The Greatest Standard Format Of All Time

When this Standard is over, we will miss it dearly.

There are any number of old formats that weren’t particularly great that some of us still reminisce about. Imagine how much we’re going to tell new players
about this one in the future.

Let’s talk about this past Sunday. It had to have been the eighth or ninth day in a row that it had rained. A local shop–Gamer’s Paradise, shoutout–a
half-hour down the road was hosting an IQ, and though I’m very often tied up with work or blissful home endeavors, it occurred to me that someday this
Standard, like all of us, will die, and that I should spend as much time with it as possible before it’s over.

Abzan Aggro

Danny West

1st Place at Star City Games Invitational Qualifier on 04-19-2015

Standard

Creatures (21)

Planeswalkers (2)

2 Sorin, Solemn Visitor

Lands (26)

Spells (11)

Sideboard

I’ll talk about my experience with the deck in a bit, but first I want to go down memory lane.

When I started playing, Mirage was on the shelves, and Weatherlight was to be released within the week. Fifth Edition, with its
interrupts and its mana sources, was the place to go for basic land cards and such.

Starter decks we called them. We didn’t know what our rares were, and we liked it!

So yeah, you could say I’ve been around a while. It wasn’t until a few years later that competitive Magic started to interest me over casual Magic, but I
can’t imagine playing the Necropotence mirror several times a day was really much to write home about, so let’s assume I’m still an expert on that era by
extension.

Some of my favorite decks of all-time are from this era, but that’s partly because I didn’t have to play against them much. Information was at a premium
back then (the Internet was too young for most of us to possess with any regularity or reliability), and Magic didn’t have the insane amount of coverage
and tournament opportunity it has today. You’d see a winning deck in a magazine two months after it was relevant, and you’d build it to beat your brother
or your neighbor or whoever. My metagame for most of those first few years was bad burn decks and tribal Spikes. The only “tournaments” that I played in at
that time were on the back of the school bus. The round time limit was based on how long you had before your stop.

Greatest hits from those days include:

Recurring Survival

Brian Selden

1st Place at Pro Tour on 10-01-1998

Standard

Creatures (24)

Lands (22)

Spells (14)

Sideboard

U/R Tempo

Paul McCabe

3rd Place at World Championship on 08-17-1997

Standard

Creatures (18)

Lands (20)

Spells (22)

Sideboard

Erhnamgeddon

Bertrand Lestree

2nd Place at Pro Tour on 06-01-1996

Standard

Creatures (14)

Lands (22)

Spells (24)

Sideboard

ProsBloom

Mike Long

1st Place at Pro Tour on 04-13-1997

Mirage Block

Lands (25)

Spells (35)

Sideboard

Behold, all that is removal:

When I say that we’re in the greatest Standard format of all-time, it should mean something, because I’ve seen a lot of them.

What Defines a Great Format?

Different players will tell you different things, but if we’re trying to capture the most common answer, I’d say diversity. There’s a pretty direct link
between formats that players really look fondly on and the sheer number of different types of decks you can play and expect to have a chance at
accumulating some wins.

Legacy has been in this position off and on for years, with only Survival of the Fittest and Mental Misstep really sludging up the show for a period. It’s
probable Treasure Cruise may have put the format in an iffy place, but thankfully, we never got the chance to truly find out.

Based on the results of Modern States, it also seems that format is in decent shape, though I think Twin is an exceptionally dangerous-though not yet
degenerate-archetype. We’ll talk a little more about Twin in a second.

With enough card flow and a touch of regulation, Eternal formats are pretty good at maintaining and policing themselves.

However, Standard is a different entity altogether. Part of the diversity (and by extension, health) of a given Standard is in its ongoing evolution. New
sets must infuse enough “newness” to realign Standard without either causing almost no impact (Dragon’s Maze, Prophecy), but at the same time,
they must not push an archetype so far into the stratosphere that it blows up an already bad situation (New Phyrexia, Fifth Dawn).

Maybe the key to a healthy Standard is just to never go back to Mirrodin.

So What Makes This Standard So Unbelievable?

To truly comprehend how ludicrous of a design success this Standard format is, you first need to understand how difficult it is to produce a game with as
many moving pieces as Magic. It is a task of utmost delicacy. As a Magic designer and developer, you are trying to produce a balanced and diverse card pool
in an already complicated game, and you only get a few dozen individuals. You have to be creative, you have to make deadlines, you have to make an exciting
product. Then, weeks before your set is even on shelves, it’s on the Internet in its entirety for everyone to see. That’s when hundreds of thousands of
players take control of your work and tear into it. It is their utmost goal to make you look like a fool as quickly as possible.

And if they don’t get it right that first week? Everything they came up with will be documented, poured over, and they’ll try again.

If you’re creating Magic cards, you and only a handful of people have to create a problem that hundreds of thousands of players are not able to
collectively solve. One small oversight means you get Deceiver Exarch + Splinter Twin. One over-tweak and you get Batterskull. Somebody needs to leave work
early ten minutes? Bam. Pack Rat.

But here we are approaching the summer of 2015. They keep adding sets to this Standard, and it just keeps working, and that is a monumental accomplishment.
It’s worthy of our appreciation and then some.

It’s a fitting irony that this was the last Standard before the new set rotation, though that doesn’t make it an incorrect (don’t be results-based, kids!)
move. There’s no greater swan song for what will become the obsolete rotation schedule than a format this unbelievably miraculous.

With all that said, diversity has its consequences.

Magic is Dead

We’ve established that I’ve been playing Magic since around the time humanity found the wheel. How amazing is it then that this Standard has put me in a
position where I am fundamentally uncomfortable with Magic as I’ve always known it?

Sort the following cards. You will utilize three categories for doing so: aggro, control, and crap.

Most players with any sort of competitive Magic experience could evaluate these and sort them as requested because they understand card purpose. These
aren’t the only categories cards can fall under obviously, but it does remind us that there is a great historic spectrum to what kind of strategies certain
cards fall under. Current Standard has this to some degree, sure. Look at Foundry Street Denizen. That card is obviously an aggro card.

But what about these?

The people who create Magic have been honing their Standard experience for a lot of years now, and they’ve finally struck something they’ve probably been
looking for for a long time.

When competitive Magic was still young, the spells were way better than even the best creatures.

So, of course, you push creature strategies.

That gets a bit degenerate, so you tweak mechanics and mana costs. Eventually, control and its spells get the upper hand again.

What else can you do at this point? It’s time to push creatures a little closer…

Now the creatures are too good. What do you do? Give the spells help one more time…

If you exclude combo decks and poorly implemented mechanics (which were often just development oversights) doing what they were never supposed to be doing
to tournament Magic (Affinity, Tinker, etc.), you get this history of tug-of-war between aggressive creature-based strategies versus counterspell and Wrath
variants. They always co-exist in the same formats, but they were very clearly defined. If I was playing Kird Ape or Ash Zealot, it was my job to kill my
opponent as quickly as humanly possible. If I was playing Day of Judgment or Supreme Verdict, it was my job to get as much value as I could out of sweepers
and permission spells until I could land a Sun Titan or a Baneslayer Angel and win shortly thereafter. Lots of decks have in-between qualities, and lots of
Standard formats had cards with some gray area.

But we’ve never seen anything like this.

This format is the pinnacle of what I call The Design Pinch. This is where both sides of the aggro and control philosophies have been so balanced that
they’ve come together pretty much as equals. This has the effect of blurring the line between each card’s traditional purpose.

Dig Through Time is obviously a control card, right?

Jeskai Aggro

Noah Walker

7th Place at Star City Games Standard Open on 03-28-2015

Standard