Tenth Edition brings with it many interesting things, and one of the more noticeable things it brings is two years of “X Marks The…” jokes that are inevitably going to pop up in gaming articles until we finally see Eleventh Edition. (At which time the jokes will instead turn to This Is Spinal Tap, such as the two years forewarned “Magical Hack – It Goes To Eleven!”) Now that we’ve officially seen all of the cards and can work with an official card-list, I’ve decided it’s prudent to take but a single week away from the Block Constructed meddling in order to try and figure out what the summer Standard environment is going to look like. With the Summer of Magic promotion going around providing shiny man-lands to fight over and various Nationals across the world happening after Tenth Edition becomes legal, it seems that there might be significant interest in the format change… at least enough to spend a week on it.
Standard with Ninth Edition had a wide variety of possible strategies, with aggressive beatdown decks, both reactive and proactive control decks, and the fair smattering of combo decks using the Storm mechanic to summon goblins, dragons, or just set your head on fire. We are going to take a look at what is leaving with the rotation to Ninth Edition and then see what we’re getting new (or what already exists that might replace it), hoping to pull everything together at the end to get an idea for how the format as a whole is going to work and perhaps even suggest avenues down which decks will evolve to combat the metagame over time. Of the cards that we are going to seriously notice and miss, we lose the following:
Seething Song
Persecute
Kird Ape
Savannah Lions
Urza’s Mine / Tower / Power Plant
Sleight of Hand
Phyrexian Arena
Wildfire
Worship
… This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it includes entire deck concepts right there and cuts significant portions out of the metagame by fundamentally altering the balance of Combo / Control / Aggro decks that we have right now. Just pulling these away, we see the following changes:
U/R Wildfire Tron… has neither Wildfire nor Tron. It clearly was not a contender at present because its soft matchup against combo decks made it a difficult deck to want to play, but designs did exist that were able to face off against beatdown decks and control decks while not losing to Dredge decks. Dragonstorm was really the thing limiting Wildfire Tron from being good, especially the kind of Wildfire Tron decks I had seen around, with plenty of Aeon Chroniclers and Detritivores to rule the control matches. Oh, and…
Dragonstorm / Perilous Storm… Not quite as good without Seething Song. Definitely not as good without Sleight of Hand. Losing one of the decks’ Rituals puts a significant bottleneck on the decks’ combo-worthiness… so losing Seething Song is huge. However, there’s more. Losing Sleight of Hand without an effective replacement lowers the usefulness of Lotus Bloom, as the effective combo motion relied not just on Seething Song’s existence but also having a reasonable shot of suspending Lotus Bloom on turn 1, which Sleight of Hand assisted. With these two casualties, the two most effective combo decks in the format are snuffed out both at once, leaving “just” Dredge and Project X as the “combo” decks of the format. (Why they don’t really exist either will be brought up later, when we see the additions to the format.)
Gruul… just lost the single best reason suggesting that Forests and Mountains combine into the same deck, reducing the necessity and the value of turn 1 Stomping Ground. Fortunately, the loss of Kird Ape is very survivable, as there are other good reasons to play Red and Green together, and even a replacement one-drop should you want to play Mogg Fantastic. The other two-power beater, Savannah Lion, also went the way of the dodo, which seems to me to mean that R/W/G Zoo has now lost all relevance over Gruul to begin with, as the key distinguishing factor was a) how many powerful two-drops you got, with Scab-Clan and Watchwolf, a question now obsoleted by Tarmogoyf, and b) how many two-power one-drops you had, now obsoleted by their rotation.
Persecute… is at once a massive loss to a wide swath of archetypes that relied on its specific use to provide an entire angle of attack that they would otherwise be lacking, and at the same time the most replaceable card on this list so far. Persecute has been played as a key component of “tap-out control” decks for some time now, with proactive discard making decks like Solar Flare actually somewhat viable in the format. Persecute’s low cost and crippling effect was enough to combat control decks by itself, but with the dedicated targets (Storm combo decks like Dragonstorm) also pushed out by the rotation I suspect this loss is survivable. Block Constructed decks currently pay six for Haunting Hymn to good effect, and Standard decks can either do the same, or do without, as there are plenty of different tools to be used that may be equally effective without the “by turn 4 or die” clause that made Persecute the right tool for the job.
