In the past few articles, we’ve looked over a lot of potential growth decks, and pored over very dry statistics about pre-Saviors Standard. The summation of all of this is to hope to learn how to play post-Saviors Standard, by means of analyzing the situation at hand and learning the rules of deckbuilding that are forced by the cards in the format. The most powerful cards in the format dictate how you play it, and the strongest sets of synergy rise to the top and form the decks we play – nothing that isn’t pretty obvious, unless something unusual is going on. Control, aggro-control and beatdown mark the three-point system of Rock, Paper, Scissors that we end up with when the format is devoid of true “combo” decks. With modern combo decks commonly disguised as either control decks or aggro-control decks, seeking to gain absolute and insurmountable board advantage through the use of their “combo” and win by means of the attack phase, it’s the cards that attack, block, and either augment or deal with other cards that rise to the fore.
The rules of the format, then, are generally this:
1. Artifact destruction isn’t a “must”, but it’s probably a good idea. Between the bomb equipment cards, Tooth and Nail’s kill cards, Vedalken Shackles and the like, you’ll find a lot of good uses for artifact destruction effects.
2. Redundancy is key. Any deck can pop out Pithing Needle, and Cranial Extraction is a commonly-played answer card to some of the modern strategies we’re seeing. Don’t rely on any one card to the exclusion of the other cards in your deck to accomplish any single important task.
3. Attacking and blocking happens. A lot. This is a creature-oriented format, and the all-stars of attacking will be on the table… or, with some Equipment cards attached, any old dork will be upgraded to a much more efficient beater. Creatures and creature-kill matter, a lot.
4. Don’t worry about the Counterspell. Only a dedicated mono-Blue control deck runs anything approaching a “hard” counter, and the multi-colored control decks you’ll see still won’t have very many Counterspells, trying to fudge it with Eternal Witness or card advantage to make better use of what little they have… and the Blue decks are foiled by the best deck in the format, thanks to Boseiju and the sheer difficulty they face in answering that card.
5. Accelerate, accelerate, accelerate! The Green decks have redundant mana acceleration, thanks to the plethora of good Green mana effects, and either Chrome Mox, Aether Vial or Wayfarer’s Bauble are likely to appear in your opponents’ deck if they aren’t Green. Some decks have two of the above three, either Mox and Bauble for control decks or Mox and Vial for aggro decks like White Weenie. Speed matters… either disruption speed, or all-out aggression speed. The clock is set to five turns: whatever you’re trying to do, you need to win that fast, or prevent your opponent from doing so, with only some exceptions. Even Jamie Wakefield “fun” Green deck can kill you by turn 5, and you don’t want to know about Tooth and Nail.
So, we’re looking to use (or control) creatures and artifacts, looking to do so quickly, with (preferably) redundant effects to work on your game-plan… and not worrying that our opponent might tell us “no”. It’s good, interactive Magic… but that’s why we have a sea of Green. There’s just enough speed to make it very difficult to play more than one color consistently unless you are a Green deck, so there are mono-White, mono-Red, mono-Black, and mono-Blue decks, and the potential for either aggression or control in either of those, and Green decks of many combinations of colors. The power cards in the format reward mono-colored strategies, if not require them, like Vedalken Shackles, Death Cloud, and Arc-Slogger. You can get away with any of these in a deck sporting Green as well, but not with a second non-Green color. Despite having the Invasion dual lands at our disposal there just isn’t good enough, fast enough, two-colored mana to thrive in the current Standard format. That general rule is broken by cards like Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama’s Reach, but otherwise requires that it be obeyed.
And Kermit always said it wasn’t easy being Green.
That said, we’re preparing for Regionals, and in the past few weeks a lot has been said, by me and by others, about what you can expect to see and how good a choice all of that is. I’ve been misquoted (by my own editor even!) as saying that Mono-Green Aggro is the objective best deck in Standard, when that was not in fact the purpose of the mathematical exercise I performed by analyzing the Philadelphia Last Chance Qualifier. That experiment determined, if anything, the best deck to play in Standard, and would not question the dominant mode of thought as far as what deck is the deck playing the best cards in the most redundant or abusive fashion.
