Battle of Wits: Spicy Brew
This deck plays 232 cards because Battle of Wits wins the game at the beginning of your upkeep if you have 200 or more cards in your library. After your opening seven, 225 cards are left, and that's why the list runs 232 and not exactly 200: the 25 extra cards are the room the deck has for everything it draws, fetches or exiles before it wins.
The deck rarely casts Battle of Wits itself. Academy Rector does that job: it dies, exiles itself and puts Battle of Wits straight onto the battlefield. There are plenty of ways to kill your own Rector: Carrion Feeder, Phyrexian Tower, High Market, Altar of Dementia, Altar of Bone, Cabal Therapy's flashback and Diabolic Intent. Sterling Grove gives your other enchantments shroud, so targeted removal can't touch Battle of Wits for the one turn it has to survive. Squee, Goblin Nabob keeps coming back from the graveyard to feed Survival of the Fittest, which gives you a creature tutor every turn for one green mana.
The second way to win uses the drawback of Phyrexian Devourer. Devourer exiles the top card of your library to get +1/+1 counters equal to that card's mana value, and once its power is 7 or more, a trigger makes you sacrifice it. While that trigger is on the stack it can't trigger again, so you keep exiling cards and then sacrifice the Devourer to Altar of Dementia in response. The Altar mills the opponent for the power the Devourer had when it left the battlefield, and the sacrifice you were about to make anyway costs you nothing. The counters come slowly, because 41 percent of the deck is land and the average mana value is 1.26: four exiles add about five power, so reaching the 50 or so cards that empty most libraries takes around 40 exiles. Both plans compete for the same cards, since every card the Devourer exiles is one fewer for Battle of Wits. And a milled opponent doesn't lose right away, only on their next draw. Pere Lloret won a 33-player league event in Alicante with this deck in March 2025.
Mainboard
- 4× Birds of Paradise
- 4× Elvish Spirit Guide
- 4× Fyndhorn Elves
- 4× Llanowar Elves
- 4× Mesmeric Fiend
- 4× Quirion Elves
- 4× Tinder Wall
- 4× Utopia Tree
- 4× Veteran Explorer
- 4× Wall of Roots
- 3× Academy Rector
- 1× Akroma, Angel of Wrath
- 1× Carrion Feeder
- 1× Gilded Drake
- 1× Meddling Mage
- 1× Phantom Nishoba
- 1× Phyrexian Devourer
- 1× Squee, Goblin Nabob
- 1× Triskelion
- 1× Volrath's Shapeshifter
- 4× Crop Rotation
- 4× Cunning Wish
- 4× Eladamri's Call
- 4× Intuition
- 3× Enlightened Tutor
- 3× Worldly Tutor
- 2× Ray of Revelation
- 1× Mask of the Mimic
- 1× Rushing River
- 4× Cabal Therapy
- 4× Diabolic Intent
- 4× Duress
- 4× Living Wish
- 4× Merchant Scroll
- 4× Quiet Speculation
- 2× Altar of Bone
- 1× Deep Analysis
- 1× Roar of the Wurm
- 4× Battle of Wits
- 4× Pattern of Rebirth
- 4× Sterling Grove
- 4× Survival of the Fittest
- 1× Engineered Plague
- 1× Pandemonium
- 1× Saproling Burst
- 1× Seal of Cleansing
- 4× Altar of Dementia
- 4× Lotus Petal
- 4× Mox Diamond
- 5× Forest
- 4× Ancient Tomb
- 4× Brushland
- 4× City of Brass
- 4× Elfhame Palace
- 4× Gemstone Mine
- 4× Grand Coliseum
- 4× Hickory Woodlot
- 4× High Market
- 4× Llanowar Wastes
- 4× Polluted Delta
- 4× Reflecting Pool
- 4× Saprazzan Skerry
- 4× Thran Quarry
- 4× Underground River
- 4× Windswept Heath
- 4× Yavimaya Coast
- 3× Phyrexian Tower
- 3× Skyshroud Forest
- 3× Treva's Ruins
- 3× Undiscovered Paradise
- 2× Caves of Koilos
- 2× City of Traitors
- 2× Flooded Strand
- 2× Island
- 2× Pine Barrens
- 1× Gaea's Cradle
- 1× Plains
- 1× Swamp
