·44 min read
Otters in 2026: An Updated Guide
Today's Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/7wPD6MvFi8KS4Znr7mXBLj?si=KVQMgEs9QxyNHD_maGm40Q
So I brought Otters to Worlds, and got popped by Grandma.
My writing seeks to accurately represent my views. I don't want to be shilling every deck I work on and selling hype at every opportunity.
When I said Quintorius combo was a good deck in pioneer that deserved more attention after the Arena Championships, then declared it not worth playing after the Sorin ban, I meant it.
When I said Otters was a very strong deck in standard despite being extremely hard to play after last Worlds, I meant that too.
When I said learning Amulet actually wasn't that hard, and was going to be the best choice for the upcoming RCs, I meant that (and turned out to be right judging by winrates in Houston, but wrong about Vegas a month later).
All this is to say, I mean what I'm about to say. This isn't a pitch, this is an assessment.
If I'd known Lessons was going to be the top deck at Worlds, like it is now, I would have made a different choice -- so I don't recommend playing Otters going forward if what you most want is to optimize your chances to win. It's likely that lessons is going to stick around, and decks that are more structurally favored into it are going to be where the format goes from here. Mono red is starting to see a bit more play, which could be a bad sign for otters' positioning. Before that shift has time to play out, it's not great to play a deck so weak into the top dog.
But I do think that Otters, when played well, is pretty likely to be a strong deck in standard for the foreseeable future, even when it doesn't see a lot of play or attention. I also think it's one of the best decks to learn for improving as a Magic player, especially as a constructed player. These factors mean it's likely a deck worth investing some time in for lots of people, so I think it's absolutely worth writing an updated guide for the version 3/9 Sanctum members brought to Worlds (and both cft and Toni made deep runs with).
This guide isn't going to be as insanely in-depth as The Ultimate Otters Guide I wrote last year -- that piece gets to keep its 'Ultimate' title. That means I'm going to release this for free in 2 weeks like my normal articles, but of course it's going to take me many days and hours to produce (Update: about 4 days, 15 hours), so I'd appreciate it if folks choose to pay for the labor I put into this.
Alright, preamble out of the way. Let's get cooking, shall we?
The List & The Philosophy
I believe the list we brought to Worlds (with cft innovating on their own a bit, as per usual) should be the starting point for Otters lists going forward.
This is specifically in comparison to the Team Handshake list, which is closer to the versions that were popular online leading up to the event. These lists cut Thundertrap Trainer, play 4 Boomerang Basics, more Bushwhacks and fewer Analyze the Pollens, and often more copies of Furnace//Sauna, which makes sense with the playset of Boomerangs.
These self-bounce heavy lists scan to the outside observer like much stronger Magic decks than the weird concoction of 1-ofs, 2-ofs, and 3-ofs in our list. They are significantly better at playing a solid midrange plan, where all your cards can play flexible roles as setup pieces, combo pieces, or just normal solid magic cards. It's a very elegant setup and makes for a deck that can probably glide through most of the random brews and suboptimal builds people will bring to FNM like butter. For folks unfamiliar with Otters as an archetype in general, or who just want to bring it to one tournament, I'd honestly recommend using one of those lists, they're very fun, still quite strong, and you'll probably do better with them!
But there's one key difference here that I believe is more important to each deck's positioning than anything else, and I believe is the reason Sanctum Otters went 10-9 in a tournament where Otters overall had a significantly sub-50% winrate:
Our list is VASTLY better at finding the card Enduring Vitality.
Looking at Alex's list above, there are only 5 "Vitalities" (4+1 analyze), and only 5 ways to "dig" meaningfully for them (4 Stock Up, 1 Legend of Kuruk). This isn't bad -- this deck will find a Vitality in most games, sometimes 2 -- but there will be some games where it just never finds one, or the first one gets countered and there's no way to dig for the second, so you're stuck planning to win "fairly".
Compare this to our list, which has 8 "Vitalities" (4+4 Analyze), and 10 ways to dig to them (4 Stock Up, 4 Thundertrap Trainer, 2 Rakshasa's Bargain). It's extraordinarily difficult for Sanctum's list to go through a game without somewhat quickly finding a Vitality, and it will almost always find a backup copy in case the first one gets answered.
Why is this so important?
Last year after Worlds, I wrote about Otters as a hybrid midrange-combo deck that could flexibly mold its gameplan to every matchup. I still think otters is a deck that needs to be highly flexible in its gameplay and take different approaches matchup-by-matchup to succeed, but current Otters, at least in the form I believe it to be strongest, is no longer primarily a midrange deck -- it is entirely a combo deck, with some light touches of aggro, midrange and control each sprinkled in as necessary.
Why is this? In some ways, the Boomerang Basics version of Otters is even better at playing a midrange game than last year's worlds deck was. But the times, they are a-changin'.
There are two main factors at play here:
- Decks in current standard are much better at punishing midrange gameplans
- Otters now has multiple "A+B" combos, both using Enduring Vitality.
Both of these cards respectively say, in a single package, "You can't out-card me" and "You can't out-board presence me".
Lots of the best shells in standard right now play one of these two cards. The ones that don't are control decks with ways to go over the top like Marang River Regent and Jeskai Revelation, or combo decks that try to end the game definitively like Bant Airbending or Sultai Reanimator. In other words, this is not a format where casting Seek the Beast or getting value through self-bounce (like TTABE used to do and Boomerang Basics does today) is a reliable way to pull ahead in games.
Thankfully, Otters itself is also much better at closing games quickly, thanks to this little guy:
Badgermole Cub + Enduring Vitality means you have pseudo-infinite mana -- especially when Song of Totentanz gets involved. There's a reason our otters channel was jokingly named "Rats" in the worlds discord server. Imagine this very nice opening hand:
- Stormchaser's Talent on t1
- Badgermole Cub on t2
- Enduring Vitality, Song for X=4 on t3.