I hate to burst your bubble of hope, but Tooth and Nail is the best deck in Standard. Now I’ll explain why I’m not going to be playing it, because the best deck is not the same thing as the best deck to play. If you’ve ever read a Mark Rosewater article over on MagicTheGathering.com, you’ve probably heard four names repeated over, and over, and over: Roseanne, Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. The first is a name that, when heard enough times, will drive you into a psychological state of extreme anger followed by intellectual violation. The other three are psychological profiles of Magic players… Timmy, Power Gamer; Johnny, Combo Player; and Spike, Tournament Shark. If you’re reading an article here on StarCityGames.com Premium section, you’ve paid for the right, with the expectation that this will be worth your $30 per year by increasing your likelihood of winning (or at least enjoying) tournament Magic, thus recouping your $30 investment and likely gaining a bit of enjoyment reading about Magic. One way or the other, you’re at least part “Spike”, or else you wouldn’t be reading this. But the art of playing the metagame follows similar profiles, based on why you play the metagame, and how you play the metagame. It’s because of this tendency that you can walk into the most serious tournament in the world, with the most well-established format in the history of the game, and there will still be someone playing a deck that will be openly mocked by the Internet Magic community for months.
You can keep the names “Timmy”, “Johnny”, and “Spike” for this, if you insist. If you want to refer to Star City authors instead, you can call them “Wakefield”, “Flores”, and “Zvi”. The psychological profiles are, in broad and simple terms:
“Timmy”, or “Wakefield”, metagames because they can’t imagine doing anything else. You can give them a Tooth and Nail deck, and their own internal rules will require them to win on their own terms, whatever those internal rules may be. Timmy appreciates that a lot of work has gone into building the deck that has been put into his hands, quite possibly by a large number of people who are technically quite a bit smarter than themselves. Timmy just can’t leave that be, though, because it cheapens his victory… he trusts himself, and what has always worked for him, not some faceless multitude of lemmings jumping off a cliff to go play Ravager Affinity. His deck is an expression of himself, more so than any other archetype, and so his Tooth and Nail deck will play Cloudposts because the Urza-Tron is (at least in his mind) over-used and vulnerable to land destruction, and doing so allows him to put a Swamp or two in the deck and play a few Cranial Extractions either in the maindeck or the sideboard to help combat those dastardly other Tooth and Nail players.
(A true Wakefield wouldn’t be caught dead playing Tooth and Nail, when he could Blanchwood Armor up a Rushwood Dryad instead.)
“Johnny”, or “Flores”, watches for interactions they can take advantage of. If everyone else is playing Fires of Yavimaya-based Red/Green decks, he’ll figure out Simoon long before anyone else comes up with it for the mirror match, then having locked in the mirror look to exploit cards that give an advantage against other decks, and next thing you know we’ve got Armageddon going on while Rith, the Awakener swings with Armadillo Cloak on. Where the Johnny archetype for the game of Magic is a combo player who has a keen eye for assembling a few pieces into a stunning victory, the Johnny archetype for the tournament mage is a relentless tinkerer. He (or she) exploits perfect (we hope) information on the metagame to attack its flanks, finding an otherwise unknown deck that sits outside the metagame and attacking the elements of the metagame that are common across the few key decks that are considered ‘the best’. He’ll play dozens of matches of the Tooth and Nail mirror (or at least a ten-game set), then move on to aggro Red LD versus MUC and play relentlessly until he has the sideways attack he needs to win the game of the metagame. He won’t play bad cards, or even a bad deck: that’s more the province of “Timmy”, whose card choices can be a lot more arbitrary… he’ll just play a deck that nobody else knows about, as a foil to the present metagame.
And “Spike”, or “Zvi”, insists on playing The Best Deck. Spike knows his options, and he knows what’s out there, and he’s not willing to settle for second best. If there’s a deck that’s playing the largest number of the best cards in a fashion that provides the best synergy, that’s what he’ll be playing; Spike is fickle, and many would say “unoriginal”… but a tournament Spike may be working off of secret information, exploiting the best cards in the format or the most powerful deck, even if somebody else hasn’t found it yet. Spikes have high standards for a deck, and hate it when they can’t be met, because then they have to settle for second best… but they aren’t unoriginal. They just don’t see the need for originality for its own sake: they value different things, and are looking for the most cutthroat deck, whether they built it themselves or not. Spike thinks playing fair is, well, stupid. Spike plays Tooth and Nail right now, kind of wonders why his Affinity deck was stolen a few months ago, and misses the good old days when he could pay life to draw cards or at least discard cards to untap Tolarian Academy.
(In case anyone is wondering, I consider myself a Timmy-Johnny off of these profiles, lacking the cutthroat dedication to playing The Best Deck In The Format when I can instead come up with something myself, and preferably attack the format from the side rather than bashing into it head-on.)