Worship… is a theoretical loss, but one that was only a niche sideboard card in very narrow metagame decks such as Richard Feldman’s Orzhova Suicide Squad and not an actual “tool” put to frequent use. It will not be missed, even if it would have been awesome with Troll Ascetic again. This rotation saves Mike Flores innumerable hours of playtesting, as without the ability to assemble Troll Ascetic + Worship he will probably skip trying to make G/W decks work for once.
Phyrexian Arena… is a good card that traditionally has not been played by good decks; good decks nowadays play Aeon Chronicler, not Arena, so even though it is a tool that gets put to use in a variety of places again it will not actually be missed.
Just by the omissions, then, we see that Storm-based combo now has a lot less to work with, asked as it is to rely upon Rite of Flame and Lotus Bloom if it wants to have Ritual effects. My expectation is that this is just not enough to continue to support decks like Dragonstorm, especially with the loss of the best turn 1 Lotus Bloom digger-upper. You can Peek if you want to, or cycle Street Wraiths till the cows come home, you’ll still be hard-pressed to play turn 1 Lotus Blooms as consistently as we did with Sleight of Hand in the rotation… and thus hard-pressed to see Lotus Bloom be as good as it has been this past year. The most effective combo decks have been effectively cut out of the metagame, leaving us more or less with just graveyard-centric comb decks, in a world where Extirpate, Tormod’s Crypt and Leyline of the Void are all considered to be reasonably playable, if not outright the numbers one through three most common sideboard cards (as they were at Regionals).
Cutting an entire sector out of the traditional three-strategy metagame, we have control versus beatdown, just like in Time Spiral Block Constructed. And just like in Time Spiral Block Constructed, as good as the beatdown is, the control tools might just happen to accidentally be better. Let’s have a look at the new additions we’re welcoming to the fray and then have a look-see at what the new Standard might look like.
Here to beat down:
True Believer
Steadfast Guard
Hidden Horror
Mogg Fanatic
Siege-Gang Commander
Quirion Dryad
Troll Ascetic
Faerie Conclave
Ghitu Encampment
Treetop Village
Steadfast Guard is the sketchiest inclusion on this list, but its importance as another two-drop Rebel with two power is presumably non-zero to at least someone out there. They actually snuck a few Rebels in there, like Cho-Manno and Ballista Squad, in case you want to go fetch-happy with Amrou Scout into Defiant Vanguard to get the chain up to searching out four-drops… but in reality it’s the non-awful two-drops that will have an impact. Which is not to say that it will have one, as you can see with the next White 2/2 for WW. True Believer is a beater that also provides a bit of disruption as well, which has its uses in specific metagames… True Believer was played at Grand Prix: Columbus, it’s always possible that it will make it in the big leagues of Standards if the remainder of the decks are disrupted to some degree at least by his Ivory Mask effect.
Hidden Horror, however, is a creature that at least some people can get behind. Gathan Raiders is an integral part of a Block Constructed Reanimator strategy that puts large creatures in the bin for later recycling via Dread Return or Body Double, and one of its key shortcomings is its inconsistency. Having another discard outlet for Hellkites while also having a sizable threat is an important thing to note, and it’s not exactly shabby for its “intended” use either… aggressive Black decks played him in the past, and he may very well contribute to the critical mass of good Black weenies that seems to have been slowly boiling up out of nowhere.
Having already mentioned that Stomping Ground no longer fuels Kird Apes, it’s probably worth noting that Mogg Fanatic and Troll Ascetic are two good things that work good together. They aren’t especially related, but they are both excellent beatdown creatures and have been powerful in previous formats to the point where some would have called them dominating… even out of their expected role in beatdown decks. After all, Mogg Fanatic was so good in Tempest-era Magic that he was even a four-of in Blue-based control decks, albeit usually as a sideboard plan, in Counter-Phoenix. Troll Ascetic not only led the forefront in Mono-Green Aggro but also eventually had a secured home in Tooth and Nail decks, even main-deck at least sometimes. If they beat down enough to trick control decks into playing them, playing them together (and likely alongside Tarmogoyf) has to be a good thing. Both likely find an immediate home in Gruul decks and completely re-characterize how the deck works, and both are conveniently immune to the current hot card of the month, Tendrils of Corruption… one outright, and the other at least able to die in dignity without the opponent gaining ten life.
