So one night while trying to fall asleep I was watching Twitch. Bloody, one of the streamers I watch quite regularly, was playing a new deck with cards from Ikora. The engine of the deck was the one and only Winota, The Joiner of Forces. She was using Winotas absolute killer of an ability, which we will go into shortly, to cheat out the Agent of Treachery among other powerful human creatures. I was hooked instantly and Winota may be one of my favorite cards in a long time. So this doesn’t sound too bad right? Just another busted standard deck that is pretty powerful right? Not so fast, let’s dig into it…
The best place to start is with Winotas ability. To read it word for word just check out the image to the side but basically, it allows you to look at the top SIX cards of your deck for EVERY nonhuman creature attacking. Out of the SIX cards, you may put one human creature onto the battlefield tapped, and attacking. Oh ya, and they are indestructible until the end of turn. The other five go on the bottom of your library in any order. Just looking at this at face value it is already apparent that the ability provides a massive amount of value to the person using it, but once you realize how easy it is to abuse it becomes an absolute bomb of a card. How you ask… like this.
If possible your perfect starting hand is 3 lands, a one drop nonhuman creature (I use healers hawk), raise the alarm (note that it makes soldier tokens not human soldiers), legion warboss, and Winota. Now let’s say that everything goes perfectly for you and you get to turn 4 with the hawk, 2 white soldier tokens, and the warboss with a token out. You play Winota, go to attacks and the warboss makes another token. Once you attack and you now have 6 triggers on Winota. We will see our entire deck doing this. We can optimally drop 4 agents, taking all their lands, a charming prince to flicker one of the agents, and maybe a Hakktos or Kenrith just for the abilities and damage. On turn four I can cheat out up to 36 mana worth of creatures AND take everything on your board. Like I said before, it’s busted.
So all that said, I have a few questions for WoTC… Did you play test this card with the rest of what is in standard? You gave us a 4 drop 4/4 that can cheat in any amount of creatures without even having to attack. While I love this card, even I have a hard time understanding how this slipped through the cracks? Everyone and their brother has been complaining about Agent of Treachery since Ikoria came out (and yes I realize Lukka can cheat him out also) but if you ask me, Winota is the one on the banning chopping block. I haven’t seen many pushing towards this but it seems like an easy target to me. With a new B&R announcement coming up this Monday I fully expect this to be on there, along with a ban or change to companion. (more on that to come)
So what do you think about this card/deck? Does it deserve to be banned? Does just Agent need to be removed from standard? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook at the links below. We would love to hear what you have to say and make sure to give us a follow for more articles and content like this in the future!
AoE Table Top 