We are about to see a major change in Standard as we know it, a change that will fundamentally affect the nature of how what Standard decks we are going to see succeed.
The first impact that we’re going to see of this change comes with Amonkhet, but it may be something that is largely invisible, because the way that Standard will be affected by Amonkhet comes out of what isn’t happening.
Standard isn’t rotating.
The current philosophy of rotation that we’ve had be the new normal was announced in August, 2014 by Mark Rosewater, in his column entitled “Metamorphisis”. In it, he laid out the upcoming changes that would shift rotation of sets from a roughly 24-month cycle to a roughly eighteen-month cycle, hinging upon the removal of core sets, and changing the three-set blocks into two-set blocks.
That rotation schedule has made Standard a very small Standard, shifting these last few years between five and six sets of cards, where previously it shifted between five and eight sets of cards.
If the rotation schedule hadn’t been revised late last year, we’d be seeing Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch rotating out with Amonkhet coming in.
Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is the most notable card that isn’t going anywhere, but he well could have if the powers that be within Wizards of the Coast hadn’t decided to make this shift. The October announcement by Aaron Forsythe addressed the big reason they are doing the change in this way:
“[…] when the rotation began to take place twice a year, we started hearing from players that it was more difficult to keep up. Yes, the change was exciting, but if play lapsed for a few months—as it often does for any number of reasons—players found it more difficult to jump back into Standard. More and more, players were seeing the twice-yearly rotation of Standard as a bug rather than a feature.”
Now, I’m not someone that has really ever had a lapse in playing Magic; the most I’ve done is put it on the back burner to other events in life like a new job or graduate school. But, throughout all of it, I’ve always kept current and been playing, all the way back to probably 1995 or so.
I think that there are a few other major effects that are going to occur, though, that will be structural to Standard, and I think that these are going to be good things.
First, let’s look at the various Standards, since the beginning of the first announcement in August 2014 through to today.
The Last Big Standard, Theros Era, September 2014 until September 2015
As noted earlier, the first announcement of changes came in August 2014. This was very shortly before Khans of Tarkir was released, with Tarkir to be the last three-set block.
From the release of Khans of Tarkir in September 2014, the past sets rotated out, and the oldest set was Theros, which came out in September 2013. This five-set Standard would grow with each release until Magic Origins completed it as the eighth set in July 2015.
Khans of Tarkir
Magic 2015 Core Set
Journey into Nyx
Born of the Gods
Theros
Fate Reforged
Khans of Tarkir
Magic 2015 Core Set
Journey into Nyx
Born of the Gods
Theros
Dragons of Tarkir
Fate Reforged
Khans of Tarkir
Magic 2015 Core Set
Journey into Nyx
Born of the Gods
Theros
Magic Origins
Dragons of Tarkir
Fate Reforged
Khans of Tarkir
Magic 2015 Core Set
Journey into Nyx
Born of the Gods
Theros
Except for Pro Tour Fate Reforged, all of these set releases came paired with a Standard Pro Tour. While it is widely understood that most Pro Tour decks are simply less good than those same decks will be once the format is better understood, we can still compare the rough lists from one event to the next, at this highest level of competition, to see how things are affected by sets.
Let’s start with the two red decks that won back-to-back Pro Tours.
Creatures (15)
- 1 Frenzied Goblin
- 4 Foundry Street Denizen
- 2 Goblin Rabblemaster
- 4 Monastery Swiftspear
- 1 Lightning Berserker
- 3 Zurgo Bellstriker
Lands (20)
Spells (25)
Creatures (18)
- 3 Firedrinker Satyr
- 4 Monastery Swiftspear
- 4 Lightning Berserker
- 3 Zurgo Bellstriker
- 4 Abbot of Keral Keep
Lands (21)
- 21 Mountain
Spells (21)
Sideboard
There is surprisingly little overlap between the two decks, given that only a single set sets them apart. When we say that the two decks share twenty spells, this is much less than expected. This is, in part, because Martin Dang’s Atarka Red was attempting to “go wide” and Joel Larsson’s Mono-Red Aggro was much more similar to a Burn deck. Abbot of Keral Keep and Exquisite Firecraft were the two most notable additions to Joel’s list from Magic Origins, and both players had Eidolon of the Great Revel in their sideboards from Theros block.
It brings forth the important first lesson:
Larger card pools make more things possible.
