With the first week of M10 in Standard, we can already see a pretty radical change. Some pundits felt it would be only a cosmetic change, just a few decks with worse manabases, no more Swans combo and that’s it. I for one had been watching and expecting a more extensive change to Standard, and to see a Standard that looks familiar in some ways and very different in others. With that in mind, I spent much of last week preparing for the first PTQ of the new format, as the set rotation change right in the middle of the PTQ season promised to make some pretty drastic changes. I even presented my deck of choice in last week’s article, though I didn’t specifically point out which one it was or include a sideboard, as that was part of what my testing last week was intended to work out for me.
This past Saturday in Edison, New Jersey, I had the pleasure of playing the following:
Creatures (12)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (26)
Spells (18)
This deck is, to me, two things: first, a home for four copies of Baneslayer Angel, and second, an advancement in control-deck theory that follows where my thoughts about the current Standard card-pool have been going anyway lately. If you recall a few weeks back, I tried out a weird variant of Faeries that had a lot of Plumeveils and Jace Beleren to try and ‘update’ the Faerie deck. That update was pleasing in some ways, and bothersome in others, because the card-drawing control deck aspect worked very nicely, but didn’t mesh as solidly as I might have liked with the Faeries base. I am, after all, the same deckbuilder who puttered around and put Shriekmaw + Mulldrifter + Makeshift Mannequin in the same Faerie deck for Block Constructed season, so it’s not exactly something I haven’t encountered before as I keep trying to poke and prod at the Faerie shell and add new and more interesting modifications to it.
The ‘advancement in control-deck theory’ part is simple. Jace Beleren is so awesome I am astounded that so far only truly terrible decks have played four copies of him, as we’ve seen Jace put to hard work only in Turbo-Fog and Sanity Grinding. Jace and Plumeveil go together like two birds of a feather, and it just boggles my mind that in Block Constructed we were playing Oona’s Grace but not Jace Beleren in our chock-full-of-removal control decks. It was not a mistake I was willing to continue making, by playing the ‘traditional’ card for these sorts of decks, Esper Charm. Sure, Esper Charm is great alongside Broken Ambitions and Plumeveil, because the more things you can keep up open mana for then the more options you have when on your opponent’s turn it is finally the proper time to respond. It’s still no Jace Beleren.
These two radical changes to the Five-Color Control archetype were the big divergence in this list from others. Other Five-Color Control decks were bound to succeed, I suspected, based simply on the fact that the metagame was going to be extremely friendly with lots of nice soft Kithkin matchups to cake-walk all over. You wouldn’t have to build the most radically different Five-Color Control deck in the world to succeed, but I was finding changes to the deck flowed very nicely with each other and the absurdly higher card-power I was harnessing would blow my socks off. I was certainly correct, as I killed so very many people with Baneslayer Angel or rode Jace Beleren to ridiculous levels of card advantage. One might even argue that the main-deck is practically just a Blue-White Control deck and not a ‘true’ Five-Color Control deck, because I kept cutting mana requirements like the Black from Esper Charm, and cutting Cloudthresher entirely, and only playing one Cruel Ultimatum. While it is perfectly conceivable that I could have designed the deck as a three-color control deck, just Blue/White splash Red, balancing that manabase and matching its needs didn’t actually give me a good reason to diverge from a manabase of Vivid lands, hybrid duals and Reflecting Pools, and while I’m there I might as well play a Cruel Ultimatum.
This article is not about my tournament with my deck, though I did quite nicely. I do feel of all the Five-Color Control lists I have seen coming out of this weekend that mine is the most advanced, as it pushes the technological edge further and adopts new cards and new advancements, while also just happening to be more streamlined than most designs usually are because they are almost fixated on running almost-random one- and two-ofs to ‘diversify’ how their deck draws. I like drawing the same awesome cards over and over again, and I like playing the same game of Magic over and over again once I’ve designed a deck that will win that game of Magic. This is why I love Ponder, as it is a tool I can lean on to help me do exactly that, manipulate my deck at minimal cost to smooth my early game draws and also just help me draw the same awesome cards I want over and over again. This is not a deck for Ponder, but the two appreciations are interrelated, I just want to do the same thing over and over again and that means playing most of my deck as four-ofs. There is after all such a simple concept, that one card is just better than another, and that is why this deck is built the way it is, acknowledging the great cards and playing as many of them as I can. Some people ask me if four Baneslayer Angels is correct. Nowadays I tell them no, six copies is, but they still won’t let me play that, so in the meantime four it is. Decks that play something like one Baneslayer Angel or two Baneslayers I can understand, if not get behind. I would totally play Baneslayer Angel if she cost seven mana, but I’d only play one or two copies of her. Decks with just one or two haven’t gotten over the sticker shock yet, and realized that it is in fact just five mana for this much awesome card.
