Oops! All Spells!

Most recent deck lists: here.

How does Oops! All Spells work?

As mentioned before, Oops! is a Dark Ritual combo deck. Its main goal is to put Thassa’s Oracle into play as fast as possible. There’s a lot of fast mana in the deck:

• Dark Ritual
• Cabal Ritual
• Elvish Spirit Guide
• Simian Spirit Guide
• Lotus Petal
• Chrome Mox

You’re using this mana combined with the lands (Agadeem / Turntimber) to put a Balustrade Spy or Undercity Informer into play. Balustrade triggers upon entering, Undercity needs activation, but they both do the same thing: mill your own deck until you hit a land. Since Agadeem and Turntimber are so-called Modal Dual-Faced cards (MDFC), they count as their front half, ergo they are not lands. You mill your entire deck. Then, you trigger your Narcomoebas and use them to flashback Dread Return, returning Thassa’s Oracle from your graveyard to play. Oracle’s enter-the-battlefield trigger will win you the game since there’s no cards left in your library. There’s a lot of protection since you can use one Narcomoeba to flashback Cabal Therapy to see if the coast is clear for Dread Return. Due to Bridge from Below being in your deck (and at this time hopefully in your graveyard), this doesn’t reduce the amount of creatures on your board since you sacrifice a creature, making you a Zombie to sacrifice to Dread Return. Alternatively you can play Thoughtseize before your combo, or have Pact of Negation in hand.

There are some variations to the deck, but the core is pretty settled. The deck list above has one Reanimate in it. This is not entirely stock, though more players are adopting it as an additional route to victory. Reanimate allows you to bring back Thassa’s Oracle if your Narcomoebas get exiled so you can’t go the Dread Return way.

Acquiring Oops! All Spells!

Let’s say you want to build Oops! All Spells! But you don’t want to buy everything at the same time. Luckily, most cards in the deck cost very little in terms of money, so you’ll be able to purchase roughly half this deck for around 25 EUR/USD. The most expensive cards are:

• Chrome Mox
• Force of Vigor
• Agadeem’s Awakening
• Lotus Petal
• Thoughtseize
• Thassa’s Oracle
• Pact of Negation

The rest of the deck is close to 100 EUR/USD and absolutely necessary to buy. In terms of phases, you could consider playing 1 Chrome Mox instead of 2 at first, and bring in an additional Cabal Ritual. The most important factor to take into account when playing around with replacements like this is that this deck is very dependent on its black sources to go off. This is why Chrome Mox is so important, it allows you to exile your redundant cards to it so you can ramp into your kill. In many cases there are more redundant black spells in your hand than alternative black mana sources. In fact, when I updated this article in November of 2023, I noticed an uplift in the Chrome Mox count rather than a decline. This card is very, very important. That said, there are a lot of different lists floating around, test what you like best and use the hive mind in the Discord. They might be passionate combo players, but they don’t bite!

An additional way to reduce the budget a bit further is replacing Thoughtseize with Duress. The biggest disadvantage of the latter is that it doesn’t take Endurance and Faerie Macabre. Since we use the graveyard to win, these are potent threats against this deck. I would advice against this, but you could test it if you wanted. Keep in mind that Oops is a highly tuned combo deck which probably loses percentage points upon replacing cards with cheaper alternaties.

Upgrade paths

This is a hard one with Oops! All spells. While Oops is a very tightly designed deck, it’s also using many fringe cards. The most valuable cards in the deck are Chrome Mox, Lotus Petal, Thoughtseize and Force of Vigor. The deck that uses most of those cards is probably ANT, but it’s quite a leap to call that an upgrade path. Some form of Depths (mono black/BG/BUG) is probably closer since it also uses Lotus Petal, Thoughtseize and Force of Vigor in some cases.

Additional Resources

• Nathan Lipetz is one of the most active Oops! All Spells! community members and wrote an extensive primer for this deck. Check it out: here.
• Faultedform is another very active community member and one of the evangelists for Memory’s Journey. They even wrote a field guide for that card in this deck, specifically (it’s on their Twitter).
• There’s a Discord server: here. There’s also an updated Sideboard guide in there which is extremely helpful for this deck.
• I did an interview with Nathan and Faulted which you can check out here.