- Immediately, we have access to 8 mana. Let's say we rebuy our Song with talent, attack with Vitality and two rats, and pass.
- Without any additional cards outside our starting 7, this is our board on turn 4:
Our opponent is at 15. We can cast Song for X=17, giving us 32 mana, but also the option to attack for lethal, which is probably better.
Now, this was close to the ideal 7 for goldfishing. So let's say instead of talent, we had a Stock Up. This still lets us go Cub on 2, Vitality on 3, which immediately generates the mana to cast Stock Up, and then on turn 4 we untap with the ability to cast Song for X=7, giving us access to 14 mana. The opponent better hope we didn't find anything good off of either our draws or checks notes... Stock Up.
Fine, let's say we don't have a Song at all, and instead have a Thundertrap Trainer. That's significantly less explosive. We play Mole on 2, Vitality into Stock Up on 3, and on turn 4 we can kick a Thundertrap with 2 mana to spare. Still pretty good! We're digging 15 cards deep into our library (5 from Stock Up, 8 from kicked Thundertrap, 2 from draw steps)...
Oh, we're 64% to find a Song anyways? Huh. Well, we've already tapped out for the turn, so it's not like we're gonna have access to a ton of mana to deploy all the other stuff we found after we cast Song...
...What do you mean we have 6 mana left over??? (Song X=1 gives the Thundertraps haste and leaves us with 3 untapped creatures 😉 )
All this is to say that Badgermole + Vitality is, to use the technical term, extremely fucked up in this deck. We already know how strong Valley Floodcaller + Vitality is, giving you access to pseudo-infinite mana with even just 1 or 2 rats/otters lying around -- but Cub makes a real case for being even stronger.
That being said... you have to have the vitality.
Without access to Enduring Vitality, none of this works. Your Badgermole Cubs are glorified Druids of the Cowl, your Valley Floodcallers are weird lords that only pump some of your creatures, and your card draw is slow and clunky. This is why we only play 3 Cubs -- while it's incredible with vitality, it's underwhelming without, so you want to often have 1, but having 2 isn't the snowballing catalyst it can be in the elfball decks, it's more of a liability.
Vitality's irreplacability is why we're making so many sacrifices to always being able to find it in our list -- you can't afford to not find it if you want your deck to do powerful combo things, and we think it's a trap to try and compete in the Ouroboroid-Quantum Riddler format as a midrange deck.
Newcomers & Interaction
So this is the guiding philosophy behind Sanctum's list - find vitality quickly, threaten to do broken things with it, and find it again if they answer it. I already went through a lot of the cards in our list in last year's guide, so I'm going to reserve this section for just talking about the newcomers, how we attempted to round out this plan for Worlds, and possible adjustments to make going forward.
The biggest newcomer is Rakshasa's Bargain. I mean, this is basically Stock Ups number 5 & 6, but bargain plays two additional roles, one major one minor:
- Fuels Analyze like nobody's business.
- It makes sense that other teams didn't play more Analyze the Pollens, since it can be very hard to turn on in this deck, but Bargain singlehandedly turns on Analyze, and sometimes does it almost twice
- Creating an actual fork with Valley Floodcaller
- Old Otters had TTABE to play at instant speed on the opponent's turn, so you weren't totally telegraphing your Floodcallers when you left them up. Nowadays, it's useful to have another strong development play to punish the opponent for leaving up removal for Floodcaller.
The one big concession we're making to Bargain is that we're playing the full 4 Starting Towns, which isn't the best possible land, but it's much nicer to have Bargain cost about 3.5 instead of about 3.75 (since you can always cast it with Vitality mana, but that's sort of less important because usually things are good once you have Vitality in play). Notably, we have to sacrifice playing the full number of Botanical Sanctums, which would normally be the best land in the deck, but you can only play so many fastlands.
Outside of Bargain and Badgermole Cub which we've already covered, there isn't actually that much new in the maindeck from previous iterations. The main difference is that we're now playing a much more varied spread of interaction. This is partially because the best way to "speed up" your combo deck in games where it hasn't found its combo is often to slow the opponent down so you have time to set things up -- and also because the Worlds metagame looked like it was going to include other creature-based combo decks like Bant Airbending and the Otters mirror, where being able to remove key pieces of your opponent's board is important.
The reason we're playing a lot of 1-ofs is that this deck selects through lots of cards in almost every game between Thundertrap, Stock Up, and Bargain, so it's relatively easy to find the type of effects you need and avoid drawing too many of the ones you don't.
Basics isn't necessary at all to this version of the deck, and cutting it completely is reasonable. Since you can't curve out with double blue very often, it's much worse at playing the aggro game with Stormchaser's Talent.
So why are we running exactly 1? The main reason is just that it's a situationally strong card when you can pair it with Stormchaser's Talent, and flexible enough to never be dead. Since we have so much selection, we get to pass up on Boomerang Basics when it's awkward, and only take it when there's a crucial tempo swing to be had or we want to grind with Talent and otter tokens.
It's also nice to have a card in your deck that lets you go pseudo-infinite with the old Floodcaller combo (it's not actual infinite because you'll draw your deck), in case there are games where you need to go really over-the-top (when you're comboing, you often have access to your whole deck anyways since you can pretty much cast Stock Up after Stock Up, and can go find the Boomerang).
Floodpits was an inclusion for a meta we expected to feature lots of Simic, Airbending, and Dimir, where it's a really nice way to win the early development turns. It can also be a nice situational Analyze tutor target later in the game -- but I would probably cut it in the current meta, it's not important or good enough to justify including right now.
I like having one removal spell that can always kill "chunkier" creatures like a 2/4 Ouroboroid (or teaming up with Torch to take down truly big stuff). This used to be an Obliterating Bolt, but the 1 damage mode is nice to have so you can still win the turn after Airbending makes infinite 1/1s, and situationally good against decks like Simic if they happen to have a 1-toughness heavy draw. I think that added flexibility is enough to prefer Iroh's in this slot over Obolt's ability to exile and go after planeswalkers.
