One Step Ahead – Green Is the Best

Make no mistake: green is the best color in Standard right now.

For weeks, I’ve been testing variations of green decks in an attempt to find the best list to unleash on StarCityGames.com Open: Baltimore – but after my Grand Prix Portland finish, I decided not to go. My fourteenth-place finish qualified me for Worlds on rating, but I have to wait until six weeks before Worlds before the actual cutoff. As such, I’m not going to play in any events until then – unless I need to pad my rating to ensure I don’t get jumped.

As I see it, there are six viable engines that green can work with.

1) Noble Hierarch, Birds of Paradise, Lotus Cobra

Seen in:
Basically every green deck, although typically only Mythic plays the full twelve.

These are the reasons why green’s the best. If your accelerators go unanswered, soon you’re hitting them Vengevines, planeswalkers, or giant six-drops. That’s usually too much of a tempo advantage to overcome.

If your opponent spends his early turns killing your mana guys, one of four things can happen:

a) You get bottlenecked on mana, most likely leading to a loss.

b) You’re still able to hit your land drops and develop nicely; meanwhile, your opponent’s using his best removal trying to slow you down. Eventually, your opponent will succumb to your real threats.

c) It’s too late because you’ve already played something like a 4/4 Knight of the Reliquary or Jace, the Mind Sculptor that they can’t deal with.

d) They have no pressure and eventually you draw out of it.

Notice that in only one of those scenarios does your opponent come out ahead. Clearly these scenarios don’t occur with similar frequency – but it’s important to note that if you’re able to make your land drops, you have a higher percentage of winning. It’s a crazy thought, right?

My point is that you shouldn’t count Birds and Hierarchs as lands. Your deck still probably needs twenty-four to twenty-six lands to operate efficiently.

Consider this situation:

You sit down for round 1 of a big tournament against an unknown opponent, and draw the following:

Birds of Paradise
Noble Hierarch
Lotus Cobra
Knight of the Reliquary
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Sovereigns of Lost Alara
Misty Rainforest

I’d keep this against nearly every deck in the format, especially on the draw. If you draw a single land, you’ll put the game away almost immediately. If not, you still have plenty of mana sources.

Your first draw step isn’t a land, so you fetch a Forest, and play Birds of Paradise. It’s likely to die, and you’d rather have the Hierarch later. If their only removal is something like Earthquake, it’ll live, so it seems better to play than Hierarch.

Pretend they’re just playing lands and passing back. You don’t draw another land, so you play Noble Hierarch to make sure you can cast Knight of the Reliquary on your third turn. Your goldfish opponent passes back again, and your third draw step rolls around… Still not a land.

In the end, even with all your acceleration, all you could manage was a third-turn Knight. While the accelerators are amazing, they still need help. They’ll only truly pull you ahead of your opponent when you’re making your land drops as well, so make sure you play enough lands in your deck!

I literally can’t stress this enough. I’d much rather be mana flooded than mana screwed, as it’s way harder to come back from being screwed. If you pack enough bombs in your deck or ways to take advantage of having lands, you’ll be fine.

I always played twenty-six lands in my Naya deck. I had a Sejiri Steppe that was more of a spell than a land, and a plethora of manlands that were very handy when I got flooded. In addition, sometimes people would try to harass my lands with Spreading Seas or Tectonic Edges. Occasionally, I had enough lands so they couldn’t color screw me.

Mythic’s a powerful deck and arguably the best in the format. It’s somewhat consistent in that it can play one-drop, three-drop, four-drop, six-drop with alarming frequency, but you have to mulligan a lot. Turn 3 Sovereigns is about the best thing you can be doing in this format, but you need to make your land drops to make that happen.

Take note that Wrapter’s (a.k.a. Josh Utter-Leyton) US Nationals-winning list played a pair of Explores, which nearly overnight became the industry standard. He knew that against some decks, his mana guys were going to die, and he needed other acceleration. Also note that Explore, like Birds and Hierarchs, are only good when you’re making your land drops.

“Explore, no land, go” isn’t a play you want to be making.

Add some lands to your decks!

2) Fauna Shaman

Seen in:
Naya, Dredgevine, some Mythic builds

Left unchecked, this should win you the game. Either you create a nearly endless supply of Vengevines, or find silver bullets like Inferno Titan, Cunning Sparkmage, Meddling Mage, Realm Razer, or Linvala, Keeper of Silence.

A few Mythic variants run it, but it cuts down on the explosive draws they can have, adding only to their consistency. One of Mythic’s strengths is its nut draws, so unless you’re more of a Vengevine/bullet deck rather than a Sovereigns deck, I don’t think you should be messing with this one.

There are some ways to fuse Mythic and Naya, which I’ll look at later.

3) Hedron Crab

Seen in:
Dredgevine.

