With Ravnica hot on the streets, the obvious question is what’s going to come out of it and kick serious butt at States. Theories are kicking around everywhere: Black/Green is a prime contender, as is White Weenie (more Kamigawa Block than former Standard) with a little help from the Boros Guild splash made so easy by Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] and Sacred Foundry. Some mono-Blue deck seems inevitable, as does the fact that it’ll probably be pretty good. And a conversion of the best Block Constructed decks, namely Gifts, is all but inevitable… and it’s a hope, not a promise, that we get to have a more divergent format than the last PTQ season.
What I’m looking to do here is a little bit different than most articles, and definitely quite a bit different from my other articles, because this is a Choose Your Own Adventure article series for looking at Standard in the weeks leading up to States. I’ll start with three decks, one aggressive, one controlling, and one with a combinatory element, to be discussed, tweaked, and (perhaps by some adventurous few beyond just myself) tested if they look interesting. It’s an opportunity to allow for an exchange of ideas, among people who might be interested in using the Forums… but who might not be interested in contributing to any one particular thread, as elements of the deck in question hadn’t caught their interest. Consider this a place where ideas can change hands, and profit everyone involved, so long as people are willing to ride along with the experiment.
What I am going to do is present a few decks here, starting with a brief discussion of what role they might fill in the upcoming States metagame, and open the floor to discussion on the Forums about the strengths or weaknesses of each deck, each card within the deck, the purpose of the deck, and suggest alterations. If I tossed out sixty cards and left it at that, it’d be kind of like cheating and just asking the Forum posters to playtest the decks for me, and thus be a really lazy man’s post-Ravnica Standard article series. Instead I’m going to present fifty cards, and open the floor to discussing how well those fifty cards work at doing the job of the deck, so that we can discuss this and combine an awful lot of brain-power into brainstorming a deck.
Fifty cards sounds like a lot, but about half of those are usually lands, leaving ten cards in the main undeclared, and another fifteen in the sideboard. All told, half the work of defining a deck and its potential interaction with other decks will be presented here as a possible question looking to be answered, and hopefully we’ll be able to discuss together what suits the missing half. Through discussion and weighing the strength of the options available, we’ll be exploring what you can and cannot do with post-Ravnica Standard decks.
Obviously, this will only work with your help: maybe not you, in the back, the stoner in the oversized trenchcoat, or you, the forum-troll hiding under his desk when I point at him because he hates the bright lights out here in the real world. But some you‘s will have to help out and participate in this experiment for this to all work, otherwise we’re going to have a really hellaciously boring few weeks together. This article series will be updated each week with advancements in technology, new card suggestions, hints on what early testing against others seems to see the metagame shaping up as, and so on and so forth. Come the week before States, we’ll have a lot to show for the work we’re all putting in together, and like any meaningful experience, you should be able to get back proportionally to what you put in. Thinking about this in depth should help stimulate additional thoughts that take you deeper into the burgeoning metagame, and lead to a higher level of preparation for the State Championships later this month.
And besides, if nobody participates in this, Ted is going to haul me over the coals and beat me with a sackful of weasels that they keep on hand for opportunities exactly like this one. I’ve still got the scars left over from my run on Star City Daily and the “My London” run, which just didn’t go as far as I thought it would when I thought the “guidelines” were actually “rules”. Please help me keep another savage beating at bay, before Ben takes me to the Bleiweiss Corner again…
… I’m joking about the beating, aren’t I, Ted? Ted?
Deck number one: Blue is dead, long live Blue
The changing of the guard from one block to another inevitably sees an immediate rise in the number of beatdown decks floating around out there, and there’s no reason to think this time will be different than the last. It’s a long December… I mean October… and instead of playtesting control decks with the new format, people are planning their Halloween costumes, drafting Ravnica, getting cranked with back-to-school homework, and learning how to attack for two again. The color Blue inevitably gets left behind in cases like this, with surprising regularity.
If everyone’s beating down then, a deck that wipes the board with a sweeper and keeps things clean with countermagic and seals the deal with card advantage and the latest Blue or Artifact nightmarish creature of choice is going to work well. If they have creatures and equipment and more creatures where some other, more threatening decks have burn, then this plan is going to work practically without fail pretty much all of the time.
4 Golgari Rot Farm
4 Quicksand
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Minamo, School at the Water’s Edge
16 Island
4 Jushi Apprentice
4 Telling Time
4 Hinder
4 Mana Leak
4 Remand
4 Plague Boiler
We’ve got twenty-six lands, four of which are pseudo-removal and four of which are colorless lands that power up and control Plague Boiler. The choice of Golgari Rot Farm assumes that you can mess around with your mana early if you absolutely have to, but the twenty-six lands are there to assure you from having to do so too early on in the game. Playing Plague Boiler turn 3, and your first Rot Farm turn 4, lets you use the Boiler to blow up the world turn five and still keep up two mana for Mana Leak or Remand.
This deck is obviously missing a little bit of something in the “hard counter” department, with its two-mana counters just buying time, and doesn’t yet have anything to finish the game with. There are a lot of options for that, and either way it shouldn’t take up too many slots to put an actual kill mechanism in.
Blue mages: choose your own adventure!