My tournament started poorly, about as poorly as one could fear. There were about four Merfolk decks in a room of three hundred players, a number I am sure Brian David-Marshall will likely correct in this Friday’s The Week That Was as he took home the PTQ standings and decklists courtesy of Gray Matter Conventions, and I had the unluck of playing one of them round 1. I did in fact get trounced, not drawing particularly well and facing a basically terrible matchup. Being down 0-1 in a nine round PTQ is about the worst feeling ever, but I sucked it up and reminded myself that my awesome deck was in fact awesome, so there was nothing to do but accept my back was up against the wall and murder eight people in a row, eleven if I wanted to win this thing. Round 2 I played Faeries and was able to leverage deck power level increases such as Jace and Baneslayer Angel into a clear win, as I’ve found even if Faeries is favored in this matchup, my design changes really cut into that margin significantly and while I am paying an opportunity cost by only having my Volcanic Fallouts in the sideboard, it is a game that I am very much in the running for. In this case, I was clearly the better control player, and that made a significant difference right alongside my better card choices affecting this matchup.
At this point most people would expect to hear “I played Merfolk round 1 and Faeries round 2, and I was playing Five-Color Control, so it’s time to draft”. Round 3 I played Calosso Fuentes with Combo Elves and lost the first game to a Gilt-Leaf Archdruid stealing all of my lands to put me from ‘few outs’ to ‘zero outs,’ then battled back with my now-ten-sweeper Five-Color Control deck by casting three or more Firespouts, Fallouts and/or Hallowed Burials each game, with a Path to Exile for any Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders beforehand as-needed. Then we hit a nice sweet spot in the tournament where I started playing White decks, and mangled a Kithkin deck followed by an update of the not-quite-Kithkin mono-white Knight deck that won Grand Prix Sao Paulo. This sweet spot was interrupted by an incredibly hard-fought match against the Five-Color Elementals deck, where I won the first game on the broad shoulders of Baneslayer Angel and drew the second game when my opponent kept a no-action land-heavy hand and the game progressed out into turn 20 or 30 with a lot of battling back and forth but no decisive result. Time was called bringing us into extra turns and I had a number of Cryptic Commands equal to his number of attack phases, and then drew another in between his attacks, when I had already switched away from the previous plan (“kill him with this here Baneslayer Angel”) to take no chances of losing the game before those turns were up. If going with the previous plan I would have killed him the turn after we’d run out of extra turns, but exposed myself to a few risks in between, but instead that last attack with Baneslayer Angel before letting her die was enough to keep me out of multiple Cloudthresher range if he was to try and bypass the attack phase for damage, and that locked up round 6.
Heading back into the sweet spot of the tournament, I faced another Kithkin deck for round seven and a mono-Red deck for round 8, bringing me from a dejected 0-1 start to 7-1 and playing the last round for Top 8, playing the last round sadly due to the fact that an 0-1 start gifts you with terrible tiebreakers. My tiebreakers meant that as the lowest in my bracket I got paired down to the 6-1-1 Faerie deck, as played by Tim Landale, instead of playing either the mono-Red deck or the Kithkin deck in the match next to us, or drawing in like the tables next to them got to do. And unfortunately I had an advantage in game 1 but assumed I had an even bigger advantage than I did, with my opponent stuck on three lands to my five and discarding while I was drawing a nice plump hand thanks to Jace Beleren. Instead of giving him another card and possibly his fourth land, ramping Jace up to three counters to continue savagely outdrawing my opponent, I figured I couldn’t possibly lose this one and just traded Jace in for a third card, then turned around to lose that one handily because I’d thrown away the advantage I did have out of fear of letting my opponent back into the game, when it was throwing away that advantage that let my opponent back into the game. For the second game he drew well and controlled me from the get-go with Bitterblossom, and I had a very hard time defending myself as the Bitterblossom games can be quite difficult when you don’t draw two or more Volcanic Fallouts.
