Last week I laid out my ideas for a Post-PC Mono-Green Aggro deck with the caveat that we would simply have to wait and see what Standard was like to really know what we were talking about.
It turns out that the format is just about as wide open as you could hope. I wrote my last article under the impression that there would be three decks that would start the season off: Mono-Green Aggro, Dralnu du Louvre, and Dragonstorm. The Top 8 of the first Standard 2x Premiere Event to include Planar Chaos showed otherwise.
At the end of the swiss rounds, ten people had 12 points or more. Of those, one Dralnu du Louvre, one Dragonstorm, one Blue/Green Tron, one Blue/Red Tron, one Blue/Black Snow Control, one Red/Black Gargadon, and one Red/Black Aggro made the cut to Top 8, while one MGA deck and one Green/Black Dredge deck missed on tiebreakers.
Unlike the Extended format, where Planar Chaos hasn’t had a truly noticeable impact, Standard decks are adopting new cards fairly universally. MGA decks have at least picked up Timbermare and Groundbreaker, though some have also added Uktabi Drake and Gaea’s Anthem. Dralnu decks have picked up Damnation, Extirpate, and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. Even Dragonstorm has been seen with Riptide Pilferer in its sideboard.
Planar Chaos Cards in the Top 8
Damnation
Surprise! Damnation was featured in both the Dralnu du Louvre deck piloted by freija, and the Blue/Black Control deck that islands ran. It kills weenies, it kills Solifuges and Spectral Forces, and it kills Skeletal Vampires. Absolutely no one was surprised that multiple people ran this card in the Top 8.
Extirpate
The other card that was added to the control decks, Extirpate is at its best when it’s ripping out the other guy’s Mystical Teachings, but that’s not the only thing it can do. Against MGA you can hit all of their Moldervine Cloaks or any random threat that has you worried, such as Stonewood Invocation or Silhana Ledgewalker. You can even pull off some tricks with it against Dragonstorm. Hitting the first Rite of Flame in response to the second will mess up their mana math, and if you can Seize the first Hellkite you can stop the other three from ever showing up.
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
This card showed up in the Blue/Black control decks and in the Red/Black Aggro decks. It makes sense in a deck like Dralnu where you are often struggling to find Black sources that don’t deplete your storage lands or deal you damage. In a deck like R/B Aggro, it is less helpful, but still increases your consistency. One deck used Urborg to fuel Greater Gargadon plus Nether Traitor to knock a friend out of Top 8 contention.
Riptide Pilferer
This card is a great anti-Dralnu weapon other than one fact: Dralnu decks simply can’t sideboard out their Deserts. Still, Desert doesn’t always show up, and when it doesn’t, this little guy can cause some serious damage. The Dralnu deck that split the finals was packing these for the mirror, and a couple of Dragonstorm players in the swiss rounds had them as well.
Keldon Marauders
Only one deck running this card made the Top 8, but there were plenty of decks running this guy in the swiss rounds. Against control decks, he is essentially a five-damage burn spell for two mana, which is absolutely worth it. In the times where he doesn’t get the attack in, he’s either eating a removal spell, chump-blocking a huge man, or holding off some weenies. Any of these is worth two mana when two damage is tacked on. In addition, the deck running it in the Top 8 used the Vanishing to trigger its Nether Traitor. Besides which, Greater Gargadon goes very well with creatures that are going to die anyway.
Harmonize
There are plenty of decks that would love for Concentrate to still be legal, and one of those that has been making small waves for a while is Blue/Green Tron. How fortunate, then, that Concentrate would be reprinted in Green. It is certainly harder to cast than Compulsive Research, but it still comes out on turn 3 plenty of the time in this format filled with Signets and Prismatic Lenses.
Top 8 “Coverage”
Of course there is nothing that can match simply watching the games on Magic Online, but I suppose that it isn’t a given that everyone has MTGO, even though they really should. Either way, the idea behind this section is to show the cards that I just talked about in action.
Quarterfinals:
Shimichin2005 (U/G Tron) versus Evincar_onn (Dragonstorm)
Game 1:
Shimichin misses land drops, discarding a handful of powerful cards like Harmonize. Without having to worry too much about countermagic, after getting a Bloom and Telling Time Remanded, Evincar makes 3 Hellkites on turn 5.
Game 2:
Shimichin gets stuck on two lands again, and Evincar uses Lotus to power out Teferi when Shimichin tries to Repeal the Lotus on upkeep. Nothing much happens for a while until Teferi gets Shimichin to 8 and Evincar storms out 2 Hellkites.
Result: Dragonstorm wins 2-0
GrosseBank (R/B Gargadon) versus freija (Dralnu du Louvre)
Game 1:
GrosseBank is slow out of the gates, with only a Marauders and a Nether Traitor that gets countered. He suspends a Gargadon that eventually runs into Repeal, and freija actually wins the game with a Skeletal Vampire.
Game 2:
GrosseBank starts out with a turn 1 Gargadon and a turn 2 Defense Grid, while freija misses his second land for a turn. GrosseBank uses 2 Mogg War Marshals to unsuspend his Gargadon on turn 5.