The important thing to realize here is that none of these profiles are better than any other. Zvi, I mean Spike, may be the most ruthless tournament-winning machine, but if he walks into the last Extended PTQ armed with the best Extended deck of the season, he can get blindsided by Flores, I mean Johnny, playing “Black Thumb”, and losing like a chump because Johnny is attacking the format’s weaknesses and has Timmy’s number that week. They explain method and motivation, and have little if anything to do with play skill. (Insert Flores crack here.) Being the best at the game doesn’t mean you’re a Spike, because you can flourish in any of the three profiles… and being the worst player in the room won’t prevent you from being the Spike playing Tooth and Nail in the 0-5 bracket. What it is supposed to do… is give you an amusing reminder to not let yourself be blindsided, either because you fit one of these three brackets or because you assume that a particular bracket is worth ignoring. When it comes to sitting down at a tournament, anything can happen and frequently does.
All of the decks that we have been studying up on these past few weeks bear looking at from each of these three perspectives, because each of these three perspectives are a different way of making choices. As I’ve said before, I like playing with the tolerances of things, and tweaking and toggling choices on decks can be fantastically interesting. In the end, when it comes to crunch time and it’s the night before Regionals, the only person who can tell you what 75 cards to sleeve up is yourself, because it’s you who is going to make the decisions. Information is power, but information needs to be used to make an intelligent decision, it can’t be followed blindly. This article series on post-Saviors Standard, with the groundwork I’ve laid down already getting to this point, would be worthless if I thought everyone who read it was going to draw the exact same conclusion and play the exact same deck. The Timmies will like something they see and make it their own, while the Johnnies will be following the logic and looking for trains of thought to follow… and the Spikes will play Tooth and Nail.
You can go through all the preparation in the world, playtesting and exploring the format as thoroughly as you like, but no amount of preparation in the world will save you from being blindsided by yourself. Wakefields put blinders on themselves by restricting what cards or decks they are able to play, based on whatever internal set of rules they follow in choosing their tools in deckbuilding… while Flores’ put blinders on themselves by restricting their beliefs in what they should and should not play based on the simple aspect of avoiding the direct approach, taking longer than anyone else to learn when the best deck is the best deck to play and only doing so after exhausting numerous other options. Zvis, of course, puts blinders on themselves by limiting what cards or decks they are able to play… but in the opposite sense of the Wakefield archetype, becoming unwilling to play anything that isn’t good enough instead of too popular or not my style… because Zvi hates to play fair, and I can’t blame him. Whichever of these archetypes fits you, though, you’ve got blinders on your perspective of one sort or another, and it is only by actively trying to change your perspective on your thinking, your playtesting, and your deck of choice that you can check your work for objectivity and reach usable conclusions. A team is very good for this, especially if it includes people with all three tendencies, as it will cover a lot of ground and check its work… and as a solo player, working by themselves, it is only by looking at everything you do through all three perspectives that you can really consider yourself prepared for an event, especially when the format is at the start of a rotation.
“Know thy enemy,” Sun Tzu once said, in The Art Of War… but then he also said “Know thyself”, and between the two, failure in the latter can be far more dangerous when it comes to preparing for a serious Magic tournament. How you play the game, and how you play the metagame, can both be severely hampered by bad information and wrong decisions, ending your tournament as soon as you turn in your deck registration sheet.
That said, let’s kick into some decklists and see what the tolerances are…
Tooth and Nail
I would be remiss in my duties if I were not to talk about this deck first. Everyone’s seen it, everyone’s seen really good versions and everyone’s seen really bad versions. You’ve probably seen both good and bad versions in articles I’ve written in the past few weeks, and I never intended to hide that fact, trying to invoke thought rather than make you believe you should splash for Extraction and leave the Urza lands behind in favor of Cloudpost. That is an option, and even openly ridiculing it as “not a good one” won’t prevent it from happening anyway.
The land base is static, locked into place unless you want to try being tricksy:
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Tower
4 Urza’s Power Plant
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
1 Okina, Temple of the Grandfathers
9 Forest
Some people omit Okina, and frankly it doesn’t usually matter; if you’re copying Sundering Titan that many times with Kiki-Jiki, whether you still get to keep a Forest around probably isn’t on your mind.