Siege-Gang Commander, however, is an interesting Goblin. He works best with friends… in fact he’s so good with friends he tends to bring his own. But really he works best with lots of friends, as can be seen any time Onslaught block is fleshed out in full and we start to see crazy Goblin combo deck shenanigans coming out of nowhere. At least at this immediate moment, Siege-Gang is over the curve as an individual, since he’s five power for five mana… already quite amazing. His finisher potential is likewise strong, since when he’s done attacking he and friends start bursting into puffs of warm goblin-drizzle to the tune of two damage each, which can really shave a few turns off of a defending mage’s life-span. But does he have a home right now, as a five-mana creature that really seems to want to be in a beatdown deck? Clearly he would be topping the curve if he was played in that fashion at all, and clearly he is going to be biased against initially since he doesn’t have the thirty or so friends that you usually jam into a “Goblin deck” to start throwing around. Taken for who he is, though, I’d say he looks pretty good… even without the hints at a return to “Creature Type Matters” coming with the next block.
And then we have the beatdown creature that isn’t, Quirion Dryad. QD is apparently right now the best creature in Vintage just on his base stats alone, unlike Virulent Sliver who is apparently the best creature based on the power of Flash alone, or any of the creatures in the Ichorid deck which are all the best creature based on the power of Bazaar of Baghdad and the Dredge mechanic plus Future Sight additions like Bridge from Below. Quirion Dryad grows awfully big awfully easily if you play him off Tropical Island, and there’s reason to believe that casting him off Breeding Pool might still get the job done. Aggro-tempo decks are going to have an absolute field day with the Dryad, and much like Troll Ascetic and Mogg Fanatic it would seem that a long-standing relationship with Tarmogoyf is soon to be formed. Both seem to profitably enjoy associations with Islands in your deck, and don’t mind terribly if there aren’t so many Green spells involved neither, making them the kinds of Green cards Jamie Wakefield traditionally hates but the kinds everyone else starts drooling over.
For Jamie, well, there’s Troll Ascetic and Overrun. And I’m sure he’ll do well with them… but not all green cards are printed for him. (Some are printed for Blue mages, apparently.)
… And then we have some beatdown creatures that aren’t even creatures at all, with the Urza’s Legacy man-lands returning and once again the three of the five who possess two or more power are going to be amazingly powerful in Standard, although they are fighting for space right now against a plethora of colorless lands, dual lands, and even a brand-new cycle of comes-into-play-tapped cousins like Llanowar Reborn and Keldon Megaliths. If nothing else we now have some very interesting tools to work with, and there are two that are bound to stand out immediately: Treetop Village and Faerie Conclave. Ghitu Encampment will start out getting no love because the decks that might play it will play Treetop Village instead, at least in the immediate future. Without the Ravnica-block duals, however, I’m sure we’ll be looking at all of them a lot harder, especially since even a part-time Drudge Skeleton and part-time 1/5 combatant are better than their full-time counterparts and better than, say, their respective basic lands in at least some quantities.
The Rest of the Contenders:
Reya Dawnbringer
Aura of Silence
Twincast
Arcanis the Omnipotent
Plagiarize
Distress
Agonizing Memories
Terror
Seismic Assault
Squee, Goblin Nabob
Beacon of Destruction
Manabarbs
Incinerate
Overrun
Crucible of Worlds
Pithing Needle
Platinum Angel
Razormane Masticore
Legacy Weapon
Mind Stone
Let’s start with the Artifacts, because they clearly have a very important impact on how the format is going to be played. The most obvious card to acknowledge here is Pithing Needle, which drastically impacts… who knows what yet. Pithing Needle is a hole-filler, and can serve as a catch-all solution to cards like Seismic Assault or Tormod’s Crypt, as needed. While it rarely has a home in the first pass through a metagame’s evolution, and thus probably won’t have a very big impact in first-week events or even probably in second-weekers like U.S. Nationals, it will appear in the future as appropriate to answer very specific cards. Depending on what does well in week-one Nationals events, those being Australia and Italy according to the tournament schedule, Pithing Needle might just hit sideboards everywhere if (for example) Loam-Assault decks seem to be the hardest-hitting week one force. Regardless of any tournament outcome, there should be at least one early adopter: Dredge. The one-mana Pithing Needle is far more useful, much more versatile, and way cheaper than the three-mana Krosan Grip out of Dredge decks’ sideboards, and even works as an answer to the “sorcery-speed” Tormod’s Crypt which Krosan Grip otherwise doesn’t answer.
