer of protection like a Gideon emblem. On the other hand, there's also some upside. If we can get a Platinum Angel on the battlefield and then play Chance for Glory, we not only get an extra turn, but an indestructible Platinum Angel, and an indestructible Platinum Angel is enough to beat some decks all by itself. While something like Path to Exile, Cryptic Command, or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria can still deal with an indestructible creature, decks that are relying on normal removal like Assassin's Trophy and Lightning Bolt, or artifact destruction like Ancient Grudge, to get Platinum Angel off the battlefield typically just scoop once Chance for Glory resolves.

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Our last way to not die to Chance for Glory and Glorious End is a single copy of Angel's Grace. If we're about to die to the "you lose the game" trigger from Chance for Glory or Glorious End, we can use Angel's Grace as a one-time way to save ourselves. While not as good as Gideon of the Trials or Platinum Angel since its "you can't lose the game" ability only lasts for one turn, it has some fun "gotcha" potential as well if our opponent attacks for what they think is lethal.

Other Stuff

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Faithless Looting and Wall of Omens keep us churning through our deck to find our combo pieces and extra-turn cards. When our deck is at its best, we'll be able to play a Gideon of the Trials or Platinum Angel and then take several turns in a row with Glorious End and Chance for Glory. Having some ways to filter our draws helps to make sure we find as many extra-turn spells as possible. Plus, Wall of Omens is a solid early-game blocker and even better once it becomes indestructible thanks to Chance for Glory.

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The rest of the deck is removal to help slow the opponent down while we are getting our combo pieces online. Path to Exile helps in the early game, and in a pinch, we can Path to Exile our own Wall of Omens to ramp into our Madcap Experiment and Gideons. Meanwhile, Anger of the Gods, Day of Judgment, and Wrath of God give us a suite of sweepers for creature decks. Since our only creatures are Wall of Omens and Platinum Angel, our wraths are often one-sided, and they are always one-sided if we can make our creatures indestructible with Chance for Glory. More importantly, if we happen to run into a matchup where our wraths are bad (for example, against creature-free control), we can use Faithless Looting to discard them and hopefully draw something relevant in the matchup.

The Matchups

Glorious Boros felt surprisingly strong, but it can struggle with counterspells. With Chance for Glory and Glorious End, we really want to cast them on our opponent's turn, untap, and cast something like Gideon of the Trials or Madcap Experiment for Platinum Angel to stay alive. Against decks with lots of counters, our opponent can simply let our Glorious cards resolve and then counter the Gideon of the Trials or Platinum Angel to make us lose to our own Glorious End or Chance for Glory. While we can play around this by getting our "you can't lose" card on the battlefield first, it does slow us down quite a bit and make the Chance for Glory plan much more risky. Otherwise, we have solid removal against aggro, Gideon of the Trials and Platinum Angel naturally hate on combo decks, and having a bunch of planeswalkers and extra turns to close the game against midrange seems like a solid plan.

The Odds

All in all, we played five matches and won four, giving us an 80% match win percentage, along with winning 10 of 15 games, good for a 66.67% game win percentage, making Glorious Boros great for an Against the Odds deck. For some reason, we post a good record every time we play a deck with a bunch of Gideons. Thankfully, it wasn't all about the Gideons. Chance for Glory and Glorious End were great, giving us big combo finishes and stealing games with indestructible Platinum Angels. Glorious Boros was surprisingly strong—apparently, having eight three-mana extra-turn spells is good enough to compete in Modern. Who would have guessed?

Vote for Next Week's Deck

We're nearing the end of our month of Guilds of Ravnica decks, but the set is so sweet that we should probably play it one more time next week before moving back to normal polls featuring various cards from other sets. Which of these Guilds of Ravnica cards should we play (most likely in Standard) next week? Let us know by voting below!

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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 @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.