Without accounting for extra copies of cards like multiple printings of a card in different sets and basic land, the eight-set Standard had 1838 cards. Compare that to the Standard now, before Amonkhet, which only includes 1408 cards, or, even worse, before Aether Revolt, with only 1224 cards.
With smaller card pools, ideas that are almost worthy for being explored will sometimes come up just a little bit short. Either they are shoved out by insufficient answers to some important card, or they don’t have enough tools to make their own path be powerful enough.
For an example that we can point to today, let’s just look at the Dynavolt Tower decks that I’ve talked about earlier this month.
This is the most successful one to date, Victor Fernando Silva’s Temur Dynavolt:
Creatures (4)
Lands (22)
Spells (34)
- 3 Negate
- 1 Anticipate
- 2 Horribly Awry
- 3 Kozilek's Return
- 3 Void Shatter
- 2 Incendiary Flow
- 4 Harnessed Lightning
- 4 Dynavolt Tower
- 4 Attune with Aether
- 4 Glimmer of Genius
- 2 Disallow
- 2 Natural Obsolescence
Sideboard
If you’ve played a lot of Standard, you know exactly what it is that is warping this deck. It is one and only one card:
Disallow is just a better card than Void Shatter, for the most part. But Scrapheap Scrounger exists. Horribly Awry is playable but not incredible, but Scrapheap Scrounger exists. This deck wants to exist on the end step, and yet it runs Incendiary Flow because Scrapheap Scrounger exists. Natural Obsolescence is one of the narrowest green Naturalize effects that has existed, but Scrapheap Scrounger exists.
Now, all of these cards have a particular degree of utility that make it all form a part of a cohesive plan, just in general, but this is a deck that exists in the form that it does because it is forced to exist in that form by a lack of alternate options.
Let’s look at the possibilities in color that are truly open for this macro-archetype. You need to be a base U/R deck; to support that, you can try to add in another color, but you are immediately constrained by your mana options. Grixis and Jeskai both have much, much worse mana for this deck because the deck leans on blue. As such, if you want to beat the deck overall, your options are to take on green and become Temur (because the enemy-color palette based in blue demands it) or simply go U/R and eschew the extra color options (which, ironically, may actually make your mana worse, though that isn’t certain).
The state of counterspell-based control in Standard today is so dismal because the options that can compete are simply so few. It isn’t that there aren’t a ton of great cards available for the player that wants to play control; it’s that there aren’t enough cards working together to make that option be powerful enough to handle the other decks that exist.
Let’s look at another set of decks from the past, this time, going to the boogeyman of yesteryear, Abzan.
Creatures (16)
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (24)
Spells (13)
Creatures (10)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (26)
Spells (19)
- 4 Thoughtseize
- 2 Ultimate Price
- 4 Hero's Downfall
- 2 Bile Blight
- 1 End Hostilities
- 2 Utter End
- 4 Abzan Charm
Sideboard
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (26)
Spells (15)
Beginning with the Steve Rubin-designed, Ari Lax-piloted Abzan deck of Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir, we had a set of cards that emerged as a potent, powerful force to be reckoned with:
All three of these players played all of these spells, from Ari Lax at the beginning, through to Marco Cammiluzzi, all the way to Matt Sperling. There were only three Standard Pro Tours during the four sets that this time held, and a controlling build of Abzan was the only thing that was constant from the beginning of this time until the end.
For a lot of people, this meant that they would just get incredibly, incredibly sick of seeing the deck. If that’s who you are, that’s fine. But it also meant we got to see a World Championship that looked like this:
Seth Manfield and Owen Turtenwald were duking it out in the finals in a mirror match.
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (26)
Spells (17)
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (26)
Spells (17)
Unsurprisingly, they each had all of the powerhouse cards above that the previous players did (though Owen had one less Elspeth, Sun’s Champion). And, additionally, they both had had access to intensive playtesting with and against Abzan since Khans of Tarkir, almost a full year prior. I know that Owen, like me, played B/U Control in Hawaii at Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir, but I’m confident he did extensive testing with and against Abzan (Abzan was a reason to play B/U Control). Seth, for his part, was a very key part of the team I was on for that event, Team TCGPlayer, and was foundational in the testing of Abzan that helped give Ari his win at that Pro Tour.
The net result of this gives us another lesson:
Longer life in card pools provides format stability. Format stability rewards knowledge.