Crucible of Worlds is acknowledged as powerful enough to design decks around when used with man-lands, which conveniently we are also seeing return in Tenth Edition. If nothing else it has a built-in combo with Horizon Canopy and the man-land of your choice, but unfortunately at least short-term it is likely overshadowed by Life from the Loam, which has the good sense to combine with Seismic Assault in ways that Crucible just doesn’t. Some designs, such as Patrick Chapin’s latest take on Adrian Sullivan’s “The Baron” for Standard, are already including this card; none, however, seem to have looked at using it as a central portion of their deck, despite having numerous good options for doing so.
Platinum Angel and Razormane Masticore are both powerful Mirrodin Block critters coming back for a second tango; Platinum Angel has already seen significant play, even if only in a small niche that we aren’t likely to see repeat (Tinker decks, very fast Reanimator strategies)… while the Masticore has started to see some play in Extended after living in a Standard format severely overshadowed by strategies such as Affinity. Platinum Angel is a powerful control creature… after all, it does say you can’t lose, and not just in the way that Skeletal Vampire kinda-sorta says it. If seven is indeed the new six, as Mike Flores sometimes likes to say, it’s quite possible Platinum Angel may be the new seven as a threat worth protecting. Razormane Masticore is so close to being very, very good… but I suspect his long-term habitation in the same format as Tarmogoyf will mean that he doesn’t control aggressive decks as well as he was designed to, because he didn’t count on duking it out with a 5/6 for 2 anytime soon. So long as Tarmogoyf is the top beater, which seems not-unreasonable given its easy splashability and in-color assistance from cards like Quirion Dryad or Troll Ascetic, the Razormane Masticore will not control the crowd as well as advertised, and thus not actually see significant play.
Mind Stone, however, fits perfectly with where Standard is going right now… Block Constructed control decks are all about the artifact mana, and Mind Stone is clearly better than Prismatic Lens in a control deck that keeps its colors reasonably constrained to sane limits rather than requiring Prismatic Lens’s color-filtering effect. Take a skeleton we already have floating around — say, Flores Mishra — and replace the Signets or Lenses or whatnot with Mind Stone, giving the deck access to both Mind Stone and Chromatic Star to make copies of. Drawing cards for fun and profit tends to be a good thing, and even the “fair” uses of Mind Stone are going to prove to be really, really good.
Presume for a second you could fix your land base to reasonably expect to cast Mishra even if you cut colored Signets for Mind Stones, and imagine a twist to the following known deck:
Adjust the Signets into say Izzet Signet x2 and Mind Stone x4, or even switch them over entirely into Mind Stones and a pair of Coalition Relics, and you can see how the potential for both mana ramping and card advantage can be impressive indeed. And really this is only the tip of the iceberg, the most obvious place to begin looking at as far as homes for Mind Stone; its adoption into new and currently unknown strategies is high, because who doesn’t want mana now and a card later?
And then we have one last artifact, for those who are not feeling constrained by the limitations of a “fair” manabase. Legacy Weapon is currently being laughed at, from what I have seen… but my personal experience with the card names it as a control card par excellence, perhaps in the neighborhood of Take Possession when it comes to powerful things to spend seven mana on. While it’s true you don’t get your first return on investment until you’ve spent twelve mana, that’s not actually hard to do nowadays with Coalition Relic decks, which conveniently also tap for the missing colors needed to activate the Weapon. Legacy Weapon may be a slow and grueling control tool… but it’s a surprisingly persistent one, and also one that clearly wins the long game by annihilating whatever’s needed at the moment. First it comes for your creatures, then it comes for your lands… and even though something else has to come for you, even a lowly 1/1 could finish the job when you have the ability to remove every single permanent your opponent has played or could ever play. Worse yet, you don’t even need the 1/1; just play two Weapons and you can keep your opponent on no mana, keep a full hand and discard the second Weapon every turn in order to deck your opponent regardless of the size of their library or the game state.
