Each fall, we jump face first into a new Standard environment. A bunch of new cards, meshed with a bunch of familiar faces, leads to an exciting period of deckbuilding. Everyone wants to be the first to create a new deck with new cards. I think this is the appeal of the 2010’s/States/whatever. If the incentive to win States were significantly high, you probably wouldn’t see that many new cards. But since States is merely a place for everyone to try out their new stuff; innovation reigns supreme.
Innovation is a double-edged sword. Innovating bad things is certainly not desirable, but the vast majority of all innovation is negative. If you’re bringing a new deck to States, then odds are you won’t do as well as someone that’s bringing a tried and true deck. After all, your opponent is likely to be far more familiar with their cards than you are with yours. Also, their deck is certainly good, whereas your deck may or may not be good. This is fine, provided you have goals other than to win this particular Magic tournament.
Each time you fail and learn what doesn’t work, you get closer to what
does
work. With that in mind, I’d like to go over some of the new cards in Scars of Mirrodin and go over some potential applications to the new Standard format.
Metalcraft
Many cards have metalcraft, and many of them look extremely powerful. In fact, many of them are absurdly powerful once metalcraft is turned on. A 4/4 for 1G or an 8/8 trample for 2GG look enticing until you realize that vanilla creatures still aren’t chocolate or peanut butter (or god forbid, both. Chocolate + Peanut Butter > Illusions + Donate).
Mox Opal is admittedly absurd, and Galvanic Blast makes Shrapnel Blast look a bit embarrassing. However, if you’re going to play a bunch of Memnites and Ornithopters (vomit) to turn on your metalcraft, then you have to look at your metalcraft card as essentially discarding cards to get the effect. If you’re playing Prophetic Prisms, you’re paying extra mana for your metalcraft. Shards/Zendikar Standard was not a removal-fest by any means (outside of Jund), but it was rare to see a game where three cards were cast and stayed in play, while its caster needed additional cards to help out the strategy.
The closest deck where this was true was Soul Sisters, which needed a bunch of Soul Wardens in play for its threats to actually do anything. If you’ve played Soul Sisters, you realized that it was a gimmick deck and didn’t have true staying power. Granted, there will certainly be more artifacts in Scars than there were Soul Wardens in Standard, but you’ll need three of them to turn on your metalcraft card. That’s four cards, unless your metalcraft card is an artifact itself.
The list that seems best optimized to take advantage of metalcraft that I’ve seen doesn’t even have all that many metalcraft cards in it. Patrick Chapin posted the following decklist in his article this week.
Creatures (5)
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (20)
Spells (30)
This deck is an interesting take on what’s possible with an artifact-centric deck. This deck has a ton of ways to cheaply access metalcraft (Mox Opal and Everflowing Chalice are important parts of the mana base). However, the actual metalcraft cards are limited to Galvanic Blast and Mox Opal. Kuldotha Phoenix seems like it’d be a great fit here, but this deck doesn’t want a never-dying creature that costs five. I think metalcraft will have to wait for more powerful artifacts and metalcraft cards to be printed.
Molten-Tail Masticore
I feel like this is the best card in the set. I doubt it will be format warping like the old Masticore was, but I doubt that any card in Scars of Mirrodin will be format warping in the same way that Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Vengevine are. Speaking of which, here is a deck that combines all three cards!
Creatures (29)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 3 Trinket Mage
- 4 Lotus Cobra
- 3 Cunning Sparkmage
- 4 Vengevine
- 1 Aether Adept
- 4 Fauna Shaman
- 1 Frost Titan
- 1 Inferno Titan
- 1 Sylvan Ranger
- 1 Memnite
- 2 Molten-Tail Masticore
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (25)
Spells (2)
A tentative sideboard might look like this:
Sideboard
1 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Roil Elemental
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Basilisk Collar
1 Cunning Sparkmage
1 Manic Vandal
1 Acidic Slime / Sylvok Replica
1 Tunnel Ignus
X Arc Trail
X Mind Control
X Mana Leak / Flashfreeze / Negate
This was the first deck I built after Scars was revealed, but I was certainly not the only person to build a deck like this. This deck’s greatest strengths are also its greatest weakness. The four-drops are just some of the best cards in Standard, and they all play well together… except that they all cost four. For the most part, if you don’t hit four mana on time (preferably early), you won’t do anything. This deck has a ton of mana issues and feels very clunky. It’s very hard to optimize resources with this deck, which ends up diluting the incredible power of many of its cards. However, it remains a pretty good Masticore deck. You have plenty of mana, plenty of creatures, and you even have a way to fuel the Masticore (Jace) and make profitable discards (Vengevine).
Grand Architect
I think this card is extremely powerful, but again the fight will be to optimize its abilities. These abilities are often at odds with each other (one wants blue creatures, the other wants artifacts). I feel the best way to use the ability is to use the Architect to power out artifact creatures, with a minimal amount of blue utility creatures to help out the mana ability. No point in playing Sphinx of Jwar Isle just to tap it for two Workshop mana.
Creatures (22)
- 4 Trinket Mage
- 4 Lodestone Golem
- 2 Wurmcoil Engine
- 4 Grand Architect
- 4 Molten-Tail Masticore
- 4 Riddlesmith
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (24)
Spells (10)
I don’t think this deck is remotely tuned, as we’re loading up on the four-drops. In addition, I feel that Riddlesmith isn’t taken advantage of nearly enough, as looting is the last thing you need to do after casting a four-plus-mana impact spell. I wish there were more artifacts worth playing from a pure power perspective. This deck might be one to keep an eye on once more artifacts are printed. I’ll note that this might be an even better Masticore deck than the previous one. Masticore plays extremely well with Grand Architect.
