1.Magic Online Videos on Select? Well, I Don’t Know…Okay, You Got It!
Pro Tour Champion Shaun McLaren is open for business on Select today!
Image from Wizards of the Coast.
Seeing some of your favorite and most entertaining mages doing Magic Online videos on the Select side of the SCG coin is something you need to get used to, because we’re going to throw new videos your way every week!
Cost of admission? Zero dollars.
2. Follow the Leaders
SCG Tour ®stars like Jeff Hoogland, Joe Lossett, and many others on social media were curious about player performance since the SCG Tour® has moved to the two-day Open model. Well, ladies and gentlemen, here it is for your viewing pleasure:
|
Player |
Wins |
Top 8s |
|
Tom Ross |
3 |
10 |
|
Todd Anderson |
1 |
8 |
|
Jeff Hoogland |
– |
8 |
|
Chris Andersen |
– |
7 |
|
Joe Lossett |
2 |
6 |
|
Jim Davis |
2 |
6 |
|
Noah Walker |
2 |
5 |
|
Gerry Thompson |
– |
5 |
|
Dan Jessup |
– |
5 |
|
Todd Stevens |
– |
5 |
|
Logan Mize |
– |
5 |
3. Bant Company Did Not Win #SCGBALT and Should Be Ashamed of Itself
So you put 53 players in Day 2, you’re half of the top 8, and you didn’t win? Pathetic.
Creatures (12)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (25)
Spells (15)
Long-time Pro Tour Magic veteran and entertaining mouth with a human being attached Osyp Lebedowicz took the strictly worse and completely dead in every way G/W Tokens archetype and smacked around the entire field.
The big takeaway this weekend isn’t that Bant Company is Caw-Blade or Affinity, but it is pretty much Delver. That is, it’s a deck with so much inherent safety and reliability that it’s hard to argue against playing it, even if it isn’t consistently unbeatable. The Pro Tour will be the final verdict on this deck’s place in all-time Magic degeneracy.
As much as The SCG Tour® has grown, its playerbase still has a penchant for playing the safest deck, even if it means days upon days of mirror matches and it hasn’t yet proven itself as the best deck. Case in point: close to a year ago, Michael Majors flew to the top of Week 1 with a G/W Megamorph deck that was everywhere for a few weeks before vanishing almost entirely. Despite the great attendance numbers on The SCG Tour®, it has yet to carve out its place as a beacon of innovation rather than Standard’s status quo.
4. That is, Unless Your Name is Cory Dissinger or Ali Aintrazi
If Bant Company is so dominant, why do great players keep putting together absolute rubbish and flying to the top of the standings? We’ve seen it with W/B Control decks, we’ve seen it with Ali’s big mana decks, and most enjoyably, Cory Dissinger brought a deck so out of left field that it may as well have been from Mars. He was the most dominant force of the weekend until a rough quarterfinals cut the dream just a little short.
Creatures (18)
- 1 Elvish Visionary
- 4 Den Protector
- 2 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
- 2 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
- 1 Bounding Krasis
- 1 Hangarback Walker
- 1 Void Grafter
- 1 Emrakul, the Promised End
- 1 Ishkanah, Grafwidow
- 4 Noose Constrictor
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (25)
Spells (15)
If this format was a hopeless mess, we wouldn’t be seeing results like this. But we are.
Collected Company is good. It’s a strong deck that many players built before Eldritch Moon. But a ton of innovative deckbuilders have proved two weeks in a row that it is in no way invincible.
#SCGRegionals is coming, and that will provide even more data on how diverse (or not diverse) this format can be.
5. Is Magic Development to Blame for Collected Company…?
Developing Magic is hard. Other new games that are completely digital can simply patch out issues. Magic isn’t so lucky. Once the packs are on the shelf, the cat is out of the bag and there’s no going back.
What exacerbates this is that a single miss can spiral into a huge error because of Magic’s interdependence on complex interactions. There is a public record of admittance that Reflector Mage was never thought to be a Constructed-relevant Magic card; however, because Collected Company is so blatantly powerful, every single creature card with converted mana cost three or less should have been examined. This is the reason that everyone knew Spell Queller was going to be a terror on Day 1. We had the full understanding of how Standard worked that Development didn’t by that point, and it had bad news written all over its little Spirit body.
A new rotation schedule doesn’t eliminate these sorts of issues; it only serves to make them less lengthy and slightly more sufferable.
Mind’s Desire is a historically degenerate Magic card. It allowed its caster to build a deck with the sole purpose of fueling a giant storm that in essence ended the game by raining free spells. Mistbind Clique was a card that allowed you to dictate the flow of huge swaths of turns (especially when paired with Cryptic Command), making it impossible for your opponent to interact with you in any optimal way. In a way, Mistbind Clique was a 4/4 flying Mindslaver. Except Mindslaver only works during one turn.
What if Mind’s Desire was two mana less, you could cast it at instant speed, and you only got four small spells out of the exchange? I’d still say that’s pretty (read: too) good. Being able to set the tempo of the game in a reactionary way (like Faeries) while holding up a nearly guaranteed four-for-one is going to completely take over any reasonably powered Standard format. 3G for a couple of two-power threats, a better version of Unsummon, and a soft counterspell? 3G for a couple of two- or three-power threats, a Kismet, and a Rampant Growth that turns into a planeswalker?
This isn’t revisionist. This isn’t hindsight being 20/20. We knew this was the format we were getting.
6. …Or Are We to Blame as Well?
Emrakul, the Promised End is a powerful, powerful card.
But before a handful of pros broke it down as such and Ali Aintrazi put it in another one of his trademark big mana decks, the card was met with a resounding “meh” from the greater Magic community.
As long as players refuse to be anything but tepid about cards that aren’t all-time good, R&D is going to be forced to push the envelope, often too far. Siege Rhino is really exciting the first two weeks; then it’s a format liability. Collected Company is now the latest iteration of “that” card. And we have to shoulder a lot of that blame.
It’s up to us as players to be smart enough to evaluate cards in their proper context instead of mocking every spell that can’t automatically be jammed into Modern or Cube.
7. Those Poor, Poor Blue Players…
Market research has evidently shown that the creature battles we have today are better for the game than the broken noncreature spell mirror matches of the old days. No argument there.
But haven’t we gone a little too far the other way at this point?
2U. Counter target spell.
1RR. Destroy target land.
Are nerfed old-school spells like these really too good at this point? In a format where having different cards in your graveyard is a bonus, and green and white can draw cards with zero drawback, is this really bad for Standard Magic?
Shaheen Soorani and Adrian Sullivan are players too. Poor little Timmy is stealing all of their prize money. And it’s heartbreaking.
8. Enough Standard Already! Let’s Talk Modern Month!
#SCGNY is in a few weeks, followed up by the #SCGINVI a few hours south in New Jersey. This is on top of a lot of Grand Prix weekends! If you need a break from Eldritch Moon Standard, you’re going to get it in the form of Eldritch Moon Modern!
Ari Lax is already convinced that Eldritch Evolution is a Modern monster that will devour most of us, and Shaun McLaren is readily prepping his favorite archetype in the format for battle—on Select no less! Jennifer Long is also joining the brigade in bringing you a breakdown of the top tiers of the format, starting today!
Join the Modern battlefront!