Currently you see zero out of any known deck. I expect that number to soon change to 1-2 in Coalition Relic control decks, as its sheer power can help to justify the “big mana” strategy embodied by Block Constructed Relic decks right now.
For Green cards of interest, we’d be looking at Sylvan Scrying if they hadn’t taken our UrzaTron away… but instead, we’ve got just Overrun in the new things that we find interesting. Clearly the card is situational and expensive… but it has been cast many a time to turn a lost cause into a won game, even in some 60-card formats. If nothing else it ought to please Jamie Wakefield, who also probably pleasantly noted the return of one of Overrun’s old friends, Llanowar Sentinel. Both seem to enjoy the fact that now you can play about a bazillion Elves, with Llanowar Elf, Boreal Druid, and Elves of Deep Shadow in the one-drop slot without even resorting to Birds of Paradise as “Elf” #13-16. Someone will play Overrun in their 60, and even if they aren’t necessarily right to do so it’ll still probably work out reasonably well for them… life’s funny that way sometimes.
And now we can discuss the actually interesting things, with the caveat that Mind Stone and Legacy Weapon are some pretty serious artifacts.
There is already a Reanimator-style strategy that takes discarded creatures like Akroma and Bogardan Hellkite and finds a way to put them into play, either via Dread Return or faking it with Body Double. A strategy of this sort would probably profit at least somewhat by considering Reya Dawnbringer, who comes stapled to future reanimation spells and can pull up a large army of Dragons and Angels up with her. One reanimation spell on Akroma kills in a total of four turns, assuming the opponent hasn’t taken two from a Ravnica dual; one reanimation spell on Reya pulls that Akroma up too first chance she gets, and kills in a total of three turns. I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see Reya be a one-of reanimation target in Dredge decks, either, as she can summon an arbitrarily large number of huge Golgari Grave-Trolls with but the one Dread Return… though space in that deck is tight, and she’d likely be considered as a reanimation target only after Akroma, Bogardan Hellkite, Blazing Archon, Angel of Despair, and Platinum Angel, most of whom don’t even warrant a slot in most builds of the Dredge deck.
The other White card of interest, Aura of Silence, is part Seal of Cleansing and part hoser all wrapped up in one pretty little package, and might just be “the stoneblade” as Flores likes to say in his non-English-speaking moments, absolutely devastating against decks relying on artifact mana like Coalition Relic to accelerate and color-fix to threats it can’t otherwise produce naturally. As in the above example, of Flores’s “The Legends of Team CMU” artifacts-and-Mishra deck, just imagine the impact if they are relying on artifact accelerants but can only really play the one turn 2 Signet before things start costing four or five mana. While again we see this as a metagame-reactive card, rather than a proactive strategy piece, it’s quite possible that we are already living in what used to be called a four-Disenchant environment, back in the good old days when aggressive decks played non-creature, non-pump, non-damage utility cards sometimes without earning the ire of the entire Internet brought down upon their head.
As a potentially disruptive utility piece, Aura of Silence might be a key part of helping to put aggressive White back on the map… though admittedly losing Savannah Lions goes against that development at least a little, now that Sulfur Elementals don’t seem nearly as common as they once were. If artifact-mana-powered slow control decks are in fact the wave of the future, and there are at least some hints that this is where life is going to take us, this one could be a contender.
So we’ve covered the White card that non-White decks will play, Artifacts, the token Green card, and the sole White card of interest. Finally, we can start digging into the meat of things and look at Blue, Red, and Black, the “real” colors nowadays. For Blue we see an interesting tool that never got put to use the first time, another legendary bomb creature, and an interesting Mystical Teachings target that should be assimilated onto the long list of candidates. Twincast is the first of those, and the Fork-reprint is now back in the Core Set to prove once again that any good card ever printed, from Alpha onward, would be better as a Blue spell. “What to do with it…” That, as always remains the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, because it doesn’t seem to fit with a proactive strategy and can be a very confusing reactive card… one that didn’t find a home the first time. It has shown up from time to time in combo designs, and has a home in Blue-based combo in Legacy on the strange occasions when that deck seems to be good. It’s likely something that will just be completely overlooked up until such a time as a critical mass of similarly-inclined combo cards appear, much like Early Harvest in Ninth Edition seemed so innocent until Early Harvest + Heartbeat + Weird Harvest + Drift of Phantasms accidentally turned into an amazingly powerful combo deck.