Hedron Crab is effectively a mulligan. However, it’s a card that can win the game nearly on its own. It’s very hit-or-miss, but once every two matches or so, you’ll have a Vengevine in play attacking on turn 2. Some decks like U/W Control have a hard time dealing with it as well.

Sometimes it sits there as you mill away all of your non-Vengevine spells. Sometimes you’re missing land drops. But sometimes you’re attacking for twelve on turn 3.

I’ve liked the Crab. Standard’s mostly a coin-flip format, and Crab adds some variance to that. If you build your deck correctly, you’ll definitely end up on the better side of that coin flip.

4) Vengevine

Seen in:
Naya, Dredgevine, some Mythic builds.

I’m no stranger to Vengevines. Right now, Vengevines are very good (and presumably still will be after the rotation). There are still U/W, Jund, and combo decks out there, all of which Vengevine is absurd against.

Typically, I side out Vengevines against other green decks. The clock isn’t impressive, and decks like Mythic and Naya don’t play an attrition game. You need some way to break through the ground stalls like Inferno Titan or Sovereigns of Lost Alara. Linvala’s also acceptable most of the time, since it prevents them from playing their bombs.

While playing Vengevines will make you worse in the green mirrors, you’ll make up for it by playing Fauna Shaman with a reasonable number of bullets that are difficult for them to deal with.

5) Sovereigns of Lost Alara

Seen in:
Mythic, some Naya decks.

The big poppa. The reason Mythic’s probably the best deck in Standard right now. Let’s be honest – Rafiq of the Many and Finest Hour just weren’t going to cut it.

Sovereigns adds some variance, just like Hedron Crab. Instead of being a low-casting-cost creature that sometimes does stuff, Sovereigns is a huge, sometimes uncastable creature that’ll almost always win you the game. Playing Sovereigns also means that you need to play a couple Eldrazi Conscriptions, and naturally drawing a Conscription is annoying, to say the least. At least there are some games that you win by having two Lotus Cobras and hard-casting it, but mostly you’ll be lamenting your bad luck.

6) Eldrazi Monument

Seen in:
Usually bad green decks, like awkward versions of Naya, or underpowered decks like Elves or U/G Shared Discovery. That’s not to say Monument isn’t a great card, because it certainly is. However, the other decks don’t need it.

Ever since Rise of the Eldrazi gave us Eldrazi Conscription and Vengevine, there’s been very little use for Monument. It was always great for beating Jund, but with everyone’s nightmare declining and with a more efficient way to break through in green mirrors, Monument fell by the wayside.

The Monument decks often focus on putting a bunch of little dudes into play at once, and then winning with its namesake or something like Overrun. Those decks are vulnerable to the same things that Mythic are, like Cunning Sparkmage and Linvala, while lacking in the Cobra-into-Sovereigns nut draw department.

Having your cards be good on their own is incredibly important, and Mythic does that for the most part. A deck full of Elvish Visionaries and Shared Discoveries doesn’t.

So, which green deck is the best? If you pay attention to numbers, you’d almost always have to say Mythic. Still, that doesn’t mean you should give up and do what the numbers say. You can always just build a better metagame deck, or a deck that crushes other green decks.

Take these brews for example:

I built this for StarCityGames.com Open: Minneapolis. I expected Jund, Mythic, and Naya – a bunch of green decks. I took a couple of losses in the Swiss because of my poor sideboard, but still made Top 8 and lost in the finals.

The deck was fantastic, but I knew I could do better. U/W Control and Valakut/Eldrazi Ramp were tough matchups. I needed a little more disruption. The green matchups were great because of my faster clock and access to removal and Cunning Sparkmages.

Linvala was a huge problem, though…

At another local tournament, I played this:

I took the list that I did so well with and added the card that had been my kryptonite: Linvala.

I outright won that tournament and was very happy with the deck. Linvalas often left my opponents helpless. A follow-up Meddling Mage (naming Linvala) would usually lock them out of the game. If necessary, Meddling Mage could pre-emptively stop their Sovereigns as well.

Mages were also great at protecting yourself from Cunning Sparkmage, Day of Judgment, and Primeval Titan. Unified Will further solidified the control and combo matchups.

So what was left? Mashing those two lists together clearly.

Had I gone to StarCityGames.com Open: Baltimore, this is probably what I would’ve played. Thankfully, Ben Hayes gave the list to one of his buddies (who accidentally drew himself into ninth place), so at least I got to see my baby do well.

If you want to go the Dredge route, this is where you want to be. You have answers to everything, and your backup plan (should your opponent be attacking your graveyard) is to simply function like a Naya deck.

Not everyone likes the Dredge aspect, though. I understand. Hedron Crab has bricked enough times for me to want to tear my virtual copies in half.

If you want more of a “normal” deck, may I recommend…?

Again, not necessarily a new idea. Just cleaned up and tuned for today’s metagame. But what about tomorrow’s metagame?

Well, that’s what next week’s for…

GerryT