Now we’ve learned that Extended will be very much the same as always. Enemy color fetchlands will be in Zendikar, and manabases will be very much as they’ve always been. This means the rotation has a much less dramatic impact on Extended. We lose Birchlore Ranger and Wirewood Symbiote, which forces Elves to look a lot more like the Standard version. This makes Glimpse of Nature dramatically less insane. We lose cycling lands, so Life from the Loam isn’t a card draw engine, just a way to get a bunch of lands by playing fetchlands every turn (or to attack with Ghost Quarter or something, but really, Loam decks are gone). We lose Astral Slide, but without cycling lands that wouldn’t do anything anyway. We lose Mind’s Desire, Brain Freeze, and Tendrils of Agony, and we force storm to rely on Dragonstorm or Grapeshot. We lose Riptide Laboratory, which greatly reduces the value of Vendilion Clique, Venser, and Spellstutter Sprite. We lose a lot of goblins that weren’t really being played anyway (but might have been played with the new Zendikar goblins). We lose Decree of Justice and Exalted Angel (but Baneslayer Angel is better anyway). We lose Sulfuric Vortex. We lose Chain of Plasma. And that’s about it. This Extended season is going to be more about what we’ve gained than what we’ve lost, which is not how people had been looking at it.
So let’s look at where that leaves us. First, Zoo is the default aggro deck, not Affinity. Affinity might be playable, but I don’t really see what possible advantage it could have over the new and improved Zoo. Zoo should be the deck to beat in preparing for the Pro Tour, and I think that might be surprisingly hard. I would probably try to pick up where Saito left off and play Knight of the Reliquary. I think Bloodbraid Elf fits the deck better than Ranger of Eos, and it causes problems for the Blue decks that are sure to be fairly popular. Lightning Bolt is obvious. Qasali Pridemage could easily be to utility two-drop of choice, but I’m not totally sure about that, since there are so many options and they all do such different things. The deck could even play Meddling Mage in theory, but that sounds extremely unlikely to be the right way to go.
Some kind of Bant deck might be another way to take advantage of our continued wealth of mana flexibility. These decks were popular late in the last season, despite the fact that no one ever really seemed to figure out how to build them. There were a ton of different cards played in these decks, and no two decks looked particularly similar. Presumably there is a “correct” shell that hasn’t been found or formalized yet. This deck generally contains a large amount of lifegain to compete against the faster Naya-shelled Zoo decks, and leans more heavily on Blue for disruption to beat decks that it can’t purely outrace. The card quality is extremely high, and these decks have the advantage that, because there isn’t an established list, the opponent never knows what to play around, and the right play can often be very different depending on what cards you’re actually playing.
As long as we’re looking at shards to base aggro decks around, Zoo could also move into more of Jund shell. Putrid Leech is awesome, and easily casting Dark Confidant is nice. The trick is managing the life loss while moving away from White, which might actually prove too difficult. Maelstrom Pulse might be too slow, and if you’re playing Dark Confidant, Slaughter Pact might even be better, but it does deal with huge animals and Vedalken Shackles, so there’s some chance. I suspect that White is better than Black because of Knight of the Reliquary, Path to Exile, and Lightning Helix, especially Lightning Helix, but a Black build could be worth testing. Or you could just play Putrid Leech and Lightning Helix in the same deck. I mean, enemy fetchlands make things pretty crazy.
Tarmogoyf is going to continue to be more or less the defining card of the format. It’s hard to imagine a control deck holding up to the new Zoo without Tarmogoyf to buy time in the early game. Engineered Explosives and even Firespout sound less than ideal as answers to Zoo, and Zoo goes bigger and bigger in an arms race against itself. Path to Exile should be similarly awesome, particularly if Baneslayer Angel is among the best late game plans as I think it might be.
I think this extremely fast format will mean that Blue decks will have to be Previous Level Blue style, but probably geared even more toward surviving the early turns. I might start with something like Gaudenis’s second place deck from Grand Prix: Hannover, but possibly even with further defensive measures, like perhaps maindeck Lightning Bolts.
Baneslayer Angel is another card that has the potential to substantially impact Extended. It is certainly killable, but if people lean toward burn as the best answer to early creatures or a way to give their decks more reach, it gets better. I don’t think Zoo expects to beat Baneslayer once it can attack, and Blue or Black can easily set up protected Baneslayers. Five mana just isn’t that much for a finisher for a control deck, especially one that’s so good at stabilizing when it hits the board. The Glen Elendra Archmage plus Baneslayer Angel “combo” might find its way into Extended.
Another powerful five-mana spell in M10 is Time Warp. Last weekend I borrowed Bill Stark Sanity Grinding deck, and while I didn’t like the deck, I was impressed by exactly how far ahead playing 3 Time Warps in a row put me. It’s hard to imagine Planeswalkers and Time Warp being fast enough for Extended, but they do seem like the might be powerful enough. Given how devastating creatures are these days, just the extra attack step can be huge. This and/or Baneslayer could just be played at the top of the curve of a Bant style aggro deck.