Deck number two: Heartbeat Combo
If you were paying attention in Kamigawa Block Constructed, Rich Hoaen and a few others played a combo deck based off of Heartbeat of Spring. It was always present in the metagame, with someone in the room playing it, either well or poorly. Things got to be pretty sad once mono-Blue decks started showing up in greater and greater numbers, but still it soldiered on hoping for more favorable matchups in what was a surprisingly open metagame. Much like the basic concept behind High Tide in Legacy, you have a card that doubles your mana, and effects that untap your land so you can draw more and more mana into your mana pool, and then mysteriously somehow you win. In Legacy, it’s by decking using a two-mana card, which sort of makes everyone wonder why you bother making an arbitrarily large amount of mana in the first place. In Block, it was Maga, Traitor of Mortals for your life total. It can be anything here, so long as they die, right?
The point here is to use the tools you have at hand, mana acceleration and deck manipulation, to set up cards in hand and mana available in such a fashion that you can pull off One Big Turn before your opponent overwhelms and kills you. The limitation is on the number of colors you can play, as you’ll have no more mana-fixing than the Kamigawa Block versions did, and want to keep the nonbasics to a severe minimum thanks to their non-interaction with Early Harvest. If you need me to tell you the basic gist of what a combo deck’s supposed to do, rather than show you the engine and let you figure out the surprisingly obvious for yourself, then I’ve done something wrong… or you’re sitting at a typewriter along with an infinite number of your compatriots trying to re-trace the plays of Shakespeare.
4 Early Harvest
4 Heartbeat of Spring
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Telling Time
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Time of Need
2 Eye of the Storm
2 Myojin of Seeing Winds
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1 Sakashima the Impostor
4 Yavimaya Coast
11 Forest
6 Island
This is the basic engine, missing anything to close the deal with, or anything to help out against Blue decks. A tidbit of information that may prove useful: Sakashima the Impostor comes into play with a Divinity counter if used to copy Myojin of Seeing Winds. At least one of these cards is highly dangerous to even consider, that being Eye of the Storm, but I included it out of the desire to show them that seven-mana broken combo cards are still broken combo cards and need to be treated more carefully. The danger is that your opponent can use it too; the idea is that their doing so still shouldn’t matter, since you use it better and kill them that turn. Kind of makes me want to play a non-Instant, non-Sorcery kill card though, so I don’t accidentally get killed in response. That’d be downright embarrassing, after all.
Combo players: Choose your own adventure!
Deck Number Three: Boros Deck Wins!
Mono-Red decks proved to be exceptionally good at attacking the metagame in a fundamentally different way than other aggressive decks in the last Standard format, but we don’t seem to be getting the same kind of support we’d normally expect in our quest to take Red men and turn them sideways. Beating down can be hard to do, but these two colors combined seem to make things work out well enough through their combined dedication to aggressive speed. Fast beats and potent burn have been a good team ever since Savannah Lions first met Lightning Bolt out on the plateau, and the archetype eventually became known as “PT Jank” when it kept working years and years later against decks like Trix. “Boros Deck Wins” is as good a name as any, in the modern age of “Solidarity” and deck names not making any sense whatsoever, because at least it’s not “Ralph Fiennes Fan Club” or “Hillary Clinton Tribute Band”.
Call it what you want, it’s still two-drops and burn.
4 Sacred Foundry
4 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
4 Mountain
10 Plains
4 Lightning Helix
4 Char
4 Suntail Hawk
4 Lantern Kami
4 Boros Swiftblade
4 Leonin Skyhunter
4 Skyknight Legionnaire
Here we have cheap creatures with evasion, to make sure those annoying Sakura-Tribe Elders don’t interfere in our attack phase, backed up with enough burn to take someone out from a reasonably high life total. Add to this your opponents’ painlands and life lost to power dual lands and we have a rather unforgiving starting build, and one with synergies to be explored and advanced through the remaining ten maindeck cards as well as the sideboard tools. Red/White is effectively White Weenie without the inability to kill you from eight life after you Wrath, which can make all the difference in the world when one of the most anticipated decks to start looking at, the Gifts deck, was the nemesis of this deck’s mono-White predecessor.
Beatdown players: choose your own adventure!
Now, for the fourth choice I’m hoping to look at something a little less obvious.
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Journeyer’s Kite
4 Sickening Shoal
4 Nightmare Void
4 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
4 Dark Confidant
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Tower
4 Urza’s Power Plant
1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse
13 Swamp
A lot has been said about several of the cards here being “close” to relevant in the new Standard format, but only close. Journeyer’s Kite and Sensei’s Divining Top are well-known as a potentially very strong combo, except for the fact that they cost a lot of mana to use. Adding in the Urza’s lands can make that easier to afford every turn, combining for deck-thinning and selective Tutoring even though the Kite can’t find Urza’s lands itself. Likewise, Top + Dark Confidant is an outrageous combo, drawing an additional card a turn at minimal costs not to exceed one mana and one life.
While we’re at it, trying to use black cards and Top together well, Nightmare Void is considered on the margin of playability, despite the fact that it can crush combo or control decks single-handedly. This is solely because it costs a lot and doesn’t have any ‘supplemental’ benefit. The cost to use can be a benefit in and of itself, though, if you try to use it that way. The benefit of getting to mill the top of your deck isn’t usually seen as an advantage, but with Sensei’s Divining Top it’s at least as good as drawing a miscellaneous shuffle effect. And all of this together may add up to nothing… but it also could add up to something.
Maybe everything else will work out well, but the Urza’s lands don’t fit. Maybe a second color could fit instead, or just a mono-Black deck without any excessive use of nonbasic lands. It’s something that gets the creative juices flowing, as obviously Dark Confidant + Sensei’s Divining Top is good, but where can that take you if you push it?
Brainstormers: choose your own adventure!
See you on the Forums, if you choose to participate…