With Guildpact on sale, it’s time to start cracking on the formats that are soon going to matter; I’ve already started taking a look at the impact Guildpact will have on the Sealed Deck Pro Tour Qualifier season. Soon after that we have Team Unified Standard. The decks that do well at Pro Tour Hawaii will greatly impact the decks that appear on most teams’ deck roster, and the point here is to get a solid start on Guildpact for Standard to get a feel for what it is we’re going to see in Honolulu.
Guildpact could have nothing in it besides three new dual lands, and still massively impact the existing Standard environment. Fortunately, it has other cards too, and some of those will see play as well… especially the ones that change the value of other cards in prior sets enough to raise them up in playability, like having Stomping Grounds to go with your Kird Apes. Some of these cards are going to go on to impact other formats in very considerable ways, like the automatic inclusion of one copy of Quicken to the Extended Mind’s Desire deck’s sideboard, allowing you to go absolutely crazy with Mind’s Desire at end of turn, or in response to very dangerous plays, or to do degenerate things while under a Scepter-Chant lockdown. Admittedly, all too many of the cards you’ll see in Guildpact will be Limited filler cards and other dreck, but we can’t all be Arcbound Ravagers.
Looking at the mana bases as they change, you get three new dual lands: Green/Red, Black/White, and Blue/Red. Steam Vents has been pegged for automatic inclusion in the Blue/Red Tron deck that first premiered at this year’s World Championships, but the ramifications of that particular dual land are going to be long and far. Blue dual lands are just better because, well, let’s admit it: Blue is better. This is the first step in reassembling a Counter-Burn type strategy, which has worked at several points in the past with Counter-Hammer and Counter-Phoenix. This could also be the starting point for something unexpected, as Type 1 frequently sees Blue/Red Fish decks. Having eight true dual lands to commit to a strategy can go a long way toward finding a viable proportion of cards that work well together without your mana blowing up in your face.
Having Steam Vents around also suggests the possibility for other things, and the first deck I wrote up after actually seeing the cards was a Blue/White splash Red deck looking to abuse Quicken… or at least use it as effectively as is possible. Flores is already mashing Steam Vents in next to Stomping Grounds in an update of Critical Mass, dropping Putrefy and Extraction for extra bonus six mana legendary permanents like Godo and Tatsumasa. Adrian Sullivan pet creation and Wisconsin State Championship winning deck — “Eminent Domain” — is that much closer to having perfect mana, waiting only on the Black/Red dual land in the next expansion before it can tweak its manabase to have the perfect balance of acceptable slowdown versus acceptable pain. Right now it still has two true duals, two Signets, and three pain lands to smooth his mana base… plus Tendo Ice Bridge and Spectral Searchlight as is appropriate. Steam Vents also advances last year’s Blue/White/Red Enduring Ideal trick deck “Good Form” by providing good mana, letting you access Blue countermagic and card selection with the same land that can be tapped to cast your Seething Song.
Blue/Red is a very busy place to be, but Green/Red has to by the nature of its sub-type of ‘Forest’ fit into a much more complicated puzzle. Steam Vents brings with it a lot of potential for some proven and well-loved archetypes, but Stomping Grounds is surrounded by the cards that work well with it: Wood Elves, Farseek, and the powerful basic-land accelerators Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama’s Reach. Green-based decks can do a lot more with a Forest Mountain than other colors can by including their Mountain Island, so the options for improvement thanks to Stomping Grounds is going to be astounding.
Starting with some simple changes, let’s look to the Japanese for their Glare of Subdual deck. It won the World Championships, after all, so it has to be doing something right. Thanks to the existence of Stomping Grounds, you can easily squeeze in a light touch of Red mana, and those wacky Japanese a) love their Godo, Bandit Warlord and b) are better at Magic than us. These two facts may very well be related. Congregation at Dawn can now fetch Godo, who finds Umezawa’s Jitte, and that is generally accepted to be absolutely nuts… and yes, it could do that before, but now there really is no relevant cost stopping you from doing so. With that much good mana, you can do anything, quite literally.