Going forward into the future, I would play the exact same deck again with literally no changes, I was that happy with all of the working pieces of the deck and their ability to mesh well with each other. I only designed the deck a week before the tournament while I was contemplating changes to Standard with M10, but most of my thoughts and theories about the current Standard format are included within its design and have been percolating for much longer than that, which is why you see four each of Plumeveil and Jace Beleren in the deck as I wish I could go back in time to Lorwyn Block Constructed season and hand myself a deck with four Plumeveils and four Jace Beleren. There was no dead weight to the deck, just a tank full of high-octane gas that powered me past opponent after opponent. And let me tell you, there is a reason that Star City Games started pre-selling Baneslayer Angels at fifteen dollars, but are presently sold out selling Baneslayer Angel for $25 each. That ‘reason’ is because Baneslayer Angel is the real deal, and as a never-before-seen Mythic Rare from a set that is already sold out of its initial printing I expect it to very quickly become the most expensive card in Standard, likely hitting the $40 mark or more this weekend at Nationals and well worth every penny.
Now enough about me, when we have four separate National Championships to look at. This past weekend saw significant results out of Spain, Singapore, Japan and Australia, decklists aplenty and a very real feel for the Standard metagame.
| Singapore National Championships | ||
| Kithkin | W | O |
| 5c Blood | OO | |
| R/G Aggro | OO | |
| Faeries | O | |
| Sanity Grinding | O | |
| Australia National Championships | ||
| Combo Elves | W | O |
| 5c Blood | OO | |
| Esper Mannequin | O | |
| Faeries | O | |
| Merfolk | O | |
| Kithkin | O | |
| Japan National Championships | ||
| 5c Control | W | O |
| Combo Elves | OOO | |
| Faeries | OO | |
| R/B Demigod | O | |
| Spain National Championships | ||
| Five-Color Control | W | O |
| Faeries | OO | |
| Kithkin | O | |
| Jund Aggro (3c Blood) | O | |
| R/B | O | |
| B/G Elves | O |
Combining these events all together, we see the following:
| Five-Color Control…………….. | WW…… | OO |
| Combo Elves | W | OOOO |
| Kithkin | W | OOO |
| Faeries | OOOOO O | |
| Five-Color Blood | OOOO | |
| R/B | OO | |
| R/G Aggro | OO | |
| Jund Aggro (3c Blood) | O | |
| Sanity Grinding | O | |
| Esper Mannequin | O | |
| Merfolk | O | |
| B/G Elves | O |
Essentially this gives us five real contenders for the top tier of the Standard metagame, and the rest of the decks appearing here are the second or lower tiers. Faeries is the most prevalent deck here, with six Top 8 appearances out of 24, for a total of 25% of the Top Eight metagame. Combo Elves has five Top 8 appearances, one of which was a win, while Kithkin, Five-Color Blood and Five-Color Control each racked up four Top 8 appearances. Five-Color Control managed two wins, Kithkin managed one, and 5c Blood didn’t win (and some of these decks are very different from each other and thus difficult to all call ‘Five-Color Blood,’ as this included the Brion Stoutarm deck that tries so very hard to defy classification). A full third of the Top 8 appearances were these second-tier decks, some of which we haven’t even seen before as Aaron Nicastri continues to pilot unusual and quirky controllish decks featuring a lot of creature spells, this time in Esper colors rather than the R/W Boat Brew that propelled him to an excellent finish last year at Worlds.
Some of these metagames were more advanced than others. Play at the grinder events in all of these tournaments (or at least all of the ones for which I was able to find any coverage of the grinders at all) included a very high percentage of Kithkin decks, right about what I expected to see at the very start of the metagame. The Japanese National Championships seemed to have a much higher technology level than the Spanish National Championships, for example, with not a Kithkin to be found in the Japanese Top Eight while the Spanish Top 8 saw its two Kithkin decks meet in the finals. Likewise, three Combo Elf decks made the Top 8 in Japan, while none did in Spain. I wouldn’t call out an entire country or anything, but it’s pretty apparent to everyone around the world in the Magic: the Gathering community that the Japanese are pretty far advanced in their deck design and metagame analysis, so the metagame that mattered was one that was informed by the presence of Combo Elves and one that was well-prepared to kick around the Kithkin. Combo Elves and Five-Color Control can stomp on Kithkin all day long and are reasonably competitive against each other, Faeries doesn’t want to play Kithkin all day long but if played expertly and with a well-prepared sideboard that has the right tools to face the hobbit horde it will have no complaints in the matches it does play. Kithkin completes that top tier by beating everything else in the metagame, the Red decks and Jund decks that Faeries doesn’t want to play against and so on and so forth.