Seth Manfield absolutely crushed the 2015 World Championship. His opponent in the finals, Owen Turtenwald, may well have been the best player playing Magic at that moment. If we were to reboot that 24-player event from the beginning, I would be unsurprised to see the very same two players make the finals again. The 24 competitors found seven different archetypes of decks to play at the highest levels of competition, and each of them had had a full year to develop their skills with that deck, if they had so chosen.
Knowledge edges are a big deal.
A long time ago, at a PTQ in Cleveland, my opponent was annoyed at my “strange” control deck and complained out loud in frustration to Cedric Phillips, who happened to be walking by. Cedric laughed. “Hey, Adrian,” he said, “How long have you been working on that deck?”
“This one? Well, for this format, ever since the newest sets came out. The macro-archetype? Maybe nine or ten years?”
I was playing the most recent build of my Baron Harkonnen deck, the U/G Control that helped build my name in the ’90s. While I would miss in the finals, that groundwork of knowledge built up over time gave me a huge edge in tons of matches, despite the fact that I was in the midst of grad school and couldn’t dedicate the kind of time to Magic that I would like.
The Small Standards, Khans On, September 2014 until April 2017
Has it really only been two-and-a-half years of this?
Here are the Standards we’ve enjoyed:
Battle for Zendikar
Magic Origins
Dragons of Tarkir
Fate Reforged
Khans of Tarkir
Oath of the Gatewatch
Battle for Zendikar
Magic Origins
Dragons of Tarkir
Fate Reforged
Khans of Tarkir
Shadows over Innistrad
Oath of the Gatewatch
Battle for Zendikar
Magic Origins
Dragons of Tarkir
Eldritch Moon
Shadows over Innistrad
Oath of the Gatewatch
Battle for Zendikar
Magic Origins
Dragons of Tarkir
Kaladesh
Eldritch Moon
Shadows over Innistrad
Oath of the Gatewatch
Battle for Zendikar
Aether Revolt
Kaladesh
Eldritch Moon
Shadows over Innistrad
Oath of the Gatewatch
Battle for Zendikar
The time of small, fast rotation was a whir. This is unsurprising, though. Going to a twice-yearly rotation meant that there was often very little time to catch your breath, and very little ability to build upon the ideas of the past.
Think about what happens in the shift of six months, say, from Battle for Zendikar Standard to Shadows over Innistrad Standard. The two five-set Standard formats are 40% different in their full card pools. This is basically the creation of radical shifts every major rotation, with only a few powerhouse cards maintaining their meaningful state.
If you’ve played much Mardu Anything (Vehicles, Ballista, etc.) over the last few months, you can know just how intricate the games are. There is a reason that many players agree that the metagame in Standard is not very wide open, but the games are incredibly interesting.
Imagine that we were continuing the path of the past, and once again, in just a few weeks, we’d sweep all of that away. When I say that “a significant change” is arriving, in this case, that significant change is the slowing down of the massive tumult that marked what are Standard is. It means that your Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch cards are going to have meaning a little while longer without needing to step their power level all the way up to Modern or Legacy levels.
Personally, this fast, small Standard has taken a big toll on me. I work best carefully tinkering and fixing a thing until it is suited for the format. Most of my successes in Magic come from two places: the utterly, wildly new, where the ability to create a new idea that is better than other people’s new idea shines, and in the long-honed tool. These days, Magic Online and the proliferation of decklists makes the “utterly, wildly new” deck harder than ever to find, because anything that succeeds often gets disseminated by The Magic Hive Mind. Without that, also losing the ability to slowly make a deck what it needs to be has left me with far fewer of the things I’ve perceived as my advantages.
This has certainly hurt my performance in the game.
Beyond that, I’m excited for the larger card pool to make everyone’s opportunities to play what they like all that much brighter. While we’ll still have the upper-echelon decks that are going to be “the best decks” no matter how the formats look, that secondary tier of decks is certain to get much more diversity. This means that more people are going to be likely to be able to play the kinds of decks that they want to play, and that is a great thing.
I’m also excited to see other people have the time to really get to know a deck. When “Salad” comes out in Summer 2018, I want to play against someone who has been playing their U/W Midrange Cat God deck for a year and see the mastery they’ve build up over that time.
Magic is the best game I know, and once again I think it’s about to take a shift towards being even better.