Argentum Armor
This is the Eldrazi Conscription of the set, a nearly prohibitively expensive card that can be put into play for free by exactly one other card in Standard. In this case, the card is Quest for the Holy Relic. This can be a tough nut to crack, as Quest for the Holy Relic requires quite a bit of resources, but very little of it is mana. This has led people to play a bunch of Ornithopters in their decks, which are quite bad when you don’t have the proper support. In my opinion, those decks are extremely volatile, and not worth playing. However, this doesn’t make the Quest/Armor combo unplayable. Instead, I prefer to play it with a bunch of cards I would want to play anyway. This is probably the worst deck at getting Quest active that you’ll see, and I’m not even sure it’s worth it, but the deck is fairly good without the Quest as well.
HardKor Update
Creatures (20)
Lands (26)
Spells (14)
I’d love to fit Squadron Hawks in here, but I’d rather not exacerbate the weakness to Cunning Sparkmage any more than I have to. It’s also entirely possible that the Quest/Armor combo doesn’t belong as well. My favorite part about this deck is the name, HardKor.
Koth of the Hammer
Koth is one of the most hyped cards in the set, and there’s little to compare it to… or is there? I think all planeswalkers need to be evaluated in the context of each other, as they all play similarly. For the most part, planeswalkers need a few things to be playable, due to their generally high cost.
First, they need to end the game if left unchecked. I don’t think Koth has any problems in this regard. The ultimate is fairly close to unbeatable, and you get to bash a few times while you’re waiting to tick it up.
However, the strongest planeswalkers don’t operate this way. The good planeswalkers don’t threaten an ultimate to get their value. The good planeswalkers protect themselves while giving excellent value turn after turn. Here is where Koth fails. If Koth is any good, it’ll be the first planeswalker that’s been playable without the ability to defend itself. Last I checked, no deck was going to let a four-mana card just hang out for a few turns, especially if they could remove it by way of attacking.
A conversation I recently had with red mage extraordinaire Patrick Sullivan turned me on to the true value of Koth; although the Rainmaker doesn’t think Koth is phenomenal or anything. The secret to Koth is getting exceptional value out of the +1 ability, which means Goblin Guides. You need that four haste damage to matter. If that matters, then your opponent is likely to send something Koth’s way, which means fewer blockers for your next attack. If you’re happy with a 4/4 haste for four mana (with a drawback of dying when they attack), then Koth has value for you.
Creatures (17)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
The other way for Koth to be good is in the context of Chapin’s proliferate deck listed above. His deck tries to bypass the entire problem of defending Koth.
One thing I’ll say is that I don’t worry about format context too much because if a card is good enough, it’ll generally find a way to thrive despite hostile cards. For example, when Vengevine was spoiled, I was amazed that the card had such good stats for a creature you could easily cast (but generally didn’t want to). However, it failed the Path/Bolt test, as both cards would grant the opponent a significant advantage in the resource exchange. However, Vengevine has proven itself to be exceptionally strong and has been able to thrive even with hateful removal seemingly custom-made for it. The moral of the story is that I wouldn’t worry too much that Koth fails the Vengevine test. Sure, Koth is going to die to Vengevine more easily than any other card, but if Koth is good, Vengevine alone won’t hold it back.
One final thing: I haven’t mentioned the -2 ability, mostly because it sucks. Lotus Cobra does the same thing for two less mana, doesn’t require all Mountains in your deck, and can’t be killed by attackers. I can’t imagine any successful deck getting anything more than incidental value (such as pumping Dragonlord in the deck above) from the -2 ability.
Frost Titan
Wait! Frost Titan isn’t in Scars? What is it doing here? I feel that Frost Titan is one of the big contextual winners in the new Standard format. If you haven’t taken him for a spin, I suggest that you do! Anyone remember the small PTQ in Japan with all the Primeval Titans? There was this strange Destructive Force deck with two Primeval Titans and two Frost Titans. I laughed it off as card accessibility issues, but it turns out this player was onto something! Frost Titan is completely absurd, in a way that I can’t really describe. I feel that it has all the “get out of jail free” qualities that Baneslayer Angel does, but it also gives you value even if they do kill it, and the mana they have to pay is very significant. The following deck is very similar to what I’ll probably play in States this year, although there are some issues with the deck.
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (26)
Spells (23)
Sideboard
I don’t like the mana all that much in the deck. It’s certainly good enough to allow you to cast your spells the majority of the time, but I find myself having to make too many concessions to my mana base. When I say this, I mean I’d often cast spells in a different sequence if all of my spells cost colorless mana, as opposed to three different colors.
I’m not overly excited about my matchups on either extreme of the format — either the fastest of decks or the slowest of decks pose significant problems for this deck. On top of this, planeswalkers are often difficult to manage. Despite its flaws, I like that the deck has nothing but cards that are powerful and is something I enjoy playing. It’s flexible in game, and you can generally find an angle of attack in any given matchup. I know, it’s not original, doesn’t play with a bunch of Scars cards, but I enjoy playing it.
Good luck at your States, whatever you choose to play.