Going into this weekend, neither Five-Color Control nor Combo Elves were really on anyone’s radars, except possibly those at the top end of the learning curve for this format’s metagame awareness. Pretty much everyone within the group of reasonably-knowledgeable people was figuring on playing Combo Elves, and having it sneak up on the entire room in secret. That last part, well, wasn’t necessarily going to happen in the first place, and certainly isn’t going to happen now. And Five-Color Control should not be the big surprise it seems to have been: in a metagame that is now defined by Kithkin and one’s ability to escape that matchup alive, Five-Color Control is the best-prepared deck to face down Kithkin round after round, in fact it’s actually happy to see that matchup because as consistent and resilient as that deck is, it isn’t actually tricky and you can present a pretty routine defense against it and survive into the middle turns of the game so long as you design your deck to work at an acceptable deck speed. Five-Color Control is also adequate at beating most of the other aggressive decks in the format, even if the Red matchup should be a bit of a nerve-wracking experience depending on who wins the die-roll and how hard you try to have tools to beat it (like me with my four Baneslayer Angels, nightmares to many a Mountain-mage).
Five-Color Blood, however, is a very strong contender from the previous Standard format that if anything gains a lot with the new change, as it benefits from potent new additions like Baneslayer Angel if it wants to (and by my reckoning, it should want to) and has an excellent plan against the two leading control decks, the ability to Cascade into sweepers against the Elf combo deck and only really Kithkin as a poor matchup among the popular decks, and with a reliance on Baneslayer Angel even that poor matchup can be quickly turned around thanks to the power of M10’s nutty Mythic rare.
The Standard metagame no longer seems to be a diverse assortment of decks, with fifteen or so distinct archetypes you could play and have a realistic chance of winning a Pro Tour Qualifier with. The injection of M10 to the mix has given Kithkin a clear dominance in the aggressive deck speed department, cutting out many other aggressive archetypes like B/G Elves and G/W Tokens because of its aggressive starts and the powerful addition of Honor of the Pure. The car-mates I drove with to the double PTQ weekend in Richmond two months ago, who like myself all played Black/White Kithkin (and unlike myself, um, actually put up Top 8 appearances) all labeled Honor of the Pure as the clear best card in the deck, no questions, where before we didn’t even see Glorious Anthem as good enough to want to play. This testing group, with whom I was able to get in enough games to really fine-tune my version of Five-Color Control and test out its sideboard, all felt that Ajani Goldmane goes from its previous all-star incarnation to ‘barely playable,’ as it is only really good in the White-deck mirror match, and were all testing other innovations like Wilt-Leaf Liege in that slot so as to have something that at least was a threat itself rather than a dead card against Five-Color Control and other difficult matchups. Kithkin certainly has a home, especially now that it has crowded out a bunch of other competitors in the metagame, but even as it forces the metagame to react around it, it finds itself crowded out in turn, preyed upon by Five-Color Control decks and flat-out ignored as it sits across the table by the Elf combo deck.
Going into the U.S. Nationals weekend (and for which our illustrious editor agreed to move my usual publication date up one day, to have an analysis up in time for the meatgrinders instead of just the event itself), the metagame has advanced itself a full step already. Expecting a sea of White decks no matter the difficulty of getting four copies of Honor of the Pure one day after the official release of M10, the PTQ circuit and Nationals events all saw a considerable amount of Kithkin decks, but the metagame presented itself a bit differently than just Kithkin decks as there are a few other decks with clear power boosts in the post-M10 format. Expecting considerably fewer White decks, with Five-Color Control, Faeries, and Elf Combo as the two biggest competitors, what is the next step? Five-Color Blood presented itself very well at the Nationals events of this weekend past, and if a proper design can appear that can handle the big competitors and not have to face very many Kithkin decks I would expect Five-Color Blood to be an excellent metagame choice.