Creatures (23)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Wood Elves
- 2 Yosei, the Morning Star
- 3 Kodama of the North Tree
- 2 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
- 4 Loxodon Hierarch
- 4 Selesnya Guildmage
Lands (23)
Spells (14)
With a little shift — adding in a few Stomping Grounds and squeezing in room for one copy of Godo to go with the Congregations at Dawn — you can add a virtual copy of Umezawa’s Jitte for each copy of Godo and Congregation at Dawn in the deck. In all honesty, you probably don’t want to have more than six Ravnica-block dual lands, so the balance may see three Forests becoming three Stomping Grounds, while one Temple Garden becomes a lone basic Plains (or a copy of Eiganjo Castle, if you’d rather). The spell most likely to be cut is a lone copy of Pithing Needle, as there will be some definite pressure on activated abilities already, thanks to the popularity of the Gruul beatdown deck and its premier card, Burning-Tree Shaman. There will be decks that this just has no targets against, as well as decks with no real worthwhile targets, and so shaving off a single copy to move to the sideboard would probably be an acceptable trade-off.
Speaking of decks from the World Championships, fixing up a Tron deck is a difficult task. You have to balance what you are spending all that mana on with what you are doing to get there in the first place. It’s because of this need to balance your draw early and often, and to find more Urza’s pieces early in the game, that Compulsive Research is generally accepted to be one of the key elements to the deck working at all. Whatever else you are doing once you get there, your Tron deck can start off looking like this:
4 Shivan Reef
4 Steam Vents
4 Urza’s Tower
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Power Plant
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Shinka, the Blood-Soaked Keep
(23 lands, zero basic lands)
4 Izzet Signet
(27 mana sources, 14 Blue, 13 Red)
(33 other cards)
Funny we should mention Godo, because it seems to me as long as you’re going to play Urza’s lands to power out five-drops and six-drops like Keiga and Meloku, why stop there? Block Constructed season taught us the value of dropping Godo in any deck that can reasonably attempt to do so, and here we’ve got one Red mana (yes, we can afford one Red as the only colored mana we’re being asked to spend) and five colorless mana (“Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Mine”). Alternately if we haven’t drawn Godo, instead of going Tooth and Nail we can go Tatsumasa, and remind the world just how difficult both halves of this legendary dragon equipment are to handle. The deck that 6-0’d Worlds in Standard may or may not have been good… we never really got enough mainstream information and discussion going about the deck, though the Magic Online metagame seems to suggest it’s doing something right. Even at that, things can be done better if the metagame allows for it, and I’m sure something could be done to squeeze in Godo now that the mana’s good:
Creatures (11)
Lands (23)
Spells (26)
Pyroclasm is a key part of the deck in the last format, but with the shift to Gruul beatdown you’re facing a lot of three-toughness creatures that just don’t die to the two-mana sorcery. Having nutty Legend advantage and going crazy at seemingly discounted prices thanks to the Urza’s lands might be in a tight spot against the Gruul, but it sounds pretty powerful… and the countermagic can buy a few extra turns to set up when trying to go mad with Godo or find double Keiga, in addition to helping force through key cards against dedicated Control decks.
The deck I thought up first and foremost was based on the ability to use Quicken for instant-speed Wraths alongside instant-speed Tidings, and trying to cram as many good Blue and White cards as I could in a deck together. Why limit yourself to playing just Blue and White, without an Azorius Senate dual land to call your own, when you can stretch a little bit further and use Lightning Helix as well at a cost that is lower than it seems? I’ll be the first to say this idea is a little bit crackpot: nothing tells us that the addition of three new non-Blue-White dual lands would advance the opportunity to play a Blue-White deck and have it be good, but Quicken is the single card in this set that screams for attention as it breaks the rules of Magic. Blue is dearly lacking for acceptable instant-speed card drawing, as can be seen every time Tidings makes it into a deck where Opportunity would once have gone instead. Turning Tidings into Opportunity turns that frown upside down, but modern Blue decks have been about leaning on their Legends rather than playing a more traditional permission game, so it’s also quite possible modern Blue has grown with the times and doesn’t “require” or even necessarily want a cute card that enables your card drawing at the most convenient time.
