Is Historic The Next Format Omnath, Locus Of Creation Is Going To Dominate?

Welcome to What We’d Play! With the recent introduction of Zendikar Rising, many are unsure what they’d play in Historic. That’s where we come in and let you know what we’d play and why we’d play it. Hopefully this advice aids in your decision making for your next Historic event! Be sure to vote for what deck you would play at the end!

Autumn Burchett — Four-Color Ramp

I mean, I registered it for the Grand Finals, so I certainly hope I’d play this deck this weekend.

Four-Color Ramp has impressed me a lot in Historic, and you can find out more about why (with a handy sideboard guide) in my article next week. For now, the brief version is that you get an incredible mix of a powerful proactive linear plan but also some of the best hate cards in the format.

Your linear plan is so explosive and powerful that it’s possible to have your entire deck on the battlefield on Turn 4, meaning that even in bad matchups, if your opponent doesn’t have the right interaction at the right time and you high-roll, they can still easily die. Getting to pair Lotus Cobra with Explore and Growth Spiral is terrifying.

Meanwhile Grafdigger’s Cage and Aether Gust, formerly the two best hate cards in the format, are joined by the big pig Yasharn, Implacable Earth, which gets to compete with these two cards for that Best Hate Card title. You even get a sweeper in Deafening Clarion that doesn’t kill the vast majority of your creatures and buffers your life total in the process. This deck really has everything, and I’m excited to see how it does in the big event this weekend!

Carmen Handy — Four-Color Ramp

This weekend n the Grand Finals, I’m going to be playing this Four-Color Ramp list from Autumn Burchett (which you just saw above).  Lotus Cobra is an incredible card in this kind of deck, because it makes Explore and Growth Spiral effectively zero mana, and with two Lotus Cobras, the Explore effects become Moxen.  It’s easy to see how things get out of hand easily, and why this deck has the raw power to hang.

Yasharn, Implacable Earth is incredible against all of the previous top decks in the format, most specifically flavors of Mayhem Devil and God-Pharaoh’s Gift, while having an impactful enough body to play in the games that the hate-card half isn’t relevant.

The sideboard itself is largely built around the efficacy of Bala Ged Recovery as the Snapcaster Mage that rebuys impactful sideboard cards.  Looping Aether Gust over and over is absolutely backbreaking in the matchups where it’s good, and I’m excited to farm wins with the best deck in the format.

Todd Anderson —Temur Neoform

The majority of players in the Grand Finals have chosen Omnath as their weapon of choice. It’s powerful, consistent, and offers up some explosive plays that many opponents can’t handle. But it also sucks at interacting with combo!

Temur Neoform is currently my favorite deck in Historic because it offers you a unique experience that’s both rewarding and inherently powerful. It isn’t infinite, but you can deal a ton of damage on the third turn without much investment. Like Splinter Twin in formats before it, the trick will be figuring out how to keep it from being an all-in combo and instead putting an emphasis on playing regular Magic with a combo kill.

At the moment, the deckbuilding constraints you put on yourself lead to some pretty horrific draws, but Fire Prophecy and Shimmer of Possibility are just fine when paired with either Dualcaster Mage or Sea Gate Stormcaller. You have so much mana at your disposal thanks to Llanowar Elves and Gilded Goose that you wouldn’t normally use, so it’s nice to have a few ways to use all that extra mana to dig for combo pieces or kill your opponent’s creatures.

Spot removal isn’t that good against us. We’re faster than most of the other decks in the format. We’re consistent enough at finding our combo while being able to interact with the opponent when we need to. We’re also in a color combination that offers some really strong sideboard options! I’d definitely recommend this deck for the current ramp-filled metagame. If both players are just goldfishing, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a lot of free wins.

Andrew Elenbogen — Four-Color Ramp

Prior to the release of Zendikar Rising, Historic was a format with three major pillars: Mono-Red Goblins, Jund Sacrifice, and Sultai Control. But times have changed and I believe Omnath, Locus of Creation is favored against all three. To reiterate — it has no bad matchups in the current Historic metagame.

The broken landfall deck looks much like its Zendikar Rising Standard counterpart, but with a few notable improvements. It gets to play a whopping six two-mana Explore effects to turbo-charge its development. As a result, Four-Color Ramp can cast a seven- or eight-drop by Turn 5 almost every game, which is typically lights out for the opponent regardless of their deck. Four-Color Ramp has an even matchup against Mono-Red Goblins just by racing Muxus, Goblin Grandee in Game 1. But with 4 Aether Gust, 2 Deafening Clarion, and a Grafdigger’s Cage in the sideboard, Games 2 and 3 are not likely to be competitive.