But what is an article without decklists? Kithkin is almost set in stone, with basically none of its main-deck 35 spells able to be negotiated on, and its sideboard choices are equally inflexible for 11 of the 15 slots. You can’t play Kithkin and game without Ethersworn Canonist if you want to survive, you should have at least three Unmakes in your sideboard if you don’t want to get blown out by big-threat decks like Five-Color Control with its Plumeveils on defense and Baneslayer Angels on offense, and it would be mirror-match suicide to have less than four Stillmoon Cavaliers. Faeries has room for innovation, and I have certainly heard some interesting ones, up to and including Lurebound Scarecrow as a sideboard option for containing Great Sable Stags. But the Faerie deck is also a very well-known quantity, and we’ve been tuning and tweaking the Faerie deck for various matchups for over a year now. And Five-Color Control, well, I’ve already presented my thoughts on the archetype above, and I kind of grin a little when I sit down across from Elf Combo and realize that I have four Firespouts and four Volcanic Fallouts, even as these things were not specifically meant for them but instead to give me the ability to deal with sizable Kithkin and various Green creatures game one but still sideboard the right sweeper in for games 2 and 3 against Faeries.
For Five-Color Blood, however, I want to start with this shell and turn it back into a more standard-seeming Five-Color Blood deck while keeping the parts I valued when I saw it:
Creatures (17)
Lands (26)
Spells (18)
- 4 Cryptic Command
- 2 Cruel Ultimatum
- 3 Path to Exile
- 3 Volcanic Fallout
- 3 Maelstrom Pulse
- 3 Bituminous Blast
Sideboard
The very first thing I would do here is throw out the mana-base, because I cannot possibly believe that the deck should have two of each of the five Vivid lands rather than a better-designed manabase. I also don’t want Brion Stoutarm, don’t want Path to Exile (but may put Shriekmaw in, as a removal spell that works in the early turns but doesn’t turn up when Cascading), and can actually do without Cruel Ultimatum and Broodmate Dragon, though I may end up keeping one Ultimatum just to have reach still with a huge game-ending spell. Keeping the parts I want gives me a base that looks like this:
4 Baneslayer Angel
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Kitchen Finks
3 Bituminous Blast
1 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Cryptic Command
4 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Volcanic Fallout
That’s twenty-seven of Chapman Sim’s sixty-card original starting-point, whittled down to its essentials. For a more traditional look at the deck, you can see a very stock version of it appearing at the Australian National Championships:
Creatures (15)
Lands (25)
Spells (20)
Sideboard
Assuming that it has the right balance of elements overall, we’d want our deck to have most of the same common elements: about the same number of creatures, the same overall functionality on the rest of the spells, about the same mana curve. Looking at Wood’s deck, you can see it breaks down on the mana curve as follows:
| Creatures:…………….. | Spells |
| 1cc: 0 | 1cc: 4 |
| 2cc: 4 | 2cc: 0 |
| 3cc: 4 | 3cc: 9 |
| 4cc: 5 | 4cc: 4 |
| 5cc: 0 | 5cc: 3 |
| 6cc: 2 | 6cc: 0 |
We want to fill some of the very obvious slots first, like putting the four Putrid Leeches I think are sorely missing back in. Picking the rest of the deck, however, is less clear, but I am favoring a 25th land where Chapman plays 26 and Wood plays 24, as you do actually want to get up to the four- and five-mana mark consistently and need at least the 25th land, and the original list for this archetype ran 26. I do feel that with all the Elf and Faerie decks around that more sweepers are needed than the two Fallouts I was certain I wanted, and the only reason I had cut from three to two out of Chapman’s list was that I felt absolutely certain that you wanted the fourth Maelstrom Pulse before you wanted the third Volcanic Fallout, and had the urge to immediately fix that number. With the main contenders being Faeries, Kithkin, Elf Combo and Five-Color Control, and especially given where you are compensating in other places with the addition of Baneslayer Angel, I felt you could pick a worse sweeper against Kithkin to have the best sweeper against Faeries, as your plan against Kithkin is to follow up by dropping Baneslayer Angel and letting her do her thing all over their face. Poking around to fill in the numbers, then, gives us the following:
4 Baneslayer Angel
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Putrid Leech
4 Kitchen Finks
3 Shriekmaw
4 Cryptic Command
4 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Volcanic Fallout
3 Bituminous Blast
1 Cruel Ultimatum
And then the next trick is tuning the manabase to actually cast all of these things. Eleven Vivid lands is the obvious first step, as is four Reflecting Pool, but the rest of the lands that are chosen will have to help cast the rest of the spells consistently when you don’t draw a Vivid land and three Reflecting Pools and can just not worry about it. Black has a light but important commitment, in that only Cruel Ultimatum costs more than one Black, but just under half of the cards require Black to cast them and you want Black/Green together without fail early in the game for Maelstrom Pulse and Putrid Leech.