Creatures (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (32)
Blue/White may not have a dual land of their own yet, but they do have a ‘bridge’ color or two in common, so splashing in either Red or Black cards that help advance your strategy can be done at reasonable cost… so long as you can survive the fact that up to eight of your lands will either come into play tapped or ask for two life up front. Adding in a spot removal card that can handle most of the non-legendary threats you’re likely to see, and recoups some of the lost time and/or life invested earlier in the game with your mana base, will hopefully be powerful enough to prove worth your while… and the ‘splash’ for a somewhat-worse Stroke of Genius, Invoke the Firemind, should still be playable thanks to the focus on using Quicken already.
Then, of course, there’s Mike Flores‘ Critical Mass Update 2.0, losing the Black mana in favor of Red in its Blue/Green deck, being one of many places where squeezing in Godo may prove to be correct if your mana is just that good. I’ll let Resident Genius Michael J. Flores toot his own horn, however, as you can find his early thoughts on updating his Tier One pet deck on MagicTheGathering.com. (Look for “Angry Hermit Update”, which is actually the Critical Mass Update.) The advantage of dropping Red for Black is clear in the creature power department, but I’m not sold on losing Putrefy and Cranial Extraction as tools, especially not against an as-yet undefined metagame. Critical Mass is currently Standard’s equivalent to the Extended Rock deck, in that it plays acceleration and some of the best cards in the format… but the support card decision is very important, and you pretty much have to tune it to fit the metagame if you want to get your mileage out of the deck.
Leaving Steam Vents behind, we’ll take a quick stop-over with Godless Shrine before getting jiggy with Stomping Ground. Black/White is such a niche strategy to begin with, limited in scope and only truly effective when the stars align right and pigs fly ass-backwards into the wind, or at least when there are rewards for playing the solid Black/White cards like Vindicate and Gerrard’s Verdict. Chris Pikula did well with Deadguy Ale, a Black/White discard/resource denial deck, at Grand Prix: Philadelphia, and one would have to be hard-pressed indeed to believe you’ll be seeing two successful Black/White decks appearing to have an impact on a metagame within a year of each other. Black/White used to be Academy Rector into Yawgmoth’s Bargain, or at least Gerrard’s Verdict into Vindicate, but now it looks like Blackmail into Ravenous Rats into Shrieking Grotesque into Ghost Council of Orzhova is what you can actually expect might be worthwhile.
Perhaps other effective uses for Black/White by itself as a strategy may be successful, but until the “Bleeder” Control deck that Black/White is advocated as having as its most powerful synergy develops — which may very well be never — I would expect any actual Black/White decks to look like this:
Creatures (20)
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
Rats was a reasonably popular strategy while there was an, ahem, Critical Mass of Rats available in the format, when you could have Chittering Rats next to your Ravenous Rats, Hypnotic Specter, and Nezumi Shortfang. Quietly, a new Rat has appeared, hiding its nature well by pretending to be a Grotesque and having a “sometimes doesn’t work” clause built into its Rat ability. White/Black conveniently also got a nice, flexible removal spell that can remove some of the most dangerous problems from play, nailing Meloku, Keiga, and Form of the Dragon all in one sweet little card. It may not hit the Jitte, but you have four colorless Shatters for just such a situation, and a resource-denial deck like this one can easily reduce the opponent to living off the top of their deck, using pinpoint discard to help secure the Jitte advantage or nullifying their advantage without worrying that they may have a backup copy of the broken creature-control equipment. In a vacuum, you’re leaving a resource-poor opponent with whatever they have in play after the first four turns or so plus the top of their deck, versus Jitte and Ghost Council of Orzhova. Good luck for them with that one.
For this one at least, I feel I have enough of a handle of what this deck might want to put some cards into the sideboard; Manriki-Gusari helps get and keep the Jitte advantage against decks that fight you for it, or you can switch directly to Pithing Needle if you can cede the advantage and want to create dead draws along with discarded cards. Pithing Needle cleverly also names Jushi Apprentice and Meloku the Clouded Mirror of Victory as well, and can do pretty much anything else that might come up… it’s a reactive card that is nonetheless incredibly flexible, and can hit Blue’s problem Jushi Apprentices as well as Green decks’ Divining Tops and the Jitte or Glare of Subdual. All of these things would have to go, and all can be solved easily and freely for one mana of any color… what a steal!