The creatures are open for debate, and it’s the inclusion of the proper creatures that matters first and foremost:
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Eternal Witness
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Sundering Titan
1 Duplicant
These always make it in the maindeck, and always should. They usually have friends, though, being some or all of the following:
1 Triskelion
1 Mephidross Vampire
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Leonin Abunas
1 Platinum Angel
If you include all 16, that’s probably fine, you’re keeping your options open: sometimes when you Tooth in an unusual situation, you need to find one of these obscure combinations to decimate your opponent when nothing else will do. You can definitely lose the Colossus, though… it’s not special enough, and everything else has earned its place (or at least thinking about). Every slot you free up, though, is a slot that can be put to some other use: we have 23 Lands, and 15 creatures, which means 22 slots for other things… and you can cheat more spells in if you decide to leave Abunas-Angel in the sideboard, for example.
4 Tooth and Nail
4 Reap and Sow
4 Sylvan Scrying
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
These eat up sixteen of the remaining 22 slots, leaving you room for 6 cards, and are usually some combination of Kodama’s Reach, Oblivion Stone, Mindslaver, the Talisman of your choice, or Vine Trellis… or Plow Under, now that Soh has brought that transformational plan to the forefront.
The sideboard is usually dedicated to 4 Plow Under for the mirror, 4 of something to shore up the matchup against Red decks (be it Circle of Protection: Red, Heartbeat of Spring, or some other way of making sure you can cast big things around Red land destruction or buy time against burn), an extra Boseiju, and 6 cards for filling holes. [Don’t run the Heartbeat plan against Red decks – Fireball kicks you right straight in the nuts when you do. – Knut] Viridian Shaman shows up, as do the other pieces of the combos that might not have made it into the maindeck (Mephidross Vampire can be fudged by using Kiki-Jiki with Triskelion, for example, and some people choose to simply go without the Angel/Abunas combo).
The mainstream of Tooth and Nail players will be playing something very close to this, making the few choices that are really available for customizing or tweaking the deck based on their expectations of what is going to show up and the plans they have chosen to include within their 75 cards. (To save space, please refer here for a highly-respected Tooth and Nail decklist of this sort, from a prior article.) Some of the savvy, some of the individualistic, and some of the cutthroat players who pick up this deck will instead refer to what Terry Soh, Invitational winner played instead, “Troll and Nail”: Tooth and Nail with a transformational sideboard plan. That is something not previously covered in one of my articles, but you can read about it here, from Terry Soh himself… but I will look at it, because the Man Plan does gain something from Saviors, notably a replacement for Iwamori of the Open Fist.
The Man Plan is about ignoring the conventional sideboard response to Tooth and Nail, which fixates almost universally on mana denial and preventing Tooth and Nail from being cast, often at the downfall of the deck’s ability to both attack and answer threats. Rather than rely on a nine-mana Tooth and Nail with Entwine, we rely on Troll Ascetic’s mighty shoulders and assorted 5/5’s. It’s all well and good that Iwamori has Trample, but it isn’t needed; it’s excellent that he costs just four mana, but he’s not the commonly-anticipated turn 3 play for Troll and Nail – they only have two of them. The difference between Iwamori’s efficiency and a 5/5 for 5 isn’t quite so big as to be truly worth worrying about. Following Terry’s plan of action, but switching Iwamori for Arashi, the Sky Asunder can shore up a bit more safety for the White Weenie matchup as well as cause Mono-Blue players to quake in their boots even more than before… not that that should really be a concern. White Weenie can get lucky enough to be annoying, while still be worth ignoring as you continue with the regularly scheduled Tooth and Nail plan, that having a key tool against them in Arashi might be well worth losing some of Iwamori’s brutal efficiency at “being a cheap 5/5”.
That “The Man Plan” exists, and has done well, gives me even more reason to laugh at the fact that some people still play Mono-Blue. But if they do, and they play both Bribery and Wayfarer’s Bauble, they might be well rewarded to find room for a single Forest to search for, to keep two Troll Ascetics busy by being able to regenerate your own.
