![]() If we can play a cub on Turn 1, play two more on Turn 2, and follow them up with The Bears of Littjara on Turn 3 (to make another changeling), then when we hit the second lore counter on Turn 4, our four little "Bears" suddenly grow up into massive 4/4 grizzlies, which is often enough to close out the game. The rest of the creatures in our deck are all "Bears." I like to think of our one-drops as cubs, and they are the most important "bears" in the slot because they work extremely well with both The Bears of Littjara and Ayula, Queen Among Bears. ![]() However, it offers a ton of value in a deck full of changelings, quickly growing our little Shapeshifters into big threats while also fighting down whatever blockers our opponent presents, to allow us to put through more damage. The problem is that the rest of the actual Bears in Magic just aren't very strong. On its face, it's just barely worse than The Bears of Littjara when it comes to being a payoff for a deck full of changelings. The two-mana Bear lord is incredibly powerful. While Metallic Mimic is nice, Ayula, Queen Among Bears is absurd in our deck. Meanwhile, if we have Ayula, Queen Among Bears, we can make Metallic Mimic into a Bear, triggering Ayula and still allowing it to pump all of our Shapeshifters, which are also Bears. If we have a The Bears of Littjara, we can hilariously choose Shapeshifter (which I'm pretty sure has never happened before in the history of Magic) and use The Bears of Littjara to turn it into a 4/4 while Metallic Mimic continues to pump our other creatures. Metallic Mimic gives us a pseudo-lord for all of our Shapeshifters. While The Bears of Littjara is the best payoff in our shapeshifting deck, we only can play four copies, which means we need some backup payoffs. Finally, the third lore counter works as a removal spell, which is a nice bonus since our deck is so full of "Bears" that we don't have room for any other removal spells in the main deck. In theory, we can flood the board with cheap Shapeshifters over the first couple turns of the game, use The Bears of Littjara to turn them into 4/4s, and beat our opponent down quickly before they have a chance to recover. Making a 2/2 changeling when it enters the battlefield is nice, but the second lore counter-which sets the base power and toughness of all of our Shapeshifters to 4/4-is the real power of the saga. It's obviously powerful, but to truly maximize its power, it needs to be in a deck full of Shapeshifters (which mostly means changelings), and changelings-while interesting thanks to their "all creature type" ability-tend to be just a bit underpowered compared to other creatures with the same mana cost. I considered a bunch of different possibilities but eventually realized that Ayula, Queen Among Bears was absolutely perfect for the deck, both in terms of flavor and playability, which is what led to the Five-Color "Bears" deck we're playing today! The question was what else we could play to power up our little changelings. ![]() However, The Bears of Littjara isn't enough of a payoff all by itself, especially considering that changelings tend to be a bit small. When The Bears of Littjara won the poll, it was pretty obvious that we'd be playing a deck with a bunch of changelings to maximize the power of our saga. How good are "Bears" in Modern? Can we maul our way to some wins? Let's get to the video and find out in today's Against the Odds then, we'll talk more about the deck!Ī quick reminder: if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube channel. While Ayula is partly in the deck for flavor purposes (how could we play a The Bears of Littjara without the queen of the Bears?), it's also absurdly powerful, growing all of our little changelings into massive threats (and also stacking with The Bears of Littjara's ability to make all of our changelings into 4/4s) while also fighting down our opponent's blockers as our "Bears" come into play. As such, we're heading to Modern today to play a deck so sweet that I could barely wait to play it: Five-Color "Bears." While most of the creatures in our deck are changelings to support The Bears of Littjara, since changelings are technically all creature types, that means that our creatures are also Bears, which allows us to play Ayula, Queen Among Bears as a backup payoff. The winner, by a pretty wide margin, was one of our new sagas, The Bears of Littjara. Thanks to the recent round of bannings, we had a Kaldheim-in-Modern Against the Odds poll last week. Welcome to episode 277 of Against the Odds.
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