Blue is a light commitment, you only have Cryptic Command and Cruel Ultimatum that need it, but when you need it you need three at a time, so you will require some Filter lands that tap for blue, and the pre-existing manabase used four total to meet its requirements. I’ll assume that is correct because somewhere deep down there it was originated by Patrick Chapin, who I trust to have tested it extensively and thus will presume is accurately designed. Red is only needed for Bloodbraid Elf, Volcanic Fallout, and Bituminous Blast, but these are all very important things and Volcanic Fallout requires double Red, preferably on the third turn. Between all of these requirements, then, I am favoring Cascade Bluffs as my filter land of choice, and would want four of these if given that option. This is an option thankfully due to the fact that the Green requirements have grown less severe, while I have made the Red requirements more considerable by a significant margin.
Green is an absolute necessity, for Kitchen Finks and Putrid Leech and Bloodbraid Elf, plus Maelstrom Pulse. If you don’t have a Green, you’re probably already dead. Ditto for Black with its presence in all of the removal spells save Volcanic Fallout, so these two clearly have to be our main colors for Vivid lands and should be a considerable portion of our filter lands as well. Twilight Mire is downright essential, and the only reason I won’t be playing four is because I can’t go over eight filter lands and expect the mana to work consistently, and I want to sneak in at least one White filter land. That one filter should not get in the way of Cruel Ultimatum, so it is going to be Fetid Heath, and that leaves me with balancing the remaining lands accordingly. So far we have:
4 Vivid Marsh
4 Vivid Grove
3 Vivid Crag
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Cascade Bluffs
3 Twilight Mire
1 Fetid Heath
The remaining lands will need to come into play untapped and fuel the filter lands where possible, which was in the original version of Five-Color Blood one each of Mountain, Forest and Swamp. I still like how these fit the filter lands, and am content with how they buff the numbers for the three primary colors, so barring further rebalancing in playtesting I would combine it all into the following:
Creatures (19)
Lands (26)
Spells (16)
For an Elves Combo list, well, there is some debate as to what the correct design is. There is only so much flexibility in all of the slots, however, and I find I am most pleased with Mirror Entity in the very few empty slots there are. I saw Osyp Lebedowicz playing the deck to what seemed like a favorite to win the Edison PTQ and was impressed with Mirror Entity not because it was a ‘combo enabler,’ because yes it can let you get more mana to go off out of Ranger of Eos and Regal Force but that is far from its intention, but because it can replace the need to go off with Regal Force entirely. One thing the deck does quite well is play a bunch of Elves and generate mana, and Mirror Entity can kill the opponent even when you are stopped from going off, just by tapping your Archdruids and lands for a bunch of mana and attacking with a swarm of creatures that are now +huge/+huge. While some development is surely needed before you can storm Nationals with it, such as adjusting the sideboard strategy to accommodate for a field that is aware of the deck’s existence, I would start with Osyp’s list due to his respect for Mirror Entity and the design choices he made:
Creatures (35)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
- 1 Mirror Entity
- 4 Heritage Druid
- 4 Devoted Druid
- 4 Nettle Sentinel
- 4 Regal Force
- 4 Ranger of Eos
- 4 Elvish Visionary
- 1 Mycoloth
- 4 Elvish Archdruid
Lands (20)
Spells (5)
The deck is already fundamentally sound, and includes the cards it should, so no extensive rebuild will get us anywhere, unlike our extensive rebuild of 5c Blood above to squeeze Baneslayer Angel in due to being absolutely bonkers. Not that I am pushing my ‘pet card’ or anything, but when they print a card that has an absurdly high power level, I like to pay attention to it and put it in decks that seem like they could use it, and Five-Color Blood seems prepared to harness that power in full. That, or I just wanted to post multiple decks with Cryptic Command and Baneslayer Angel, BFF’s till Cryptic Command rotates out of Standard.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com