Mono-Green Aggro
This is a unified name for a disparate collection of decks, especially ironic in that most of them are not in fact mono-Green. The deck is an aggro-tempo deck (not quite aggro-control) that uses Swords and Jittes to overwhelm mundane creature combat, Plow Under to gain tempo advantage, and a mid-range set of beaters to win the game with. The choice here is very simple: accommodate Stampeding Serow, or don’t. If you aren’t accommodating Stampeding Serow, you can still play your Meloku the Clouded Mirror and keep the Wood Elves and Viridian Shaman at home, probably having something looking like this:
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Viridian Zealot
4 Troll Ascetic
4 Eternal Witness
2 Iwamori of the Open Fist
2 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
4 Plow Under
4 Beacon of Creation
4 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
Sideboard:
4 Cranial Extraction
11 Other Cards (some of which destroy an artifact and/or enchantment, and probably the other two Jittes)
I have been favoring the Stampeding Serow plan, which is an adjustment of Brett Blackman’s qualifying deck from the Philadelphia Last Chance Qualifiers. It’s only a minor adjustment, but compared to the above it’s something of a radical divergence: playing Stampeding Serow more or less forces enough cards that do something to take advantage of its “downside” that Troll Ascetic ends up in the sideboard, which is fine – that is where Blackman put them anyway – to fit in his Wood Elves. I haven’t learned much about changes that are needed for this deck other than to tweak the number of Disenchants in the sideboard, learn that harsh lesson that Cranial Extraction can tell you about having different names on the cards you want to use to destroy Night of Souls’ Betrayal, and become quite certain that Creeping Mold is highly unnecessary against Tooth and Nail, being both excessive sideboarding and an invitation to walk unprepared into The Man Plan.
“Stupid Green Deck 2005”
21 Forest
1 Swamp
4 Plow Under
4 Beacon of Creation
3 Sensei’s Divining Top
3 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Wood Elves
4 Eternal Witness
3 Viridian Shaman
3 Stampeding Serow
Sideboard:
4 Troll Ascetic
4 Cranial Extraction
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Naturalize
2 Wear Away
1 Viridian Shaman
It doesn’t look like much, and as far as pure power goes it’s low on gas compared to Tooth and Nail. But it has a distinct advantage there, in that it’s trying the Tooth and Nail Man Plan game one, even if the creatures are a lot smaller than your average Masticore or Iwamori. The numbers back this up as an excellent deck to play – even better than Tooth and Nail – if everyone else in the tournament decides normally to play Tooth and Nail in the expected percentage (about 20% can be expected, and more is quite likely, especially at a tournament like Regionals). The Cranial Extractions cripple any Tooth and Nail deck not going for the Man Plan, and aren’t useless against the Man Plan, since you can be assured they would like to cast Plow Under at least as much as you would like to… but they aren’t quite as stellar a plan as they were when Tooth and Nail didn’t do anything tricksy after game one.
Conveniently, even with a swarm of 1/1’s, this deck is quite good against most Red decks. It shrugs off land destruction, and can carry itself quite far on the back of its Equipment cards making up the difference between Wood Elves and bigger creatures. Decks of this type posted an absurd win percentage against Red decks at the Last-Chance Qualifier, as well as against Tooth and Nail, so for a first-pass look at a deck other than the acknowledged best deck that attacks the metagame’s most prominent decks with a winning percentage… this is quite a good selection.
There isn’t as much flexibility in this as there is in putting cards in Tooth and Nail; aggro decks require a considerable investment of valuable space on inexpensive creatures, and 31 slots are eaten up by things that attack, block, generate tokens, or have the sub-type “Equipment”. The seven best “other” cards are Plow Under and Sensei’s Divining Top, and the choice of creatures is dictated by the best Green creatures around plus creatures that take advantage of Stampeding Serow, leaving not so very much space to work with. Once you know what you’re aiming for, and a rough guess of where the numbers are going to fall for stuff like Swords and Jittes, it pretty much assembles itself with only a very few decisions made past the “Stampeding Serow or No?” question and its twin, “Where am I putting my Troll Ascetics?”
Red
There are three key decks that constitute the realm of “Red decks”, two based on a mix of burn, creatures, and land destruction and one based on burn mixed with more burn and a sprinkling of… you guessed it… burn. The creature-oriented versions diverge on the decision to play land destruction or to not play land destruction, and it is in the color Red that the most variety and innovation is present these days. In a field dominated by Green decks of many varieties, it is the color Red that attacks this aspect of the metagame from the side, avoiding most of the conventional attacker versus blocker interactions that become problematic. Flores’ Red deck does so by effectively ignoring the attack phase, targeting you with direct damage, while the other two try to either neutralize blockers entirely and get across with Firewalkers and Sloggers or to nullify your opponents’ ability to play interactive Magic via land destruction. All three prey upon Tooth and Nail in different fashions, and some don’t prey upon it as effectively as they would like to believe.
