Daily Digest: The Return Of Red Eldrazi

Remember when the red Eldrazi deck was supposed to be the next big Standard deck? Remember when it disappeared shortly thereafter? Well, don’t sleep on it yet. Michael Majors found a pilot that gave it some much needed updating!

Declaration in Stone fits that bill nicely, as it can exile anything without bias while also being a favorable tempo play.

Eldrazi Displacer is the major adjustment to the strategy, though. We’ve seen this tentacle monster in just about every variation of white deck that exists in Standard. It’s so good that Kevin Geissler was willing to splash for it!

And why not? Not only can Displacer can keep an opponent from attacking or blocking favorably, but it also synergizes nicely with both Thopter Engineer and Pia and Kiran Nalaar as a means to make tokens, similar to how Four-Color Rite uses it alongside various Scion token producers.

We’ve barely even mentioned that Red Eldrazi already had an excellent curve of aggressive creatures – many of which also served as disruption and reach. Not only that, but R/W Eldrazi has access to the full four copies of Chandra, Flamecaller as a top-end and can support all of these powerful interactions with a rock-solid manabase that is unlikely to flood with eight powerful utility lands.

The movement toward the white splash also offers some interesting sideboard options. There is no shortage of Collected Company and token producers in the Standard format, and I believe we’ll start to see even more of an uptick in Hallowed Moonlights now that Seth Manfield has proven that you can win with them in your maindeck.

Adding Tragic Arrogance to our aggressive deck that boasts planeswalkers and artifacts is also not a surprise. Why not add the baddest new planeswalker, Nahiri, the Harbinger, while we’re at it?

This Eldrazi deck looks aggressively unrelenting and well-tuned with viable options for playing both a short and long game. All of this is complemented by a variety of powerful sideboard cards for a whole swath of different matchups.

It shouldn’t surprise you that Kevin won the tournament.

R/W Eldrazi

Kevin Geissler

1st Place at Star City Games Super IQ on 05-15-2016

Standard