Against Jund Sacrifice, the incidental lifegain from Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath and Omnath do a decent job of ignoring their chip damage. This buys the ramp deck ample time to go way over the top of their pesky Mayhem Devils. For good measure, Four-Color Ramp also has access to Yasharn, Implacable Earth. Yasharn represents a one-card combo that completely locks out their entire deck (nice Witch’s Oven, nice Bolas’s Citadel, nice Phrexian Tower — good luck winning with mediocre beats!).

Against Sultai Control, you can just execute your Plan A. Current lists only have access to around four pieces of countermagic (and less in Game 1). That makes just ramping and casting expensive sorceries a great way to win the fair matchup and Hydroid Krasis and Nissa, Who Shakes the World just cannot compete with Genesis Ultimatum. Thoughtseize will never be a bad card, but this deck is good at mitigating its impact. It’s nearly impossible to take all the payoffs when every ramp spell cantrips and Four-Color Ramp is highly redundant to boot.

I highly recommend making it rain land drops the next time you play Historic.

Michael Majors — Rakdos Arcanist (Lurrus)

I’m still high on Rakdos Arcanist.  I’ve only changed some minor details, mixing up the DFCs and going back to three copies of Claim the Firstborn.  It’s still to be seen if Omnath is just going to dominate the Grand Finals this weekend, but another outlier performance aside, Rakdos Arcanist feels like the best deck in the format with its ability to disrupt, be aggressive, and have nigh-unbeatable draws. There’s so much flexibility in this package, and with newfound ability to beat hate, I don’t see a real reason to stop playing it.

Shaheen Soorani — Temur Neoform

It looks like I’m not the only one who falls for wacky combo decks.  The amount of power Temur Neoform wields offsets the turbulent nature of the combo, but it gets even better than that.  What Todd and I both noticed about the combo is the amount of battlefield and card advantage that can be utilized on the way to comboing.

Neoform decks in Modern were all-in on the combo, falling flat if it was disrupted in any way.  Temur Neoform in Historic provides more normal play patterns, laying out a small complement of creatures that can apply some pressure, removal to disrupt the opponent, and card draw that can provide a quick combo kill right after. A redundant combo, defended by Pact of Negation in the sideboarded games, provides some real entertainment in the Historic format.

Cedric Phillips — Rakdos Arcanist (Lurrus)

Does it look like I’m copying Michael Majors’s decklist above? That’s because I mostly am but I know a good thing when I see it. The only changes I’ve made are adding an additional copy of Bedevil over Spikefield Hazard and cutting the Redcap Melee for the fourth Leyline of the Void. The additional Bedevil is to manage Omnath in Game 1 and the fourth Leyline of the Void is because when I want it, I really want it.

As I stated in Fact or Fiction yesterday, not only was I seriously impressed by Luis Salvatto’s performance with the deck in the Mythic Invitational last month, but the deck actually got better with the addition of Feed the Swarm and Agadeem’s Awakening. The former is a clean answer to Leyline of the Void (which doesn’t see a ton of play in Historic but it’s nice to have an out to the card while also doubling as a removal spell) while the latter is just a freeroll in the manabase that also leads to explosive turns in the mid-/late-game.

I think these additions are huge (as does Michael apparently), so if I’m wrong so is Majors and then we can commiserate together!

Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa — Four-Color Ramp

Omnath has already staked a claim for best card in Zendikar Rising Standard and now it’s starting to make waves in Historic. It makes sense — all the powerful cards are still powerful and you gain many new tools in the form of Uro, Growth Spiral, Explore, and a better manabase. The decks in Historic are naturally more powerful than the decks in Standard, but there’s still no aggro deck that’s just going to kill you as you’re setting up; in Historic, the aggressive decks are mostly combo-based and do not kill very quickly.

There are some Grand Finals competitors that have already tweeted out their decks, and a bunch of them are playing Four-Color Ramp decks. Of the versions that I saw, the one I liked the most was Austin Bursavich’s and Allen Wu’s, and I know they put a lot of work into this list, so it would be the one I’d choose right now.

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