Tibalt’s Tricky Math (Arena)

No card in Kaldheim’s spoiler season generated as much excitement as Tibalt’s Trickery. At face value it gives red decks an effective out to combo decks outside of Standard. The hype though came from Modern where you can consistently mulligan into a Turn 3 Emrakul. That has been covered elsewhere and is not our focus. We are looking at Standard and Historic on Arena. I want to be clear that we are not working on an amazing competitive deck for ladder climbing. We are aiming to build the perfect workhorse of a deck. A strategy that can mindlessly wipe out your daily wins in a matter of minutes. Most of us do not have the time to maximize our free currency; help with maximization available here. I want to change that.

The Basics
So to fill in the background we do have to cover the combo for those that have not seen it. You are looking to counter your own spell with Tibalt’s Trickery; enter full control to do this. You want that spell to cost 0 so that you can do this on Turn 2. You do this so that you can ideally cast an exceptionally large and powerful spell for free; for brevity we will call these bombs. To ensure this, you need your deck to contain nothing but bombs, Trickery, and the spell that costs 0. You will mulligan any hand that does not contain Trickery and a 0 cost spell. If you utilize all mulligans without finding the combo, concede and move on. With an effective decklist in this form, we should be able to cruise through our daily wins without significant time or effort.

The Goose Egg
As far as spells that costs 0, our options are limited and not very important; we plan to just counter it. You can safely run four copies as Trickery states that your free spell is one “with a different name”. Standard is limited to Tormod’s Crypt and Stonecoil Serpent. I would just choose Serpent in case you draw a second copy and would appreciate a blocker. In Historic, it is more open but still irrelevant. Ornithopter blocks fliers but we can afford to actually pay for our surplus creatures; a Serpent could contribute to a lethal swing. It does not matter much. If you lack Serpents, play Crypt or Ornithopter to save on rare wildcards.

Odds of Mulling Into the Combo
The best odds of a successful mulligan come from a full set of Trickery. The risk here is that the combo may deliver another Trickery, which fizzles with no target, instead of a bomb. This is almost certainly a loss. More Trickery means better mulligans, less Trickery means more successful combos. We will frame a failure as not finding the combo within five hands. In other words, you mull down to three cards and still fail to find the combo. There are two card hands that can win but these rely on drawing lands and/or delaying the combo a turn. This is how those odds vary based on the number of Trickery in your list:

Trickery Count	Fail in One Hand	Fail in Five Hands
4	85.5%	45.7%
3	88.6%	54.6%
2	92.0%	65.9%
1	95.8%	80.7%

It is clear that running just one or two copies is not optimal. But there is less than a 10% difference between three and four Trickery. It may come down to the number of quality bombs available when deckbuilding. The more bombs in the deck, the lesser the odds of Trickery into Trickery and therefore less risk in running a full playset.

The Bombs
We want a successful combo to actually translate into a win and do so quickly. Ugin is an excellent choice for either format but outside of that it varies quite a lot. These are some of the options I have come across:

Standard
–Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
–Kiora, Bests the Sea God
–Dream Trawler
–Koma, Cosmos Serpent

Historic
–Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
–Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
–Captive Audience
–Impervious Greatwurm

Within the two formats there are a number of re-rolls as well. The Prismatic Bridge gives you another shot at your next upkeep; though you should run Crypt over Serpent to not have any undesirable hits. Emergent Ultimatum will have you grab three and let your opponent choose two for you. However, your three choices must be mono-colored and that is a tough sell. In Standard, I have found only Kiora’s and opening it to Historic only gets you Greatwurm. I suppose Cragplate Baloth? Two of those ought to win most games but Trickery into a Baloth is very underwhelming; especially in Historic. Though that becomes increasingly rare as you add more bombs. Perhaps the best re-roll is Genesis Ultimatum. Five cards is not particularly deep and you will not get Ulamog’s cast trigger, but it is serviceable if you have enough bombs in the deck. Like the deck itself, we are trying to add enough bombs to make it consistent but being selective enough to keep those bombs game-winning. These are your odds of hitting no bombs off of a Genesis:

Bomb Count	Fail Rate
12	31.4%
16	19.9%
20	12.1%

From this, I would conclude that you need at least sixteen bombs to make Ultimatum worthwhile; the success rate landing at 80%. The idea is that you fit in every good bomb you can and then Ultimatum adds four more bombs to the deck. To properly value this, we need to revisit why we want a high bomb count in the first place.