Last Gasp conveniently also kills Jushi Apprentices dead, can hit an early Vinelasher Kudzu from Critical Mass, the Boros drop of your choice, and with a little help from a Rat or two can team up on Gruul fatties like Burning-Tree Shaman and Rumbling Slum. For the most part it’s the same as Smother, at least when you don’t have Psychatogs running around somewhere, with only Burning-Tree Shaman as a four-toughness creature costing three or less that anyone will ever play. Descendant of Kiyomaro is a 3/5 with Spirit Link for three pretty much all the time, since your main strategy fits very nicely into the “Hand Size Matters” theme from Saviors of Kamigawa. A 3/5 trumps Kird Ape pretty nicely, and extra life-gain alongside the Ghost Council is excellent against opposing weenie decks. All in all the new Rat deck is simple and elegant, with a main-deck focus on general disruption that can be misery for Control and Combo-ish decks. Alongside that is, at its core, a competent anti-creature strategy, and a sideboard plan that can be tuned against a large variety of different problems with very efficient solutions. Swinging with Jitte’d-up Hypnotic Specters while the opponent tries to mash their army through a few Rats and a Ghost Council probably doesn’t work so very well for them.
As long as we’re looking at last year circa Regionals, we’ll skip discussing dual lands and talk about the ramifications of duals, duals everywhere, thanks to one Dryad Sophisticate. Until Dissension and the printing of Goblin Metrosexual, Dryad Sophisticate is the creature best suited to “getting around” in the City of Guilds, walking around blockers like it’s nothing thanks to the complicated terrain under your opponents’ control. Mono-Green Aggro has been inches from good enough even after the loss of Plow Under, and if everybody is starting with decks bearing duals and Forests as their first decks for Honolulu, someone will start with this strategy and smash some faces.
Creatures (28)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Elvish Champion
- 4 Elves of Deep Shadow
- 4 Zodiac Monkey
- 4 Shinen of Life's Roar
- 4 Dryad Sophisticate
- 4 Silhana Ledgewalker
Lands (22)
- 22 Forest
Spells (10)
An argument could be made for going a touch further, adding Overgrown Tomb and fitting in Putrefy, but that sounds like too much of a sacrifice as it would request Llanowar Wastes as well, and thus changing away from the focus on Blanchwood Armor… and defying the hand of Jamie Wakefield reaching into the future while you’re at it. It’s not quite a classic, traditional 26/62 Wakefield fattie special, but it does keep some of the good old Wakefield spirit going on, just with more efficient beaters and a lower mana curve than we saw last year. Beware of Pyroclasm… but besides that, a lot of other decks have to beware of you. There are a lot of two-drops you can play that reward you for having Blanchwood Armor, Moldervine Cloak or Jitte active, with a two-drop Forestwalker, nonbasic landwalker, untargetable-by-the-opponent “flier,” and the potential to just get Armor on Shinen of Life’s Roar and lock the opponent out of the game as far as playing creatures is concerned. The one-mana drop should always be an Elf, the two-drop should always be something reasonably decent to drop an enhancement on (and maybe another Elf as well, if you’ve got one), while turn 3 should always see either a Cloak or Armor on your enhancement-worthy two-drop, or access to four mana to cast and equip the Jitte. At the absolute worst, turn 3 you can drop Elvish Champion and turn your one-drops into 2/2’s, again with a flavor of evasion that can prove quite relevant. Silhana Ledgewalker is also conveniently an Elf, and while at first glance I’d assumed it would be too weak for Constructed, the one-way limitation on untargetability (as well as a limitation for being blocked) seems to me to be just good enough, even if it’s not quite as good as Troll Ascetic.