Arcanis the Omnipotent is a very silly card to suddenly be respecting, but as a card advantage machine he requires attention. Even if only played as a one-of – kind of like Dralnu, Lich Lord in Dralnu du Louvre – one has to respect the fact that expensive legendary things have been considered more and more playable nowadays than ever before, and getting to draw four cards to the opponent’s one is an impressive feat for what would cost you but a single slot in a Teachings/Teferi deck. Viciously outdrawing the opponent is probably worth six mana, especially if slow and ponderous control is indeed the order of the day.
… And as another Teachings-deck one-of, the current trend towards using Compulsive Research (and the probably trend after Ravnica rotates of using Careful Consideration) makes Plagiarize an interesting choice indeed. If your opponent casts Careful Consideration and you steal the card-draw with Plagiarize, you draw four cards and they discard two, turning their +1 card advantage into a net —3 if you only count the two cards discarded and the one spent to do it, or a combined —6 when you account for the fact that you drew four additional cards and only had to spend one card for the right to do so. A card advantage swing of “seven” is pretty impressive and might just be backbreaking enough to see play… after all, at the worst Plagiarize costs four mana to cycle.
Yes, it’s cute. And no, it probably doesn’t fill a unique enough role to truly distinguish it in these sorts of matchups from Imp’s Mischief. But it’s powerful enough at least in concept that it should be respected, or at least… carefully considered.
For the Black cards, we see the pinpoint discard Distress filling the role currently played by Castigate reasonably well, allowing the tool of a cheap Coercion effect to Black without White as needed. Without Phyrexian Arena, decks of that sort are likely not as good as they were with it, it’s true, but every once in a while you see a strange discard-oriented deck pop out of nowhere to prey upon a specific portion of the metagame that has grown too large. Distress is actually quite solid… it was a role-player in Black control decks throughout the life of Kamigawa Block, and is a good card to see back a second time. While it’s no Duress, it’s the closest to one that we’re likely to see anytime soon, and two mana really isn’t too much to ask… after all, they used to ask three and it was still played sometimes, and we’ve been paying four just for the right to staple Dredge onto the card for later re-use.
Terror… good old underrated Terror, the oft-mocked… is also likely a contender right now. Pact of Terror… I mean Slaughter Pact… is currently considered quite playable, and a two-mana kill spell for Tarmogoyfs and Gargadons might just be format-impacting. After all, free now is good, but two is less than three even if you pay three only on layaway. And in the disruptive discard slot that makes people choke on their own deck we see Agonizing Memories return, another Weatherlight special from the people who brainstormed up Aura of Silence in the first place. This was strangely enough based on a Green card of all things, but in its proper home as a Black card we get double Coercion and/or double Time Walk, stuffing your opponent’s development right down the hole by making him wait two turns just to get back to exactly where they are now. While it can’t be confused for Persecute, it’s also a very different tool and should be judged accordingly, as it can be powerfully disruptive and absolutely back-breaking along with a critical mass of discard like we are presently seeing. Imagine the following aggressive-disruptive deck:
4 Shadow Guildmage
4 Dark Confidant
4 Rakdos Guildmage
4 Rakdos Augermage
4 Hidden Horror
4 Funeral Charm
4 Agonizing Memories
4 Incinerate
4 Rise/Fall
7 Swamp
4 Graven Cairns
4 Blood Crypt
4 Rakdos Carnarium
3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Mountain
… This is how decks used to look, once upon a time, and I wouldn’t be especially surprised to see something of the sort time-travel its way back from 1997 to 2007.