Fail Rate of the Combo
Remember that the more copies of Trickery you run in the deck, the better your odds of mulling into the combo. But this also increases the chances of the “Trickery into Trickery” auto-loss. We offset this by adding more bombs. Now we come to the fail rates that come at various, reasonable bomb and Trickery counts:

Bomb Count	Trickery Count	Fail Rate
12	3	14.3%
16	3	11.1%
20	3	9.1%
12	4	20.0%
16	4	15.8%
20	4	13.0%

It is interesting to see that you need to add eight bombs (from 12 to 20) in order to offset the fail rate gained by adding the fourth copy of Tibalt. In other words, if you run a full set of Trickery you would need to dilute your bomb suite up to 20 bombs to reduce your fail rate to be in line with a three Trickery, 12 bomb build. But the trend in the numbers is what we expected. Of course fewer Trickery leads to a lower fail rate. We are accepting worse mulligans for a more consistent combo. We need to marry the two calculations to really figure this out.

The True Success Rate
Now we know our odds of a successful mulligan and a successful combo. We can put them together for our various Trickery and bomb counts:

Bomb Count	Trickery Count	Mull Success	Combo Success	Full Success
12	3	45.40%	85.7%	38.9%
16	3	45.40%	88.9%	40.4%
20	3	45.40%	90.9%	41.3%
12	4	54.31%	80.0%	43.4%
16	4	54.31%	84.2%	45.7%
20	4	54.31%	87.0%	47.2%

With these rates we can clearly see that a successful mulligan means more than a successful combo when it comes to the percentage of games in which you effectively combo. That being said, note the trend. The fewer bombs you have, the less percentage points you gain from moving up to four Trickery. In other words, the more quality bombs available to you when deckbuilding the more able you are to get away with a full set of Trickery. Regardless, running four Trickery yields a greater full success rate at all reasonable bomb counts.

Building The Beast
Now we know all of the numbers and can put it into decklists. I do want to remind you that this is not a competitive deck meant to ladder. Look at the odds above. If this combo automatically won the game, could not be interacted with, it still would not have even a 50/50 shot. We are here to brainlessly spam out our daily wins. We will begin with a Standard build.

Again, Standard’s bombs are underwhelming. We can rely on an Ugin or Kiora’s to effectively win a game on Turn 2. Our other options though, maybe? It will be slow and laborious to win with a Koma or Trawler. We will usually get there, but the goal here was to shred through daily wins. Running all four will get us to an 80% success rate on Genesis Ultimatum so we can go for that:

Standard Trickery v1
Lands (32)
32 Mountain
Creatures (12)
4 Dream Trawler
4 Koma, Cosmos Serpent
4 Stonecoil Serpent
Spells (16)
4 Genesis Ultimatum
4 Kiora Bests the Sea God
4 Tibalt’s Trickery
4 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

If you are dead set on playing Genesis, keep in mind that it adds to the fail rate. Based on our earlier table, this deck has a 47.2% success rate. Consider that 20% of those successes will be Ultimatums, which will then fail 20% of the time. This means that 4% of successes are actually fails. This puts the success rate of the above deck at 45.3%. That is reasonable but boy is Dream Trawler an awful way to get a “quick win”. Koma is not much better. Perhaps Cragplate Baloth over one or the other? With speed as our goal, I think it is fair to lower the success rate to gain some.

Standard Trickery v2
Lands (32)
32 Mountain
Creatures (12)
2 Cragplate Baloth
2 Goldspan Dragon
4 Koma, Cosmos Serpent
4 Stonecoil Serpent
Spells (16)
4 Emergent Ultimatum
4 Kiora Bests the Sea God
4 Tibalt’s Trickery
4 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

This version has the same bomb count as the previous but without the small Genesis fail rate. More importantly it closes games much more quickly. Goldspan Dragon is so painfully open to removal but we need it for our Ultimatum piles; at least it wins quickly and evasively. If I were going to spam this deck in Standard for quickly daily wins, this is the build I would play. But honestly, I am not sure Standard is where you want to be for such a task.

Historic Trickery
Lands (36)
36 Mountain
Creatures (12)
4 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
4 Stonecoil Serpent
4 Zetalpla, Primal Dawn
Spells (12)
4 Captive Audience
4 Tibalt’s Trickery
4 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

This is the fastest build I have found. You may notice the lack of Genesis Ultimatum. I realized while working on this build that it did not actually help our odds. As explained for the Standard build, Genesis fails put the full success rate down to 45.3%. Scroll up and check the success rate for the deck without it (16 bombs). I’ll save you the scroll. It is 45.7%. This means that you need more than 16 bombs in your list to make Genesis Ultimatum a beneficial addition. With this in mind, we have dropped it entirely. If we could find another playset of bombs, I would bring it back and push our success rate even higher.