It’s possible that with just twenty-two Forests, and no Sakura-Tribe Elders or Wood Elves, that Moldervine Cloak is the better Blanchwood Armor, and the two-of/four-of numbers should be reversed, but in the absence of known rivals to face off against the assumption is that the more powerful card (Armor) is the proper enhancer when compared to the less-powerful, Dredge-enabled version (Cloak). Either way, this deck is better than it’s going to be given credit for before Hawaii, and I’d be astounded if no one made the metagame jump to beating down with a surprisingly solid mono-Green deck. A sideboard answer to the Pyroclasm problem could probably be found. Against opposing creature strategies this, seems to have a solid plan and the ability to get a draw that just blows the opponent out of the game entirely by enchanting Shinen of Life’s Roar.
Now that we’ve finished with that amusing segue, we can move on from the Godless Shrine entirely, for it will otherwise be used in quantities less than four-of to balance the mana of multicolored decks that happen to use both Black and White, such as Greater Gifts, or even just serve as a one-of target for Farseek. Without the fortuitous land type of Forest that lets you cheat $20 into play with Wood Elves, its impact is just going to be limited… especially as it’s not a “flashy” color combination that grabs the attention. Much like how Temple Garden was the dual land from Ravnica that did not stir the imagination, Godless Shrine is going to be the red-headed step-dual that the Steam Vents and Stomping Grounds point and laugh at.
Stomping Grounds, however, is the one that everyone is paying attention to, thanks to obvious temptations in the Red/Green rares, such as Rumbling Slum and Burning-Tree Shaman. Give us undercosted fat, and give it abilities that deal damage to the opponent on top of being undercosted fat, and it shall be played:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Zo-Zu the Punisher
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Kird Ape
- 4 Burning-Tree Shaman
- 4 Rumbling Slum
- 4 Scab-Clan Mauler
- 4 Tin Street Hooligan
Lands (24)
There are a lot of different options available to the Red/Green mage, but one of the better ways to go against resistance would be to use the Red and Green “taxing” cards, putting an added clause of “but you’ll take some damage” to otherwise common occurrences like putting lands into play or activating abilities like that of Glare of Subdual or Meloku the Clouded Mirror. Instead of Jittes, you have Jitte-breakers and Burning-Tree Shaman, though I’m not sold on the belief that putting a “take one damage” tax on Umezawa’s Jitte is enough to effectively stop it. There’s some definite reach thanks to Shock and Char, paired up with Zo-Zu and the Shaman and Rumbling Slum to just splash extra damage everywhere, and enough fat with an aggressive curve to clean most people’s clocks in a timely fashion. There are a dozen or more ways to build Red/Green, and which way works best will be hotly debated and will likely help center the new metagame: while old decks are definitely still viable, and Boros Weenie was the key for setting the pace of the old Standard, it will be the Gruul Clans that set the clock for the new Standard.
Or, if you like peanut butter and chocolate together, you can be all sorts of greedy:
Creatures (23)
- 3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
- 4 Savannah Lions
- 4 Kird Ape
- 4 Watchwolf
- 4 Scab-Clan Mauler
- 4 Tin Street Hooligan
Lands (22)
Spells (15)
Other than that, the archetypes we are used to seeing already are the ones that will only update a little to adjust to the idea of having more dual lands around to play with. Imagine Greater Gifts going Godo Gifts as well, throwing Godo in the mix to fetch out Tatsumasa, the Dragon’s Fang, getting a creature that can be sacrificed to Greater Good repeatedly, or an artifact that can give you plus-five cards on other creatures sacrificed to Greater Good. Of course, it can “just” be good old Tatsumasa from Block Constructed, with decks dancing around against each other when it comes time to beat down. Imagine Boros Weenie splashing Ninja of Deep Hours and Mana Leak and Remand off Steam Vents and Shivan Reef, going from a true weenie deck to an Aggro-Control “Fish” deck, or really good mana for your Black/Green Rock deck to splash in White for Loxodon Hierarch, and maybe even the Ghost Council of Orzhova, or…
You get the idea. With this much good mana available, you can use your imagination, because good mana widens the potential metagame while bad mana restricts it. In the end, the best cards get the most play, and thus we’ll see things we wouldn’t expect, like Red/Green Gruul Beatdown splashing Meloku because Meloku is that good, but the widening effect of good mana available in a format is at least for the moment going to outweigh the banal stagnation of every deck playing the same few best cards because they are just head and shoulders above the rest.