Now we have only Red cards to discuss, and it’s a good color to leave Tenth Edition with. For example, entire decks are being designed around Seismic Assault, and it is the current front-runner for “best new deck,” at least from the underground hype that I have been hearing so far. Some are even discussing it as the only Red card of significant note in an otherwise base-Green deck, as I at least pointed at last week… splashing triple-Red for fun and profit. That deck, with a minor correction that somehow I didn’t catch last week (“basic Forest might be good, and having at least some basic land to actually cast Edge of Autumn might be worth it”), is presented again here:
T — A — L (Tarmogoyf / Assault / Loam)
4 Flagstones of Trokair
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
4 Stomping Ground
4 Treetop Village
3 Horizon Canopy
2 Gemstone Mine
2 Sacred Foundry
1 Godless Shrine
1 Temple Garden
1 Forest
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
4 Troll Ascetic
4 Loxodon Hierarch
4 Life from the Loam
4 Seismic Assault
4 Edge of Autumn
4 Chromatic Star
2 Fiery Justice
As far as design notes go, I had no problems getting Dark Confidant into play reliably, even with one fewer Gemstone Mine… so the Mine got cut as it was the least desired card, as the most common repeated mana problem was drawing too many Mines not having to work so hard to get a Black source active. The powerful threat array has a nasty habit of overpowering “mere mortal” creatures, allowing the Hierarch / Ascetic / Goyf draws to beat most Red/Green draws or at least halt the ground so thoroughly that you can turn around to concentrate on getting Life from the Loam active and Seismic Assault in play against beatdown, at which point it’s pretty easy to finish off… especially with incidental cyclers like Chromatic Star and Edge of Autumn really letting you cast the same Loam over and over again in one turn without any added mana cost. Control decks don’t like to see these quality creatures followed up with a post-Damnation plan, even if the post-Damnation plan is “just” Treetop Villages maybe backed by Life from the Loam.
Similarly, I am making the blind assumption that the format really is going to be as aggressive as people are suggesting, with Tarmo-Gruul as the #1 deck choice… at least Week One, and presumably Week Two would be a reasonable bet as well. Karplusan Forest was in the original list, but I found against aggressive decks I’d rather give them life than lose it myself, as the deck has no problem sealing the deal from 20 or even more than 20 once you’re in control of the board, but taking even a little extra damage from your lands can make a huge difference. If I were playing this weekend instead of next, and didn’t have the luxury of basing my decision off of Week One results, I would play Grove of the Burnwillows with no hesitation; if Australia and Italy show a control-heavy field that can’t really punish you for taking a bit of damage from your lands, I’d grow a sack and play the Karplusan Forests again. With the current assumptions however, I’m a fan of the Grove, so my Elephant-summoning doesn’t feel so counterproductive sometimes.
Answering an opposing Tarmogoyf can be a little difficult, as dedicated beatdown Tarmogoyfs have a nasty habit of beating your Tarmogoyfs in a fight. They have friends like Incinerate along for the ride to push your Tarmogoyf out of the way… while you do not. It is actually your Troll Ascetics that do the real work of Tarmogoyf-stopping, which is part of why it’s important to sideboard Temporal Isolation in this design of the deck as your Tarmogoyf-answer… it’s cheap, always effective, stops Tarmogoyfs of any size, and also happens to work neatly on popular creatures such as Korlash or even the mighty Akroma herself. Other sideboard choices of note would include Tormod’s Crypt, for Dredge strategies that this deck is not actually anywhere near optimized for beating, as well as the mirror or semi-mirror match; and Lightning Helix as an excellent catch-all answer to assorted beatdown creatures, Dark Confidants, and the aforementioned Dredge enablers. Were I to take the deck to Nationals… and I can’t, not even to grind in, thanks to the joys of a business trip scheduled for the same weekend sending me far from Baltimore to Colorado Springs… I’d give serious consideration to this sideboard:
4 Temporal Isolation
4 Lightning Helix
3 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Ancient Grudge
1 Fiery Justice
As to the other Red cards – you know the ones not named Mogg Fanatic or Seismic Assault – we have Squee, Manabarbs, and two burn spells. Beacon of Destruction is amazing but will fight for space with Riddle of Lightning in at least some peoples’ minds; if your Riddles can ever hit for at least if not more than five reliably, suddenly the shuffle-in effect doesn’t seem anywhere near as important as doing double damage. Again, like Siege-Gang Commander, we’re talking about a five-drop… so not anything that is currently going to be adopted quickly, by a deck that looks like the decks we are used to seeing prior to the rotation of Tenth Edition.
