In Magic: the Gathering, tokens are a special type of permanent that only exist so long as they’re on the battlefield. If a token—of any kind—leaves the field of play, they cease to exist. This means that bouncing a token back to someone’s hand, or killing a token creature, or otherwise moving it away from the board all result in its destruction and removal from play. While this limited permanence means tokens are incredibly weak in some respects, it also means that there are a lot of fun tricks that can be used to expand and multiply their usefulness.

Today’s deck, designed for historic play—60+ card decks, limit of 4 copies of any non-basic land, no restriction on card release set—is designed to pump out a ton of tokens to overwhelm opponents through token creation effect duplication and subverting the “legend” rule, which normally only allows one copy of a powerful (“legendary”) permanent on the board at once.

While the full decklist follows, let’s take a look at the workhorses of the build, the cards which create token creatures either when they attack or as part of regular turn operations. First up we have Legion Warboss, a happy little goblin who creates attacking token goblins every time you move to combat, and the flying Skyknight Vanguard creates human tokens when it attacks. There are other cards in our deck which generate tokens (particularly the saga enchantments of Birth of Meletis and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker), but many are better used not right at the start but after the rest of our token-copying engine is ready to go.

Three legendary cards really steal the show when it comes to this deck, facilitating the overpowering creation and buffing of token creatures. Most other cards in the deck are designed to support the summoning of these cards as soon as possible:

  • Mondrak, Glory Dominus: not only does this phyrexian double your token generation, it also has a low-cost way to add indestructability, particularly after its token doubling takes effect a few times
  • Ojer Tag, Deepest Foundation: while expensive at six mana, this card triples your token generation, and also has a self-recursion mechanic that makes it difficult to permanently remove once it lands on the battlefield
  • Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer: a very sinister addition to this deck, not only does Brudiclad give all tokens Haste and generate a new creature every turn, it also gives you the opportunity to turn all of your tokens in to a single type. This means all of your 1/1 humans can become 2/1 myrs, or 2/2 goblin shamans which create treasure when they attack (see Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, above). This includes not only your creature tokens, but all Treasure or Map tokens as well get converted too!

The three legendary cards would be neat on their own, and are worthwhile contributors to any deck, but there is an additional trick up this deck’s sleeve: Irenicus’s Vile Duplication. This spell takes any creature you control and copies it, and the copy is no longer legendary, meaning you can have both permanents on the board at the same time. This effect gets very silly, very quickly.

Mondrak says that instead of one token, you create two. So when you copy him using Vile Duplication, now you get two flying token copies, which also double your token generation. Legion Warboss creates a 1/1 token every turn. With a single Mondrak that would be 2 every turn. With 3 Mondraks, now you’re making 8. Odds are, however, that by the time you get Mondrak out on the board, you’re going to have more than one Warboss, or a Warboss and a Vanguard, or other token-generating creatures.

Add in a completed Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, which is able to make temporary token copies of non-legendary permanents. Well, your new Mondraks aren’t legendary, so they are valid targets as well. If the copying is done before combat, this means your 3 Mondraks turn into 11, at which point your Legion Warboss is not creating a single 1/1 but instead 2^11 or 2,048 hastened creatures.

I’ve had games go where Brudiclad was able to make copies of Mondrak to the point where I had 18 or 20 of them on the board at a time. This means that, for every individual token I generate—and some creatures auto-generate tokens every turn without me having to do anything—I could be creating anywhere from 262,144 to 1,048,576 of them. If I get to this point, almost every opponent instantly concedes (if Arena itself doesn’t choke on the calculations, which results in a draw).

It’s a beautiful engine, because when it gets going it’s self-reinforcing. If I’m able to cast both Mondrak and Vile Duplication, it almost doesn’t matter what else is in my hand because all of the deck supports the creation of tokens, including some lands (see Den of the Bugbear or Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance). The literal army of incoming token creatures is enough to overrun almost any defense, and there are enough bounce or destroy spells in the deck to help keep the opponent from getting their own engine going until you’re ready to unleash the horde.

Now, there are absolutely counters to this strategy, primarily in the form of agro-denial. Because this deck specializes in torrents of small creatures it is very vulnerable to defensive cards like Windborn Muse or Ghostly Prison, which limit how many creatures can attack each turn. In some combinations cards like Authority of the Consuls and other lifegain generators can stall out your ability to win as well, since the opponent is gaining life much more quickly than you can attack, and the larger your army grows the worse the problem gets. Milling decks—particularly those which utilize auto-milling permanents like Mesmeric Orb—are also going to be a nightmare to play against.

All in all though, I’m a big fan of decks which do things, and the small-yet-snowballing combo of token generation provided by this deck genuinely tickles me. It’s perfectly Arena viable and I have a great time surprising opponents with amazing armies popping out of nowhere. Recently I had a match where I was down to one life and only one Mondrak on the board. I top-decked a Vile Duplication, threw out a Legion Warboss, and all of a sudden I had enough attackers to overrun their defenses and seal the win. Moments like that are some of the most exciting Magic has to offer, and it feels like this deck pulls them out with surprising regularity.

I hope you enjoy playing around with this deck! If you have any comments, please feel free to email me your thoughts!

The Deck List

4 Sacred Foundry
4 Raugrin Triome
4 Plains
4 Irenicus's Vile Duplication
4 Fable of the Mirror-Breaker
3 Strangle
3 Stormcarved Coast
3 Steam Vents
3 Skyknight Vanguard
3 Mondrak, Glory Dominus
3 Legion Warboss
3 Fading Hope
2 The Restoration of Eiganjo
2 The Birth of Meletis
2 Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance
2 Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation
2 Get Lost
2 Den of the Bugbear
2 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
2 Abrade
1 Otawara, Soaring City
1 Island
1 Burn Down the House

This deck was introduced to me via MTG Goldfish’s “Brewer’s Kitchen”, as Godly Amounts of Tokens, and it absolutely lives up to the name

Header image of the “Raugrin Triome” (a RUW tri-land) is from Wizards of the Coast