Furnace/Sauna is the classic glue card -- it doesn't excel at one particular role, but does everything if you need it to. It's a slightly crappier "big creature" removal spell that also can be emergency card draw if you're flooding, helps fuel Analyzes with Torch the Tower, and is nice to pair with Boomerang Basics. I would try to include 1 in most lists, every bit of help fueling Analyzes is pretty important.
Pawpatch is good against Izzet discard, Izzet Portal, and Airbending, as well as being totally serviceable in lots of situations and cycleable as a last resort. Going into the event this felt like a pretty good spread, but I'm not sure it holds its weight now. Playing one of these in the main totally depends on what kind of meta you expect, it's very cuttable. I'd probably pack a few in the side for most metas.
I'm pretty reluctant to give a list I'd play going forward, because these things are so contextual to the tournament you're playing and the metagame you expect. So you're not getting a text version because I'm a grumpy parent who wants you to build character, but here's what I'd start with for a metagame that involves more lessons and fewer badgermole decks:
The changes here are pretty minor -- Cut the maindeck Pawpatch for a Heritage Reclamation that can hit artifacts (and save you sometimes against Accumulate Wisdom or Superior Spiderman), and cut Floodpits Drowner (mainly good in creature mirrors) for Ral (mainly good against decks trying to run you out of resources). In the board, I changed a Soul-Guide to a Ghost Vacuum which seems slightly better against Lessons (annoy them over the course of the game rather than 1-shot and let them rebuild), and added some Annuls in place of the 2nd Ral and the OBolt.
Matchups & Sideboarding
As usual, talking about matchup plans is much more useful than giving a sideboard mapping, but I will link to the mapping we used for Worlds:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NHji_V1712vIMx39ZCjPxfMRZBjBSVL20R8ZL4TaHuE/edit?gid=0#gid=0
And here's a more simplified mapping with this hypothetical new list (without deck sub-archetypes, so proceed with caution and always think about your opponent's specific list!):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h3JizETCrrIt8bkEaDFUMY9_VreU2dRLq7-sPEABOM4/edit?usp=sharing
Ok, the pigs have been fed the slop 😉 Time for the real work!
Izzet Lessons
I've mentioned that I didn't play this matchup at all at Worlds, and I've only encountered it a couple of times online since, so take your experiences over mine here, especially if they've come from focused testing.
The general idea is that this is a typical Izzet deck that will be good at 1-for-1ing with your creatures, but unless they can get their engines going, they can't do that forever. So your goal should be to profitably exchange with their interaction while planning to answer their engines. Cards like Stock Up and Thundertrap Trainer are your MVPs, because they can both select towards your answers (especially postboard) and put you ahead on either cards or board presence at the same time.
In game 1, we don't have many tools to turn off their engines, so unless you happen to have the Heritage Reclamation for their first monument, it's probably best to try to end the game somewhat quickly, even if it means losing to them having enough answers, which they often will. The exception to the "no tools for turning off their engines" of course is that we can target their Gran-Grans with Torches, which can really limit their explosivity. There can be spots where you try to fork them between leaving up interaction and digging towards their engine pieces, and generally it's best to force them to have/spend the interaction, because things don't get better for you if they get to dig instead.
One notable thing is that their removal can't go after planeswalkers, so landing the 1-of maindeck Ral can go a long way. Keeping speculative hands that include him might make sense.
Postboard, things should get a decent amount better for us because we gain the ability to meaningfully interact with them. We can potentially play much more of a value game, slowly establishing bodies on the board and forcing them to 1-for-1 or sweep away small boards, while crafting a hand that can combo out of nowhere if they tap low to establish their Monuments or level up their Talents.
This is definitely one of the toughest matchups, and I don't think we're favored - but a list built with Lessons in mind, as opposed to the list I brought to Worlds, definitely should stand a solid chance.
Out:
1 Badgermole Cub
1 Boomerang Basics
1 Valley Floodcaller
1 Furnace/Sauna
1 Iroh's Demonstration
In:
1 Ghost Vacuum
1 Negate
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
2 Annul
Izzet Discard
This is the Izzet matchup we WERE prepared for at Worlds, and I think we had a very good plan. Take it away, Ryan a few hours before deck submission:
There are some reasons why this is a structurally difficult matchup for otters (it's a pressure + interaction deck), but the weaknesses in the Izzet deck are big enough that I think things are even at worst, possibly slightly favored for Otters.
The basic thing going on here is that this deck is sacrificing interaction density for pressure and card engines. They have 4 Torch the Tower, which is the best interactive piece in the format against Otters, but they pretty much only have 4 Torch the Tower. This means that they can basically never spend a removal spell on a Thundertrap Trainer or an Otter token (they technically have Boomerang Basics, but are usually heavily incentivized to target their own talents with it).
Now, the deck also has lots of ways to see more cards, so it's not uncommon at all for them to find 2 Torches throughout a game. Sometimes you will need to be dead to the second torch, and they will often have it. But beyond this, you should feel fairly safe in developing a wide board that lets you combo from hand the turn you deploy vitality. This is not something a deck like Otters typically feels when playing against blue-red, so it's important to remind yourself that their hand is likely more full of threats and card draw than answers. If you have combo set up (and our list is built to have it sooner rather than later), all you have to worry about is not dying quickly.
Not dying quickly is admittedly challenging - With its best draws, Izzet is capable of killing very quickly. But if you can kill the FOMOs and Nathans, their clock gets a lot slower. Sure, Tiger Seal is a very powerful, high-rate card, but you can tank 4-5 hits from it while you set up your combo, and that's a thing you will often choose to do in this matchup (as opposed to, say, double blocking it with a Thundertrap and a prowessed Otter).