Incinerate is a great burn spell and fills into Tarmo-Gruul neatly, giving you a nice curve of Seal of Fire — Incinerate — Rift Bolt as your first twelve burn spells (with Mogg Fanatics to help in the one-slot) and three different card-types for your Tarmogoyf-ing pleasure. It doesn’t kill the regenerators that matter most… Korlash should be bigger and it can’t target Troll Ascetic… but it does good work at the right price and the right speed, something Volcanic Hammer couldn’t claim even without the anti-regeneration clause. Manabarbs is another great aggressive tool, and likely fits in the sideboard of Gruul decks to punish control strategies, which play expensive cards as a general rule and have a hard time removing non-creature damage sources from play, as well as having to dig themselves out of an early hole. Manabarbs is currently going for dirt cheap and/or practically nothing, but I suspect a well-armed individual with a stack of 20 or 50 Manabarbs would return from U.S. Nationals with zero copies and a decent profit… and that’s by Thursday and the end of the meatgrinders, not even counting the expected demand for that particular anti-control tool come Friday morning and the tournament proper.
And Squee is an odd Goblin with no home, but plenty of places he might be used. We have a whole bunch of new Spellshapers to work with, and Squee liked those before… suddenly, the cost on Llanowar Mentor doesn’t seem so high. We also have Stormbind, Razormane Masticore, Merfolk Looter, and an assortment of his friends, and spells like Careful Consideration or Compulsive Research that change a lot if the cards discarded are free or come back later. Sadly, Peace of Mind didn’t make the cut into Tenth Edition’s rotation, but that deck would probably be a Peace of Crap anyway (as decks of that particularly janky genre were comically known as whenever they were actually played).
So combining everything into a neat sum, the trends are as follows: aggressive decks have a lot of new tools, even as they lose the most aggressive of the early drops, Savannah Lions and Kird Ape. You won’t see the decks as blisteringly fast as they once were, and the all-or-nothing R/G/W Zoo strategy effectively dies as the reasons for playing it evaporate neatly into thin air. You also won’t see the decks needing to be as blisteringly fast as they once were, as the fast kill of the combo deck has similarly disappeared… but it’s not necessarily clear whether this favors the aggressive deck or the controlling deck, as combo decks like Dragonstorm often defined aggressive decks as the ones they were most scared of even as they had a positive expected value against them. I suspect the loss of two-power one-mana creatures at the same time as combo disappears (and the anti-combo tool of Persecute vanishes) favors the control decks as a whole, as the aggressive tools are still quite excellent but the control decks lose the main predator that had them playing fair and not just dedicating themselves to creature-slaughtering mayhem.
Aggressive decks get a lot of new tools, and when intelligently designed can benefit from using them… Troll Ascetic is an excellent creature against the current breed of control decks and their Time Spiral Block Constructed analogues, and Treetop Village cares not whether your God is Black or White, Wrathful or Damning. Control, however, loses the main things keeping them honest… unless you want to look to something like T-A-L above as an aggro-combo hybrid capable of punishing control. Beatdown’s tools are enough to keep control in check at least in the short term, as they work against the main plan only to flounder against Manabarbs, but we are in a world with excellent artifact mana acceleration and no combo decks to keep control in check, letting the control decks hone in on beating aggressive decks and each other… just like we are currently seeing in Time Spiral Block Constructed. The answer here may remain the same as the one there, with Blue/Green aggressive decks picking up where Red/Green or Green/White aggressive decks drop the ball against control, or the reinvention of aggro-control archetypes like Pickles or aggro-combo like T-A-L fielding a multi-pronged approach to beating control decks.
I expect Tarmogoyf and Korlash are going to be duking it out mightily this weekend and next, though Tarmogoyf will have to decide whether he’s friends with Seismic Assault or just hanging with Mogg Fanatic and Incinerate in a simple but effective aggressive strategy. I fear, however, that the slow and ponderous control decks may not have enough constraining them to prevent them from taking over the metagame, especially not if the most-common #2 deck is the deck that is hardest for Dredge to beat, as Dredge is the kind of deck the control decks would probably least like to have to face as a counter-strategy.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com