Some victories... are not really victories

If you’ve played any amount of multiplayer magic, you’ve probably noticed that its quite common for the player who seems to be the worst in the beginning end up winning in the end. I’m pretty sure the not-so-secret secret to multiplayer success is to do as little as possible for as long as possible, conserving resources and avoiding attention until you’re able to pounce on a table of exhausted and eliminated opponents.

Of course if everyone tries to do this the game goes nowhere, so I consider it a point of pride to always be “doing things” in EDH games. Unless I’m mana screwed, I’ll keep throwing down permanents and turning them sideways and wrath effects be damned. If I lose I’ll take stock of what I accomplished and be sure to point out when I did more damage than the rest of the table combined (which may be why I’m dead, but what can you do?).

While its bad enough for a slow start or cautious player to snooze their way to a win, I consider it much worse to see a player win off the back of the ultimate do-nothing-and-still-win card:

Insurrection is worse than a slow-roll-to-victory because there is so little that can be done to effectively stop it. None of the damage can be blocked, so the only real responses are counterspells, our friend homeward path, or fog effects - although saccing all your creatures to something like goblin bombardment in response can also help take the edge off (I don’t even like to think about what happens if the insurrection player himself has a sac outlet on the table). On top of all this, the easiest way to play around the card is... yes... play as few threats as possible: barf.  

The card gets even more unfair in star games, where the caster steals the creatures of 4 other players and then focuses the attack on 2. I find it hard to believe anyone ever really feels good about winning with this card (unless perhaps someone else was about to win with an even more degenerate strategy), and have thus removed it from all of my decks.

Macaroni or Cheese

Even when you topdeck it to win an otherwise unwinnable game, it just has a massive case of “who cares?”. There’s nothing cheeky or skillful about casting this, its as brainless and cheesy as multiplayer cards come.