Maze's End: worthwhile alt win con?

[WWolfe]

I was having this debate with a friend today...thoughts?

[russpe]

I would say if you play EDH with friends and no competitive decks it should be viable to build a 5 color Deck around it (needs some none budget cards) otherwise it is way too slow.
but i havent played a deck with it yet.

[Judaspriester]

hmm.. combined with Stone-Seeder Hierophant or Amulet of Vigor and some extra land drops it could work. You just need a huge amount of mana.

[crimsonking]

It's a combo that needs 11 cards (10 gates + Maze's End itself), which is a lot.
Also, all of them are pretty bad cards by themselves that go into your mana base, commiting you into a 5-colors deck.
So basically you're already playing a junky 5-colors deck with a sub-par mana base.
Moreover, you can't rely on the Maze to fetch the gates or it will take forever, unless you put out some crazy setup like Skyshroud Ranger + Retreat to Coralhelm and some way to generate infinite mana.
I think the best option is to go for stuff like Scapeshift or Splendid Reclamation + self-mill, although I'd rather use it to get Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle instead.

[Judaspriester]

I've just checked: Circuitous Route, District Guide, Gatecreeper Vine. those are the other options to search for Gates.

On the Kitchen Table it could work, but against high efficient (or even cEDH) decks, its to slow.

[Morganator 2.0]

I would wait a bit, if anything. The release of Gateway Plaza shows that more lands with the gate subtype may be released in the coming sets.

[BoBWiz]

I played it with Jodah, Archmage Eternal as the commander.

it is to slow. you cant play good cards cause you need all stuff to get your gates. and all the opponents attacked me when they mentioned that i got the gates combo ...
and the titan is banned

but i will try again and again

[ORCH1D]

A lot of discussion so far has been around running mazes end in EDH. I have spent a lot of time thinking about and making various decks for mazes end in modern, so I will give you some insights to building with it in that format.

Getting maze's end naturally is extremely slow. You need to play 11 tap lands before you can win. This means you are going to need to do one of two things:
 - Slow the game down, or
 - Speed the combo up

An example of a modern maze's end deck that slows the game down is Seth(probably better known as SaffronOlive)'s Maze's Endchantress deck which uses ghostly prison and sphere of safety to stop the opponent from attacking (link). Alternatively, you could go turbo fog to stop any attacks that the enemy does commit to from dealing damage to you. Since you are in 5 colour, you could also just play all the best control cards with Guild Summit for repeatable card advantage and outstall your opponent.

To speed up the game, you could run any cards that allows you to get lands on the battlefield, like Azusa, lost but seeking, Primeval Titan, Splendid Reclamation etc. This is where you can get a bit creative with the cards you include. Plenty of land tutors will be essential, as you need to play the cards in order to win with them, requiring them to be in your hand. Gatecreeper vine, circuitous route and sylvan scrying are all good for this purpose.

Really, you want to do some combination of these two, as turn 11 is still pretty slow for a control deck and no matter how fast you can get gates down it probably won't be as fast as turn 3 Karn or a storm deck. But no matter which route you decide to go primarily, I would recommend only having 1 of each gate. Otherwise you are going to end up time walking yourself on most turns as you cant do anything with your etb tapped  lands. Amulet of vigor helps to mitigate this, but we only have 4 of it so it's not a card we can heavily depend on. There are also plenty of things we can use to tutor out our gates (including maze's end itself) and so we really only need 1.

Anyway, back to the OP's question, is Maze's End a worthwhile wincon? Competitively no, it is just to slow for modern or even most formats and it requires playing sub-optimal cards to pull it off. As a brewer though? I think it's a great excersise in evaluating your win-cons and focusing on optimizing a seemingly sub-optimal plan. It leads to greater understanding of speed vs strength tradeoffs and gets you looking at and evaluating cards that play into a strategy.

Anyway, I hope I have been helpful, and sorry for the long post

[WWolfe]

Most of you (if not all) are echoing my sentiments.

My friends argument was that if you're running a five color deck and Amulet of Vigor you could make it work. My argument was that in many EDH meta's, to include ours, it's way too slow. Not to mention most of us run some Strip Mine effect to deal with Urborg/Cabal Coffers, Cradle, etc. so once it was realized that's what you were doing, once you got close (if you happened to get close) at least one or two of your gates would be targeted.


Edit- wrong card name

[Siberian89]

A friend of mine has build a Ramos, Dragon Engine Gate deck in a not competitive meta and the deck is sweet. While you need 11 land card to win, you can also play a lot of fun cards and a lot of tutor during the game.

One game in particular, he managed to have in play Amulet of Vigor, Maze's End and Burgeoning in a 4 player game and we had to kill him first to avoid the maze's combo win.

So, is my opinion that it depends, but it's a viable strategy in fun envoirment

[crimsonking]

All considered, Splendid Reclamation is definitely better than Scapeshift, since with the latter you still need 10 land drops.
You need Amulet of Vigor (or else you'll have to wait until next turn to win) and some self-milling engine such as Basalt Monolith + Mesmeric Orb, Cephalid Illusionist + Nomads en-Kor, Mirror-Mad Phantasm + Clone etc.
Hermit Druid + non-basic lands would be fine too, since we're already playing 5 colors.
The problem is that, with this set-up, Dread Return for Ooze or LabMan finish is a much better option.