In prior articles, and Forum discussions, I have been playfully accused of ignoring Mike Flores‘ Kuroda Red deck in Standard, despite doing very well at the Last Chance Qualifier in the hands of some very skilled players, and a cool 3-0 at the Magic Invitational. The concession, or explanation, I would like to make is that the articles in which I treated on it, specifically, did not discuss it in any great detail due to the statistical inaccuracy of the data: a sample size of three players bolstering a 65% match win percentage is too small a data sample to really compare with the accuracy of the results garnered by 10 to 20 people playing the other major archetypes (including other Red decks). Flores can toot his own horn, and has… my article series here has been looking at the bigger picture, rather than touting the latest creation of one Michael J. Flores.
The color Red is an excellent example of how to look into playing the metagame, exploiting weaknesses in the current tier of decks. Unfortunately, Michael beat me to going into any details without just repeating what he’s said, so you can look here to see a fairly accurate representation of the state of Red versus the metagame right now. I have likewise looked fairly clearly at two different kinds of Red decks in previous articles, those being the ones that cared about Thoughts of Ruin, and those that don’t. Either way, you are likely to see at least some element of land destruction, as it suits the strategy of modern Red decks very well right now. Recently, though, looking at Thoughts of Ruin has caused us to wonder why we’re trying so hard to play Arc-Slogger, when we clearly can’t afford to plan for a five-drop after a four-mana Armageddon… and re-designing the deck to work from there, removing Arc-Slogger and the Seething Songs included to cast him with, make for a much more interesting schism in the color Red:
You Ruined My Red Deck!
4 Slith Firewalker
4 Hearth Kami
4 Vulshok Sorcerer
4 Adamaro, First to Desire
4 Zo-Zu, the Punisher
4 Thoughts of Ruin
4 Molten Rain
4 Magma Jet
4 Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
4 Chrome Mox
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
15 Mountain
1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
Sideboard:
4 Volcanic Hammer
4 Arc-Slogger
3 Duplicant
3 Pithing Needle
1 Mountain
This creates a Red deck that is capable of some hideously fast starts, and can attack Lands either directly, by destroying them, or as a strategy, thanks to Zo-Zu complemented by burn spells. Sakura-Tribe Elder is a key card in the format, and Green decks are looking to play lands in great quantities to do whatever they happen to be planning at the moment, made quite a bit more difficult by Zo-Zu, punisher of the format. The decision to play Thoughts of Ruin morphs the deck far away from the common Red deck played prior, such as at the Last Chance Qualifier, and can reward high-risk cards like Adamaro, First to Desire while punishing one’s hopes of utilizing Arc-Slogger. Thoughts of Ruin isn’t good in every matchup, though, especially against your fellow traditional Red decks… and so the plan becomes one more related to a war of attrition, switching Adamaro out for Arc-Slogger and Thoughts of Ruin out for Volcanic Hammer. Duplicant can come in as well, if one’s concerns include the opponents’ Arc-Sloggers, and those plus the Mountain can replace Molten Rain quite effectively. If we are looking at a more Flores-based approach, well… he’ll be the first to tell you that he likes to have lands in play and cards in hand, making Adamaro and Thoughts of Ruin particularly monstrous for him. If controllish decks are your concern, as well as the well-respected Green decks, this may be the option that leads to success in the format.
(A more standardized Red deck, eschewing Thoughts of Ruin, Adamaro, and other untested “risky” cards and sticking to the Arc-Slogger plan, can be found here, again courtesy of a previous article.)
Red allows for an astounding amount of innovation and deviation from expected norms, while Tooth and Nail has very few different plans it can go with and is pretty much a well-plumbed, highly banal decklist at this late hour. The Green Aggro decks have more variety than the Tooth and Nail decks, but not the wellspring of variety you can see in successful Red decks… or unsuccessful ones. Red is generally acknowledged to be the primary way to play the metagame right now, exploiting common weaknesses found in Green-based decks as well as against control-based strategies…
… but that which is known can be attacked. Check back next week for the last pre-Regionals Magical Hack article, where we explore some wide-open spaces, diving past the sea of Red and Green that swarms modern Standard and trying to see how else one might play the metagame.
— Sean McKeown — [email protected]
“There are times I can’t decide, when I can’t tell up from down You make me feel less crazy when otherwise I’d drown But you pick me up and brush me off and tell me I’m OK Sometimes that’s just what we need to get us through the day…”
–Sarah McLachlan, “Push”