Today's deck is going to look a lot like Domain decks you've seen in the past, but with a janky twist. Instead of Zur, Eternal Schemer, Overlord of the Mistmoors, or Atraxa, Grand Unifier, we're going to play Doubling Season in Standard.
Since the core of the deck is full of known powerhouse cards, why bother messing around with a top end that's been proven? Well, it started as a goofy experiment to see if we could make Doubling Season work in Standard, but after playing it for a while on the ladder, I can confidently say there are some games (especially the mirror) where the extra power of Doubling Season, Doppelgang, and Three Blind Mice
The Card Draw and Ramp
Up the Beanstalk is one of the most powerful individual cards in Standard. If you've been playing Standard since its release, you've seen it alongside Leyline Binding. Exiling any threat while drawing a card at instant speed for one mana is a bonkers engine that we're absolutely abusing here. Overlord of the Hauntwoods makes the Domain much more consistent while giving our deck a powerful body and more tokens to work with.
The key is to mulligan aggressively until you find Up the Beanstalk. The number of cards you can draw off of that in a given game can more than make up for going down two or three cards from your starting seven. Filling your hand quicker than your opponent can mobilize threats is critical for this deck to be successful.
The Removal Suite
Leyline Binding and Up the Beanstalk have been so inseparable, I can't help but mention it here, but there are other removal spells in Standard that behave the same way. Cost reduction has been part of Wizards of the Coast's design philosophy for decades and it's a great way to create expensive removal for limited that has narrow applications when certain conditions are met.
Well, This Town Ain't Big Enough requires that we have a permanent of our own to get a Boomerang-style effect, which can be Up the Beanstalk itself if need be, but could also reset a Leyline Binding or, ideally, reload a Stormchaser's Talent. The combination of permanents that want to be bounced and this card is kind of nutty because it works as tempo advantage while simultaneously protecting your permanents. It can also bounce an Overlord of the Hauntwoods with impending counters still on it to retrigger Beanstalk and get it down with a body faster.
The Simic Terror deck uses this to great effect, but I think other Beanstalk decks should consider it as well. It consistently overperforms.
Two-mana spells that remove attackers from the game are fine (i.e.: Not on My Watch), if sometimes too narrow, but Seized from Slumber is effectively that plus an Up the Beanstalk trigger, which makes it excellent for our deck. It also cares about the creature being tapped, not necessarily attacking, so you can use it to bolt the pesky Llanowar Elves after it's tapped once or on a Warden of the Inner Sky that's tapped to boost its own stats. Given how hard we're ramping, being able to target an untapped creature for five is also doable if the game's gone on long.
The Top-End Twist
Doubling Season is our primary build around with a focus on tokens. Overlord of the Hauntwoods creating two Everywhere tokens, or even giving our Stormchaser's Talent or Doppelgang some extra juice can really go a long way. Five mana is a lot to invest in something like this, but with our deck being loaded with removal, surviving long enough to pull it off can be easier than you might think.
Our deck includes other token generators beyond the overlords that can take advantage of this.
Okay, I'm not the first person to ramp into Doppelgang in Domain, but this alongside Doubling Season goes absolutely mental. Be warned that copying Doubling Season and then attempting a second Doppelgang may just crash the servers, especially if an Overlord of the Hauntwoods is one of the targets because you double the number of them, plus the number of Everywhere tokens. It can get messy fast.
Our deck is also perfectly fine with using it as our five drop and making one copy of the best permanent on the field because we need to establish tokens for Three Blind Mice and we can recur it with Stormchaser's Talent.
Three Blind Mice was a janky brewer's best friend when Tamiyo, Compleated Sage was legal in the format because of its ability to go infinite with itself over time. When you make a token copy of Three Blind Mice, chapters two and three can copy it which slowly and inexorably floods the board with tiny mice that will often be buffed and vigilant. It was never a competitive deck, but it was a fun goof-around deck. Well, I think we need to revisit this card because copying the tokens created by Overlord of the Hauntwoods or Doppelgang can generate massive value fairly quickly.
It especially helps in the Up the Beanstalk mirrors because those decks often rely on creature removal for survivability which this can handily ignore while generating repeatable value. Additionally, Doubling Season doubles the lore counters when it enters, giving you both chapter one and chapter two on ETB, meaning you can actually go infinite with it if you have a token copy of Three Blind Mice to copy.
Conclusion
This deck is an absolute joy to pilot. While I'm sure it would win more games consistently if we added the Zur and Overlord of the Mistmoors package, I see a lot of promise in combining these disparate elements into such an over-the-top pile. I honestly expected this to play worse than it does and I'll no doubt continue tinkering with this shell and iterating going forward. If you want to see that process, stop by over on Twitch!
Thanks for reading, and happy brewing!