Game 3:
Three Keldon Marauders and 1 Last Gasp put freija to 8, but he has a handful of Teferis and a Damnation to take care of a Gargadon that got snuck out at the cost of GrosseBank’s entire board.
Result: Dralnu du Louvre wins 2-1
IEatGodlyPie (R/B Snow Aggro) versus islands (U/B Snow Control)
Note: islands’s deck was extraordinarily similar to Dralnu du Louvre, in that it played Teferi, Mystical Teachings, similar lands, and Skeletal Vampire. On the other hand, the deck included maindeck Persecute and Draining Whelk. In addition, in all the matches I watched, Dralnu du Louvre’s namesake card never made an appearance from islands’s deck. It is also worth mentioning that no Snow cards other than Snow-Covered Islands were ever played, so perhaps “Snow Control” isn’t entirely accurate.
Game 1:
Pie doesn’t have any Red mana to go with his Rakdos Guildmage, and his own Urborg enables islands’s Persecute and Damnation. islands starts to chain Mystical Teachings, which eventually leads to a Teferi + Vampire kill.
Game 2:
Pie manages to sneak a Rack past islands, who also has trouble hitting his lands. islands does a pretty good job stopping everything with just four mana, but eventually dies to The Rack + Rix Maadi, with Pie throwing a second Rack onto the board just to make sure nothing goes wrong.
Game 3:
Hand disruption and Rix Maadi brings both players to zero cards in hand, but islands wins with a Vampire off the top before Pie can win with Demonfire or Rack off the top.
Result: Snow Control wins 2-1
suckatog (Ghazi Glare with Red) versus mirakurufait (U/R Tron with Dragonstorm)
Game 1:
11:09 Turn 7: mirakurufait.
11:09 mirakurufait plays Island.
11:09 mirakurufait plays Disintegrate targeting suckatog. (X is 14).
11:10 suckatog: i can’t regenerate {f}
Game 2:
suckatog gets a quick start with Llanowar Elves, Guildmage, and Scryb Ranger, while mira scrambles not to fall behind with a Repeal and a Demonfire. Still, with a token producer and a Pendelhaven, suckatog finishes it up pretty quickly.
Game 3:
suckatog gets a Solifuge into play on turn 4, which seems great right up until mira casts Seething Song and Dragonstorm for 2 Hellkites. On his next turn, mira wipes suckatog’s entire board with Wildfire and starts swinging with the dragons.
Result: U/R TronStorm wins 2-1
Semifinals
mirakurufait versus Evincar_onn
Game 1:
mira gets the Tron online very quickly, and has a Remand for Evincar’s Bloom. mira slows the game way down with a Wildfire that leaves his Tron intact, and then locks it up with Spell Burst. Assembly-Worker tokens eventually take it down.
Game 2:
mire again has the Remand for Lotus Bloom, but then follows that with the less-expected double Seething Song + Hellkite play. Two turns later, mira Demonfires for the win before the Lotus can even unsuspend a second time.
Result: U/R TronStorm wins 2-0
freija versus islands
Game 1:
Both players have a very hard time getting past 4 lands, though freija has an Aqueduct and islands has a Dreadship Reef. islands uses his Reef to force a Persecute through, but freija starts making 2/2s with Urza’s Factory. Still, islands manages to resolve a Teferi with two Teachings in the yard, and freija concedes.
Game 2:
Not much happens until freija Extirpates all of islands’s Think Twices, and islands goes for it with a Persecute that meets a Rewind. The next turn, freija gets a Vampire into play and follows that up with a Teferi.
Game 3:
freija starts off with two Riptide Pilferers, the first of which meets a Spell Snare and the second of which dies to a Desert after taking a Persecute. freija sneaks a Teferi into play when islands taps out to add a storage counter to his Reef, but islands untaps into a Persecute for five cards. Each player then Extirpates the other’s Teachings, and islands gets a Teferi into play. The fight over the Teferi leaves him open, and freija plays Skeletal Vampire, which ends the game a few turns later.
Result: Dralnu du Louvre wins 2-1
Finals: Prize Split
Additional Info
Right before I turned this article in, another Standard 2x finished up. This time, the Top 8 included three Dragonstorm Decks, two Black Disruption decks, Boros, Dralnu, and a Green/Black/Blue Dredge deck that won it all.
Mono-Green Aggro failed to take any of the sixteen possible Top 8 slots, despite the fact that there were plenty of decks running little Green men in the two events. The prevalence of Dragonstorm very likely has a lot to do with this, and Blue-Black decks running Damnations can’t help at all either. The current nail in the coffin is the Black Rack decks that are running around. It’s very hard for MGA to beat Darkblasts, Smallpoxes, Edicts, and The Rack. In all, the format is very hostile to simple creature decks as things stand right now.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the forums, via email, or on AIM.
Benjamin Peebles-Mundy
ben at mundy dot net
SlickPeebles on AIM