It's important to know too that you shouldn't be trying to play an entirely controlling game - Izzet Discard is better than you are at rebuilding their board constantly, so if both players go down to low resources, they're advantaged.
To summarize the matchup: They have pressure and the inevitability, but you have the ability to dictate the pace of the game by choosing where to interact and where to further your own plan, and the ability to win in a single turn.
Postboard, they notably get access to pyroclasm, which can change the dynamic and punish you for slowly developing a wide board. Look out for this, and try to take advantage of draws where they have clasm but not pressure by finding windows to cast your Stock Ups or deploy more resilient threats like Vitality/Floodcaller.
We lose a bit of equity here changing the maindeck Pawpatch Formation to a Heritage Reclamation, but it can still go after FOMO or Siege, so we keep it in.
Out:
2 Song of Totentanz
1 Rakshasa's Bargain
1 Boomerang Basics
In:
2 Pawpatch Formation
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1 Valley Floodcaller
Dimir Midrange
The deck that disappeared at Worlds, but MTGO still has an ongoing love affair with, Dimir is a classic "good, but you have to know what you're doing" matchup for Otters.
This is the one matchup where we actively do want to go for a more midrangey value plan. Crucial to being able to implement this is NEVER FALLING BEHIND ON BOARD EARLY.
Dimir is a deck with lots of ways to punish you for letting it eke just sliiiiiightly ahead of you in the early turns, and we want to shut that down as forcefully as possible.
The 1-of Floodpits Drowner was great at doing this, but without it (which was most games anyways), we need to rely on Torch the Tower, Stormchaser's Talent, Bushwhack, and Badgermole Cub to stop their attacks and prevent them from deploying Kaito. From there, if we're lucky enough to land a Vitality, the mana advantage it generates is often enough to run away with the game, but absent that, we want to use our Stock Ups to keep digging for ways to stay even-to-ahead on board. Dimir doesn't have great ways to push forward without its board presence, so if you can hold them off from having profitable attacks long enough, you will often find yourself winning by default, having accrued more resources naturally.
Torch is our best card, because it can answer any early threat, finish off Kaito, or blow out an Enduring Curiosity. Don't be afraid to use your torch ASAP so as to not fall behind on board, but make sure you have a plan for hardcast Kaito/Curiosity.
Postboard, things are pretty list-dependent. If they're playing Bats and Tidebinders, you might want both Pyroclasms, but if they're playing Beastbinders and no bats, you might want neither. Ral is a nice threat if you can find a window to sneak him in, present a chump blocker to keep them off of a profitable attack, then untap and have an easy way to develop resources while continuing to answer their board presence. Valley Floodcaller is unintuitively pretty good in the matchup even though it doesn't answer their early board, because on the play it's a way to punish them for Kaito-ing you. On the draw, it's possible you don't want all three, but it's still nice because it punishes them for boarding out removal in a matchup where their 1-for-1 removal generally isn't the best.
I should probably mention here that we sometimes cut a land (the Analyzes and Bushwhacks are ETB tapped lands with a spell buyout mode) in matchups where hitting land drops 5+ is not that important. This is a matchup where Bushwhack is actively good, so Analyze is the odd one out.
Out:
1 Analyze the Pollen
1 Rakshasa's Bargain
1 Heritage Reclamation
In:
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1(?) Valley Floodcaller
1(?) Pyroclasm
Mono Red
We didn't expect much Red at Worlds, but apparently it's been picking up steam online as a way to fight Lessons recently. To be honest, I'm not sure this is bad news for Otters; when we last tested Red was right after the Screaming Nemesis ban, and things actually felt pretty favored, with Red losing Nemesis and Otters gaining Badgermole Cub which added speed. That being said, we weren't playing with a very optimized red list, and the new one with 4 Full Bore and more burn might be better into us.
This is a pretty straightforward "fundamentals" matchup - you want to keep your life total as high as possible, answer their threats, and either run them out of cards or combo faster than they can kill you, depending on the shape of both players' hands. The nice thing is that all their creatures are very small and double-blockable, with the notable exception of Nova Hellkite. It used to be that red had 8 extremely-difficult-to-answer threats in 4 Nemesis and 4 Hellkite, and that was very problematic because it stretched our answers very thin, but now it's just the Hellkite we have to worry about -- though it's still worrying, which is why we bring in 2 Pawpatch Formations despite them not doing that much else (though obviously the food can be quite nice)
Some potentially useful advice from Jason on the Red matchup, dated a little bit because it was when we still had to worry about Screaming Nemesis:
Out:
1 Song of Totentanz
1 Rakshasa's Bargain
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1 Heritage Reclamation
In:
2 Pyroclasm
2 Pawpatch Formation
Simic Aggro
The deck people were whispering was 'too good' just a few weeks ago is now merely one of the many decks being played in standard. It turns out that when you're not quite as fast as Mono Red and not able to play much interaction in your maindeck, it's very possible to beat you, no matter how nuts some of your draws seem.
Make no mistake though, Simic is a very powerful deck, and if you don't respect it, you'll get stomped. Luckily this is a very good matchup for us, since we get to exploit their lack of interaction.
The basic idea is that we're just faster than they are when left unchecked. If we have a hand where we can combo, it's very hard for them to stop us, and Otters will do a lot of winning the turn after they fall to 2-4 life from a big Ouroboroid swing. Meanwhile, if we don't have the combo hand, we likely have a pretty interactive one, and can try to slow Simic down and possibly even run them out of gas (though this is hard to do).
Generally, I'd recommend "bolting the bird" with your Torch the Towers just to slow them down, especially if you can project that you'll be spending your mana to develop towards combo in the following turns. Sometimes you want to sit on an Ouroboroid with torch, but the time walk of getting their first elf out of the way, or even their Badgermole Cub, is often just as effective as answering the Ouro, especially if it lets you use your mana on other things later.
