Miracle Musings | Is Force of Will Necessary Mainboard?
This is not clickbait. It is an earnest look at {Force of Will} specifically through the Miracles lens.
My current build, which I keep up to date on Moxfield, has {Force of Will} in the sideboard. I'll explain why below.
"The Right Half of Your Deck" Problem
Miracles has always contended with drawing the right half of the deck to align answers against opposing archetypes. [w] cards like {Swords to Plowshares} and {Terminus} against creature strategies and [u] cards against combo strategies. Cantrips like {Brainstorm} and {Ponder} bore the burden of ensuring the correct half of the deck was drawn.
That burden became overwhelming because each of the top threats required different answers. For example:
{Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student} was protected from all sorcery-speed removal and most removal with {Brainstorm} backup.
{Orcish Bowmaster} and {Phelia, Exhuberent Sheperd} have flash which make sorcery-speed removal like {Prismatic Ending} insufficient.
{Kaito, Bane of Nightmates} is impervious to creature removal.
{Urza's Saga} produces multiple uncounterable creatures at instant speed.
Much like how {Daze} and {Wasteland} are the gatekeepers of what mana values are viable in Legacy, {Orcish Bowmaster} is a gatekeeper for the kind of card selection that can reasonably see play.
As a result, card selection/draw became extremely taxed on top of the burden of finding answers that were too often anemic, even when successfully found.
{Erode} by Florian Herold
When Secrets of Strixhaven was released, I knew {Erode} would be a mainstay in [u][w] Miracles because "destroy target planeswalker" never existed on an instant for [w] before, but has been sorely needed for a decade.
I expected {Erode} would unburden {Prismatic Ending} and other removal that had previously posed as planeswalker removal, like {Council's Judgment} or {Unexpectedly Absent}. While it did that, it more notably helped identify the undue burden on the already-stressed and underwhelming yet necessary {Force of Will}.
This is not a knock against {Force of Will}, but rather an embrace of it as a tool rather than the supposed safety valve it has failed to be for years.
{Force of Will} — Proactive vs. Reactive
{Force of Will} is not reliable to stop the opponent's critical spells anymore.
Broadly speaking, pretty much everything on the stack from the top decks requires an answer. Aside from an immense density of must-answer threats, there has never been so many mainboardable tools available that blank {Force of Will}: {Cavern of Souls}, {Hexing Squelcher}, {Kaito, Bane of Nightmares}'s Ninjutsu ability, {Voice of Victory}, {Teferi, Time Raveler}, {Veil of Summer}, {Mistrise Village}, {Urza's Saga}, opposing countermagic defending their proactive play, the list goes on.
{Urza's Saga} by Titus Lunter
A proactive {Force of Will} (i.e., one that helps a spell resolve through opposing countermagic) has always been more potent, since it is loaded with "counter an opposing {Force of Will" rather than "counter whatever I can't beat otherwise."
A Miracles pilot could try to shift that in their favor by using {Force of Will} to help resolve their answer to whatever resolved, but that involves additional timing burdens and presumes that the removal can actually solve the problem.
A New Strategy
So what does all this mean for {Force of Will}?
The likelihood of winning a game one against a deck where {Force of Will} is the "right half of your deck" is unlikely with so many blank [w] cards diluting the deck.
Against the matchups where [w] cards are desirable, {Force of Will} needed to function as the removal for cards that [w] cards like {Prismatic Ending} could not reliably solve (i.e., anything non-creature with a mana value of three or greater). {Erode}, however, is better at solving those problems.
What if Miracles leaned into its strengths, which have been bolstered by {Erode}? Miracles, by design, assumes [w] cards will have text in most matchups, so why not go all the way and become the best version of that?
{March of Otherworldly Light} by Gozz
[u] or [w] instead of [u][w]
What if we solved the "drawing the right half of your deck" problem by playing "half" of the deck mainboard and "half" of the deck sideboard?
What if we stopped accepting the dilution of the mainboard to have some game against everything for a more robust game all the time?
This idea suggests that, against decks where {Swords to Plowshares}, {Terminus}, {Erode}, and the like are blank, we voluntarily accept that we will lose game one, which was likely to happen anyway, before morphing into a denser deck that can actually contend against what the opponent is doing.
I'm still relatively early in exploring this theory, but initial results show promise. I've legitimately been winning against top strategies with {Squadron Hawk}.
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Featured image: {Force of Will} by Terese Nielsen