I am not willing to pick up any of the other bombs I have listed in this article. All of our current bombs are true bombs. They are not unbeatable but it will take very specific cards/decks to overcome them before they close the game in our favor. More importantly, they do it quickly. We do not have the time for a slow grind or chump blockers. We trade a little success rate for a lot of speed; well worth it.

Dropping to three Trickery is a reasonable avenue though. Your total success rate will fall by 4% but the odds of failed combo fall by 6%. Do you want to queue up fewer games or be less likely to fail after going through the first two turns? That will come down to average queue time and the speed at which opponents play; numbers we do not have access to. In either case, it works. The winrate is not good but you will churn through wins faster than ever before.

The Hammer Looms
My only concern in recommending this deck is the possibility of a ban. The power level is not the problem. The issue is that the deck disrupts Arena as a game. The groans have already begun as this deck plagues BO1 in both Standard and Historic. Win or lose, neither player is having a good time. If widely adopted, it will also be detrimental to the in-game economy. The game is structured so that it is demanding to maximize your free currency. More free currency claimed generally means less premium currency (gems) purchased; the company likes making money.

This could be an Arena-only ban; the deck is irrelevant to competitive play. They did ban Nexus of Fate from BO1 at one point after all. I would hate to be left holding the bag on this one; though we would get rare wilds back for Trickery. Ulamog and Ugin are not a bad cards to be stuck with but did you need four? Captive Audience and Zetalpa are straight chaff. Build with caution.

A Word on Budget
I think it is reasonable to be unwilling to spend so many wildcards. Thankfully, it can be budgeted very easily and you do not lose much. As explained earlier, your choice in goose egg  is nearly irrelevant. Tormod’s Crypt is an uncommon so save your rares. You can get away with dropping Zetalpa for more Mountains as well. Your success rate only suffers 2.3% and you hold onto four rare wildcards. Repeating myself again, but at lower bomb counts the impact of your Trickery count narrows. You can go down to three Trickery at the cost of 4.5% success rate. I do not see this as a worthwhile trade, but hey it is your wildcards.

Historic Trickery (Budget)
Lands (40)
40 Mountain
Creatures (4)
4 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
Spells (16)
4 Captive Audience
4 Tibalt’s Trickery
4 Tormod’s Crypt
4 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

Final Considerations
There is actually another route to victory but it is not great. On Turn 4, you can use a Trickery to target an opponent’s spell and then counter it with a second Trickery. This works the same as the true combo but now you do not have to worry about cascading into a Trickery. Instead you run the risk of hitting your goose egg; that is game over. For frame of reference, the success rate of this combo in our recommended build is 78.9%; compared to 84.2% for the true combo. I suppose the odds do not really matter though. It is a desperate move. I would mull down to three before I would keep a four just for this backup combo.

Of course we have to address opposing interaction. You are always a Thoughtseize, Banishing Light, etc. away from scooping. You have to subtract those from the success rate to find your actual winrate. I just cannot recommend it for competitive play. Historic has more cheap interaction to fear but it is worth it. The point of the deck is that win or lose, your games end quickly. This often does not hold true for the Standard builds. Fast for Standard? Sure but you can speed it up greatly by suffering some extra interaction in Historic.

Wrap-Up
Well, concept proven. The deck is bad but you can churn through your wins relatively quickly and without much thought. The value really depends on you and your love for Magic. I absolutely love Magic but even I do not always have the time or desire to win four games each day. So one last bit of math.

Let’s say you are the type to churn out your 15 weekly wins but no more. Ideally, you would be getting 28 wins per week; 4 per day as the rewards after that are poor. At 100 gold per win, that is 1,300 gold per week you are missing out on. You net one rare wild card per six packs; worth 6000 gold. So the budget version of the deck effectively costs 24,000 gold. At 1,300 gold a week you are going to need almost five months for this deck to break even. This calculation of course does not consider the non-wild rares and mythics you accrue while cracking those packs. That value varies based on your pulls and the decks you want to build.

I personally already have the deck so that I could test for this article. It is convenient but I would call it niche. You have to be someone that plays enough to care about maximizing your value but cannot play enough to maximize your value. It will take a while to pay you back for building it. If it is banned or errata’d out of existence, it will hurt. But if you fit the bill and are willing to take the risk, you have found your workhorse. If not, at least you can enjoy the free wins when Trickery players mull to oblivion against you. Either way I hope that this article has been helpful to you. I write pretty infrequently anymore but I hope to be back soon. Until then my friends.