Mostly, you should not be trying to keep hands that are primarily interactive, because Simic is much better at fighting through removal than it is at stopping your combo. If your hand doesn't have a Vitality or a clear way to get to one while defending itself, it's probably a mull. You should be pretty willing to aggressively mulligan to hands that curve a 1 or 2-drop into Vitality.
The matchup is a bit more even preboard, since Otters just isn't that likely to always have hands with natural Vitality, and Simic is more consistent at having hands that kill on turn 5ish. But things get a lot better postboard when we get to bring out the fluff from our deck, and bring in Pyroclasms that can win games on their own sometimes. They get to bring in a bit more interaction, but it's hard for them to do this without meaningfully slowing themselves down or hurting their consistency, so it's not a huge deal - just make sure you pay attention to what to play around in their SB, and if they give you time, it's probably because they have something to slow you down as well.
Out:
1 Rakshasa's Bargain
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1 Heritage Reclamation
In:
1 Valley Floodcaller
2 Pyroclasm
Jeskai Control
This is a pretty classic control deck -- a bunch of 2-mana interaction, some powerful but clunky card draw, and finishers that cost a lot of mana, but will definitely take over the game if left unchecked. It's a strong recipe, and a slightly better control deck into Otters than past versions that were more interaction-heavy and finisher-light.
Traditionally, Otters has been able to play an extremely patient game against Control, where you punish them severely for not having a clock by forcing them to continually trade their interaction for your creatures that generate value before getting removed. This lets you craft a hand that can eventually combo through multiple pieces of interaction, and punish them for spending down low on mana in a super late game.
This gets a bit trickier to do when your opponents have threats like Marang River Regent, Shiko, and Jeskai Revelation (sometimes with Cursed Recording), but it's still the basic formula -- the difference is just that you have to be a little more urgent about developing the ability to combo. The idea isn't to get into a super-lategame where you have much more powerful inevitability than the "control" deck, but instead to get into the "normal" lategame against a deck with a bunch of expensive spells that you can punish by making them choose between pressuring you and respecting your combo.
The version Sanctum brought to the event, playing Shiko, Gwen Stacy, and Legend of Kuruk, is a much more difficult matchup, because they're not really a control deck - if piloted well they're a highly interactive midrange deck with lots of ways to pressure you. But luckily it seems like this version hasn't really caught on.
We just happen to have a lot to sideboard in this matchup, which is nice, and makes things much easier postboard, especially playing against Jeskai Revelation.
Out:
1 Badgermole Cub
3 Torch the Tower
1 Iroh's Demonstration
1 Heritage Reclamation
In:
1 Valley Floodcaller
2 Spider Sense
1 Negate
1 Pawpatch Formation
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
Living End
No, I'm not calling this "Sultai Reanimator", that's lame. It's standard Living End!!
This is one of our toughest matchups without the right sideboard hate, but the good news is that the hate is extremely impactful (this deck is just very weak to hate, which is why it's not dominating the format right now).
In game 1, our winrate is roughly their failrate, which is luckily not zero. It's nice that Heritage Reclamation gives us a game 1 out to their weaker combo lines, but you shouldn't rely on it, because they can easily mill over two big threats, and you can't do anything about that if they put Superior Spiderman on the stack. Try to mulligan to hands that have a reasonable chance of comboing by turn 4 or turn 5, and otherwise, just hope to get lucky.
Postboard, things get way better, because our list is very respectful, and I want to keep it that way! The main thing is to just mulligan until you have a hate piece (Spider Sense doesn't count, Torpor Orb does), or only keep a hand that is both very fast and has a good chance of finding one quickly (think Thundertrap Trainer into Vitality).
Out:
3 Torch the Tower
1 Furnace/Sauna
1 Iroh's Demonstration
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1 Boomerang Basics
In:
2 Soul-Guide Lantern
1 Ghost Vacuum
1 Valley Floodcaller
2 Spider Sense
1 Torpor Orb
Airbending Combo
I lost my first 3 matches against this deck, and then went 10-3 in matches from there. Airbending is a very powerful deck that will kill you quickly if you don't respect it, but it's very brittle, has a lot of failcases, and often can't effectively pressure you if you sit on their combo with interaction.
The matchup is tricky to navigate, and you have to be very careful not to let them win the game out of nowhere. As opposed to most other matchups, stopping them from doing their thing is much more important than ensuring you can do your thing, so unintuitive play patterns like leaving up Torch for an entire turn cycle just so that you can deploy Vitality while still holding it up in case it gets Aang-ed can often be correct (a mistake I made against Javier).
They can't interact with you very much, so once you're pretty sure you've shut off their ability to infinite combo, you can usually feel pretty safe deploying yours.
One notable thing is that it can sometimes be right to target their Gene Pollinators, because they can be very reliant on them to fix their colored sources. Pay attention to which lands they've played, and consider targeting the Gene early, because it can often fizzle them or prevent them from casting their Aang, at the Crossroads on time.
Out of the board, we get some excellent tools in Pyroclasm and Torpor Orb. You can think about bringing in Spider Senses to counter their Nature's Rhythms, Aang and Appa triggers, but they're not necessary and can be clunky against fast mana dork draws.
Out:
1 Analyze the Pollen
1 Boomerang Basics
1 Rakshasa's Bargain
1 Roaring Furnace/Steaming Sauna
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1 Heritage Reclamation
In:
1 Valley Floodcaller
2 Pawpatch Formation
2 Pyroclasm
1 Torpor Orb
Leyline Red
This is the last deck I'll cover in full, because it's the one "rogue" deck that I think requires a very clear understanding of the gameplan from the Otters side to succeed, but once you have the plan down, it becomes an actively good matchup.
The basic plan here is very opposite to what you want to do in the traditional red matchup. There, you want to use your early removal on their small creatures to try and keep your life total as high as possible. Here, you want to spend the early turns developing blockers while taking damage, and then get to a state where you can sit behind your blockers, ideally to force them into proactively casting their pump spells, while leaving up interaction.