I don’t have overly high hopes for Landfall at this point, without knowing what the cards are. The reasoning is that they have to be balanced for a Standard format that has fetchlands, and if they were powerful enough for Extended they could easily be too powerful for Standard. On the other hand, Standard’s been pretty strong lately, so maybe it will be good enough to be played in Standard and Extended at the same time.
Cascade wasn’t around the last time Extended was commonly played, and that’s a mechanic that is powerful enough. As we’ve already started to see, there are a lot of different ways to use the mechanic. Any of them could end up being utilized in Extended. Cascade Assault, could be a deck (but I’m skeptical). Hypergenesis combo could be a deck, particularly if the aggro decks are scary enough that people fail to properly prepare for it. Suspend Cascade with restore balance, like Hypergenesis combo in essence, but with less uncastable cards and less instant winning could be a safer approach to a similar idea. Big cascade as we’ve seen in Block Constructed and a bit in Standard is the least likely, since it seems slow for Extended, but stranger things have happened.
Dredge has gained a surprising amount. It didn’t seem like a deck that was likely to gain much, since it’s based on a block specific mechanic, but there are so many different kinds of cards that can help the deck (most notably anything that uses the graveyard and any discard outlet—cheap card draw is also nice, but even good reanimator targets are relevant). Fatestitcher was the recent addition before the last extended season, giving the deck 3 more Narcomoebas, but they had the minor drawback of not triggering Bridge from Below. Now we can upgrade or supplement them with Bloodghast.
Bloodghast
BB
Creature – Vampire Spirit
Mythic
Bloodghast can’t block.
Bloodghast has haste as long as an opponent has 10 life or less.
Landfall – Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, you may return Bloodghast from your graveyard to the battlefield.
2/1
Bloodghast requires a land to come into play, which can be an issue for Dredge, but with Life from the Loam or Greenseeker, this can be relatively easy, and it gives you a lot of value as an attacker or another creature to sacrifice. Having 12 different creatures that essentially enter the battlefield from your library when dredged makes firing off a Dread Returns extremely easy. This is where Iona, Shield of Emeria comes in.
Iona, Shield of Emeria
6WWW
Legendary Creature — Angel
Flying
As Iona, Shield of Emeria enters the battlefield, choose a color.
Your opponents can’t play spells of the chosen color.
7/7
This card just beats some decks. Many decks, actually, making it an excellent addition to Dredge’s reanimator arsenal. There’s a reasonable chance that dredge will want to play more different finishers to reanimate. The reason for this is that the increased density of creatures entering the battlefield means that you can with while dredging fewer times, if you have something to reanimate, so one approach to the deck is to build it to need fewer dredges, but a diversity of threats is still valuable so that you can eventually find the best one in any given matchup. Another advantage to this approach is that you can more easily survive Tormod’s Crypt, as you don’t need to go through your entire library to win the game.
Scapeshift with Valakut, as mentioned last week is likely to see play, possibly in a number of different shells (it could even be played in PLU as a kind of Rude Awakening effect that’s easier to protect). If there is a Black land that works similarly, it could easily be good enough to see play with Urborg (in a deck that might also get to play Tendrils of Corruption, which would make me happy. I miss Time Spiral Block Constructed).
Hive Mind is a six-mana Blue spell that might hope to take the place of Mind’s Desire. The idea is that you play Hive Mind and then play a couple Pacts that your opponent can’t pay for, they copy them, you pass the turn, and then they lose in their upkeep. There are advantages and disadvantages to this plan compared to Mind’s Desire. One advantage is that you can’t miss while going off. You play the cards in your hand and then your opponent dies. Another advantage is that you can theoretically do other things with the pacts to help you live during the game. Unfortunately, I don’t think these advantages make up for some rather critical disadvantages. For one, this is a multiple card combo, and you have to play Pacts instead of either library manipulation or mana acceleration that the Mind’s Desire deck was playing, both of which are probably better at actually making a combo happen quickly. For another, this combo is much less resistant to countermagic. The result is a plan similar to Enduring Ideal (cast one big spell, win with it), but it can’t be protected by Boseiju and it needs another card in your hand. In exchange, it’s Blue and costs one less mana. Almost certainly not good enough, but it’s best to be aware of the option.
Anathemancer is another potentially format-warping card. Fetchlands allow people to use more basics, but they’re much better at allowing people to get perfect mana using dual lands, and you can expect Anathemancer to be good for a huge amount of damage on average. This is another card that makes me thing aggressive decks are going to be particularly difficult to overcome this time around, and control strategies still might want to try to limit themselves in terms of colors as much as they can get away with.
Finishing up the comparisons on my thoughts about Extended now as compared to my thoughts last week, I’m much less excited about slow decks that don’t take advantage of fetchlands like Five-Color and Tron. Greedy control decks should probably find ways to limit themselves to what they can do with fetchlands and duals rather than loading up on enters-the-battlefield-tapped lands, since you can still do most things. Merfolk seems likely to have problems against Zoo, which will have much better creatures and efficient spells to break up Merfolk’s synergy. Basically, don’t look to any decks that were around before but not good enough. The format is going to have to be at least as powerful as it was before, but without Elves (in its previous incarnation).
Fetchlands are dead. Long live Fetchlands. Or… welcome to the new Extended, same as the old Extended.
Thanks for reading…