Notably, this plan can fail if you're facing down a Leyline and multiple pump spells, so sometimes the right plan is "kill their creatures early and hope to run them out of board presence". This is more common when they have an opening-hand Leyline, which both threatens early lethal even with a single small creature from 20 life, and makes them less likely to have multiple bodies to deploy. You shouldn't rigidly try to implement the "assemble blockers while taking damage, THEN interact" plan, but it's very important to know that taking some early damage is much safer here than it is against the Lightning Strike + Nova Hellkite deck, and you care a lot more about having interaction leftover once you've gotten on board.
Out:
1 Analyze the Pollen
2 Song of Totentanz
1 Ral, Crackling Wit
1 Heritage Reclamation
In:
2 Pyroclasm
2 Pawpatch Formation
1 Valley Floodcaller
Finally, here are some quick notes on other assorted matchups:
- Izzet "Prowess" (Splash Portal, Astrologian's Planisphere, Ral, etc)
- A weird mix of the Izzet Discard, Izzet Lessons, and Jeskai Control matchups. It's Lessons but worse at interacting, Discard but better at interacting and worse at pressuring, or Jeskai with fewer finishers and more trinkety stuff. Be patient (remember you're not actually under that much pressure unless they have a Frostcliff Siege), prioritize developing your own board presence instead of answering theirs, and threaten a resilient combo before they can finish you off.
- Otters Mirror
- Jeskai Artifacts
- This is more of a combo deck than a control deck, in the sense that they rely pretty heavily on Repurposing Bay and Simulacrum Synthesizer to finish games. This means that their amount of pressure is usually pretty face-up, and you can gauge whether or not you need to quickly try to find combo based on that, or whether you can play a more patient game and avoid running into their interaction. Notably they, unlike most decks, have ways to answer Vitality somewhat cleanly in Perilous Snare, and ways to clean up wide boards with Pinnacle Starcage. But unlike most other decks, they don't have many ways to play at instant speed, so often EOT Floodcaller -> Vitality -> Song is your best bet for a combo they won't be able to interact with.
- Dimir Bounce and other "pixie-like" decks
- This matchup is great- you are a better grindy deck than they are! Just don't let them pick apart your hand with Tinybones Joins Up and you'll be able to power through their clunky removal, even if it never costs them a card to cast. Also it's almost impossible for them to answer a Ral or a Song of Totentanz, so resolving those is often GG
Mulligans
This isn't going to be a deep dive on mulligans with Otters, because it's mostly about the matchup plans I talked about above, and the deck does generally have the property that lands + spells are often keeps.
However I did want to highlight some of the cases where this isn't true, and to give a very general piece of advice that I think is very important to understand when playing the current version of the deck that is a lot more combo-focused and less willing to fight on the "value" axis than most. Hands like this are often very bad now:
Even though our list is playing more interactive spells and more card draw spells, you can't afford to play it like a deck that is happy to go: interact, interact, then cast my card draw spell before I've affected the board at all. Because of the shape of the current format, where most decks won't run out of gas as the game goes long, and every deck has ways to convert early advantages into actually shutting the door and ending the game, you can't afford to fall behind on tempo before you cast your card draw. Instead, you need to already have developed onto the board, so that when your card draw finds what you need, you can quickly convert it into a victory. The easiest way to fail this test is to keep a hand that looks like "lands + spells", but doesn't actually develop strongly.
You'll also encounter some hands that are full of cards that get maximized with Vitality (mainly Cub and Song), but have no way to meaningfully dig towards one. These are also often mulligans:
Even though these hands have Analyzes, they don't have a realistic path to turning those Analyzes into Vitality, and their fair game is quite weak if you don't find vitality.
Other than these two scenarios, most "lands + spells" hands are keeps, which is nice. Just to round things out, here are some keeps:
(^This one's not amazing, but having vitality is so strong that I'd probably keep OTP, not OTD)
One last note -- our list does have a lot of situational 1-ofs, so in open decklist contexts, just beware of keeping a hand into a matchup where you know 1-2 of the cards are likely to be pseudo-dead.
Sample Gameplay
https://www.17lands.com/user/game_replay/20251220/7282411acef24f7bb8b3d895ff44ab38/0
I think this postboard game against lessons gives a good illustration of the kind of flexible decision-making and matchup-tailored approach that I've been talking about. I don't know if I played perfectly in this game, there are multiple decision points that are genuinely difficult to come to a clear conclusion about! But that's precisely why I think it's a good game to talk about.
Our opening hand isn't great at development, but it's got basically everything we want beyond that - interaction, a vitality, a draw spell, and good mana. If this were a matchup where we were under more pressure early, it would be close, but probably still a keep. Against lessons, it's a pretty easy keep.
They go Island pass, meaning they probably don't have a Gran-Gran or a Talent. We could play a tapped Breeding Pool, or play a Verge instead and leave up a seemingly-unnecessary Torch. A year ago, as a limited player, I'd have snapped off the Breeding Pool. The upside to leaving up torch against a nearly creature-less deck that has already signaled it doesn't have one is so small, and getting the tapland out of the way feels nice and cozy. It's still possible this is correct -- but given that there are 8 cards they could draw that we might be able to use the torch on (~15%), it's a genuinely interesting question whether the 2 life is worth more than covering that 15% (tbf it's definitely less than 15%, they might have a 2-mana play they prefer) possibility - especially when you factor in that we can just play the breeding pool tapped next turn if we don't draw a 2.
I ended up playing the verge -- I wouldn't make this play against another Izzet deck that pressures our life total even a little bit more. Sure, 18 is a lot less than 20 against a deck that finishes the game in chunks of 3, but if we're facing down a Monument (or multiple), knowing the matchup well, we know that this is rarely a winning position anyways, so the equity from dying a turn later (assuming of course that we never take damage from any other source) is pretty low.
I think this is a legitimately close and fascinating decision -- just another of the many invisible decisions that are so hard to see in Magic, don't end up mattering a vast majority of the time, but despite their simplicity, require having deeply nuanced and impossible-to-be-sure-about opinions about the texture of the matchup and the value of different resources.
Obviously, it didn't matter at all -- they played a land and passed, and we drew not-a-2-drop. They pass again on turn 3, and this is our decision:
What should we do here?
Lessons probably has a few Quenches postboard, and while we don't like running a Vitality into one given that it's the most important card in our deck, having two of them makes that play a lot more forgivable. We could also play a draw spell, but having this many cards in hand makes that not very high-upside -- we want to deploy our spells, then rebuild.
I played Vitality, and they Quenched -- Leaving us open to resolve Ral next turn with an untapped land, or bushwhack and play another 3.
They miss their land drop and pass, and we draw a very important Annul:
This draw makes me feel a lot better about where the game is going. It's exactly what we need -- while I expect their hand to be full of spells that can slow down our development, having a 1-mana answer to their engine pieces so that we don't allow them to get set up at the same time is exactly the thing we need to shore up the biggest "hole" in our current plan.
But still we have a decision to make here - how do we try to develop? Do we leave up Annul going forward even if it slows us down? We'd strongly prefer to hit a land drop, but playing Bushwhack into a 3 doesn't let us hold up Annul. We could Stock Up and try to hit an untapped blue source, but most of the blue sources in our deck (Sanctum, Spirebluff, Starting Town) come in tapped, so it's not super likely to actually work. I don't think we can afford to leave up Annul on this turn
The highest upside play is Bushwhack into Vitality, which gives us 5 mana next turn that we could use to play Ral and leave up Annul, a pretty devastating sequence. This play is pretty bad into Combustion Technique, but given that we have two dig spells and a Ral, we will still be able to rebuild from there, so it wouldn't be game-losing.
We'd really get blown out if they have Technique into Monument, but that's a pretty specific sequence, and while we know their hand is full of spells, it's pretty doubtful that they have a monument given that they didn't slam it when they had the opportunity.
Given that this isn't a super comfortable matchup, I don't think we should be planning to play around everything -- instead, we want to force them to have a hand that beats us. Especially because we have the tools to rebuild, but the rest of our hand is clunky, I like jamming vitality here (despite normally strongly preferring to protect it as a key piece). To put it in a single sentence, it's the highest upside play, and the floor is also reasonably high in most scenarios.
We hit on that reasonably high floor here. They cast an end-of-turn Accumulate Wisdom on Anticipate mode, presumably trying to find an answer to Vitality, and they do find a Combustion Technique. They pass back to us, and we get to slam Ral... but they have a Spell Pierce for him!
Now we might be in a bit of trouble -- I was hoping at least one of the three threats we jammed back-to-back-to-back was going to stick. If they can untap and land a monument or talent, we might be in some trouble this game. We're on plan C: rebuild with draw spells. They untap and thankfully just play a 2-mana Ancestral Recall, then pass it back to us. We draw a Negate for turn.
This is a situation you'll get into a lot against lessons postboard -- they're a deck full of good answers to your stuff, but they only have a few engine pieces, and it's not easy for them to have both the perfect answers and the tools to set up the engine. Now we're in a pretty classic control mirror, where both players have draw spells and permission and need to figure out which cards to care about and how to pull ahead in resources without letting the opponent stick threats that matter.
The first order of business is hitting land drops, so I want to cast a Stock Up here. That gets Negated, but this is fine, since we still have an Annul to sit on a monument, and it comes up huge:
This is the power of a single sideboard card in a matchup like this. When you know what to care about, having the ability to lose a counter war that you don't care about as much, then surprise them with the 1-mana answer to their engine piece they were hoping would be the way they pull ahead is huge. We get to untap and resolve another Stock Up, which if it hits an untapped land, lets us leave up Negate for another engine piece.
Unfortunately, it doesn't hit an untapped land, but we have a few options:
We're definitely taking a third vitality here, and this is the one we're going to need to protect. But what's the second card? An Annul would also let us sit on an engine piece, which is nice, but the Talent is also tempting, as we're going to need some way to start putting bodies on the board so that we can pull ahead on mana. This is a close one - I ended up choosing the talent so that we could start to get proactive, but I think the Annul might have been a better choice just in case they had a second monument, which we really don't want them to resolve (and they did just cast another Accumulate wisdom, so their grip is pretty full).
We cast Analyze to hit our land drop and deploy the talent. This gives them a window to resolve their own talent, and level it up. Engine, at least partially, online:
... but so is ours!
The game has taken another shift. Now both decks are "doing their thing", not to the extent that they're threatening lethal, but one side developing lethal is now an inevitability rather than a question. Our job is to be the one that gets there first, and we have some nice tools for it -- a torch to protect vitality, a negate to contest the first monument, another dig piece, and a talent to both put more bodies on the board and redraw spells when we need them.
We deploy vitality and another talent. We could leave up both Negate and Torch here, but it comes at the cost of not putting another body on board, which is both a land for us next turn and an additional step towards threatening a real combo finish.
I'm not sure this was correct -- but I was worried about speed at this point, since a level 2 Artist's Talent means we only have so much time to develop towards our combo.
They try to get us with a Combustion Technique on end step, and I considered negating it before realizing that torch is a much better play, since we want to preserve the negate to counter a future monument or win a counter war.
Notably, once we have Vitality on the field as an enchantment, I don't believe there are any ways for Lessons to keep us off of that effect -- so any creature we put on the board now is a full mana source, and cards like Song of Totentanz threaten to double our mana "permanently".
Knowing the value our creatures, they pyroclasm away just two otters -- a pretty ideal exchange for us -- and deploy a Gran-Gran, which mostly only matters for its card selection now.
We cast our last dig spell hoping to find an untapped land, and hit one this time, as well as a Stock Up. We shock to take our first damage of the game and pass back:
Now the important decision is going to be what we choose to spend our Negate on. Monument is obvious, it's the card we care the most about, but would we counter another talent? An Accumulate Wisdom? An Abandon Attachments?
I think my line is roughly "Accumulate or Monument". The idea being that their current most constrained resource is card quantity, so we want to try and cut them off on that and force them to keep selecting between strong cards on their Talent triggers without actually going up cards.
They untap and immediately slam monument, so luckily our decision is pretty easy:
They can't find anything to follow up with off their Gran-Gran, so we untap, draw a land, and get to cast our Stock Up. We see:
We're definitely taking Song because it's the quickest way to threaten a combo in a single turn, but do we take mole or thundertrap?
Mole would let us go for a huge burst of mana next turn with Song, which we could then use to buy back a draw spell with talent -- but it's pretty weak to a single burn spell, which we know they're likely to have a lot of, and can pretty easily find off of talent. Trainer lets us keep digging for combo pieces, and importantly gives us a way to "half develop", adding a mana source to the board this turn as well as drawing us a card with selection, so I like it better here.
Trainer finds us a Heritage Reclamation, which is huge because we can now go after their talent, or answer a third monument if they have one, so we're not necessarily in danger of being dead quickly anymore even if they manage to keep us off of comboing. It would be awesome if we could play it this turn (and we would, taking them off of the ability to keep digging to their next spell that matters is huge), but sadly we only have taplands.
Note -- I should have played a Starting Town here instead of Sanctum, so that we could play a future bargain for cheaper.
They torch our trainer, then untap and slam a monument, worst case scenario for us, but much better now that we have an answer to it:
Unfortunately, they chain this into their 4th Accumulate Wisdom, and the Lessons engine is officially fully online:
We could play conservatively and Song for 4, so that if it gets countered we still get to Reclamation the monument, but given that they've gone down to 2 cards, I think now is the time to full send, especially because we drew a backup song. This lets us kill the monument and level up talent -- which card should we draw from our fully stocked graveyard? Negate to cover the final Monument? Stock Up? Heritage Rec? A third Song, and just go for a huge wide board where we keep turning our creatures sideways?
How about the lowly Analyze...
This lets us go for a Floodcaller kill next turn, but it also doubles as a draw spell (Thundertrap Trainer) if our board gets Pyroclasmed. We're at the point where we want to end the game, so let's try to end it (with an acceptable backup plan if things go wrong):
When the second Granny was played, I knew it was in the bag. They wouldn't play this if they could sweep our board, and now we get to level up talent for [any spell], then analyze for Floodcaller, cast our second song, and threaten to kill. Even if Analyze gets countered, we still have enough mana to buy it back with the second talent and kill with any spell off the top.
We draw a Bushwhack, our Analyze resolves, and we win easily!
Without the Annul and the Heritage Reclamation, this would have been a nearly unwinnable game, and these are two cards we didn't have in our Worlds list. I think this goes to show how swingy matchups can get from the Otters side when you have a strong plan & the tools to implement that plan, vs. when you don't. We played this whole game focused on developing our own engine, which we know is hard to keep off the field entirely (especially with the Vitality + Torch interaction), while digging towards tools we'd need to keep their Monuments off the board. The difference between having exactly 1 of these tools (sideboard negate) vs. having 4 (maindeck Heritage, SB negate & 2x Annul)
If the Otters pilot approached this as a matchup where they needed to make themselves resilient to interaction and try to push combo through, they'd die to the first monument. If the list didn't have enough tools to fight these battles, it would be hopeless -- despite the fact that the post-Worlds list is only a few cards off from the Worlds list, I think it has probably a 45% Lessons matchup instead of a 35% matchup.
Final Thoughts
While it still plays many of the same cards, the reasons Otters remains strong today are pretty different from its past strengths. Last year's Otters was a flexible midrange deck that could pull ahead on any axis in the game (mana, cards, or life total) while using the "false tempo" it gained from threatening its combo to augment any of these plans.
The version of Otters we played at Worlds, now moving into 2026, is more of a resilient creature combo deck. Your goal is to end most games by comboing off, and the way you do this is by carefully deploying your gameplan in ways that are hard to interact with, while simultaneously picking apart your opponent's plan with flexible interaction and lots of selection to find the tools you need. In some matchups, this looks like holding off their early onslaught juuust enough to let yourself turn the corner, and in others, it looks like taking advantage of all the time they give you to and carefully setting up to punish them when they eventually try and turn the corner.
It's a bit like picking a lock or defusing a bomb. When you know the ins and outs of your opponent's plan, you can carefully mold your own to seep into the nooks and crannies where they're weakest, and avoid fighting the battles you can't win.
It was a bit counterintuitive to me why this current version of Otters, which is much more oriented towards a single combo end state, was still just as deviously tricky to play as the old version, where you had to dynamically figure out what your plan was to win in every game, and the answer would often look radically different.
With this version of the deck, the answer to "how am I going to win" is usually the same: You'll cast an Enduring Vitality and do some broken things with it, after which the game will be over. You shouldn't get too locked into this, there are still plenty of games you win with big Songs, Ral ultimates, or Enduring Vitality/Valley Floodcaller beats, but these tend to be the scrappy games that result from your opponents dealing with your combo.
Still, Otters is much more of a capital-c Combo deck these days, and figuring out how to manage the pace of the game in such a way that you'll get there in time is the biggest skill to master. This requires genuinely deep knowledge of your opponent's deck as well as yours, which is why I think playing Otters is a great way to become a better Standard player and better Constructed player in general!
Not every game requires master-level play, though -- there are now plenty of easy games, too.
Sometimes they DON'T immediately kill your Badgermole Cub, and then all they can say is...
RATS!!!
Originally published on Patreon.