Building decks for a totally new format is never easy, but a good place to start is to pick a powerful card and build your deck around it. A basic and fairly accurate prediction any new format is the people will try and beat you down and more complicated control decks will be less popular. With this in mind I looked over a list of all the legal cards for some inspiration. Wildfire seemed like a good plan often wiping the table of monsters and leaving you with an insurmountable board position.
After playing some games I came up with this list:
Lands
4 Karplusan Forest
1 Swamp
4 Overgrown Tomb
5 Mountain
9 Forest
Creatures
3 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Shard Phoenix
3 Carven Caryatid
Spells
2 Life from the Loam
3 Kodama’s Reach
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Thoughts of Ruin
4 Putrefy
3 Farseek
4 Wildfire
2 Pyroclasm
Card Choices
This deck needs lots of mana. After you Wildfire you want to just keep playing more land and often you end up finishing the game with a second Wildfire. So 23 lands and 10 mana ramping seemed like enough.
Life from the Loam is an interesting card you don’t want it in your starting hand but it really helps with a war of attrition allowing you destroy lots of lands and still have enough left to cast and recur threats is useful.
Threats
One of the hardest parts of this deck was working out how to win there are plenty of creature that work well with Wildfire such as Rukh Egg or Hunted Dragon. The problem is you don’t always have a Wildfire or you draw the threat after you have swept the field. Arashi on the other hand is fine on its own with a useful set of abilities to deal with flyers, that deals with Hypnotic Specter and Suntail Hawk, which are rather popular from my experience. Given how long games go with this deck, the second threat had to be resistant to removal since losing because they kill both of the creatures you drew is a real problem. With all the mana ramp getting RRR or more is no problem, letting Shard Phoenix finish people off or deal with an early rush.
Answers
Originally this deck was just straight R/G, however with the new dual lands there is little reason not to splash something. In this case, Putrefy deals with creatures larger than x/4 and also kills Jittes, which continue to be popular and allow a creature to survive a Wildfire.
Further Work
This deck does have some problems in that without a Top, you can draw the wrong answers and the game always goes long, giving people time to recover if just draw lands. Luckily with all the new lands, it is easy to splash a number of colors into a deck without adding too many lands that don’t tap for the “right” mana. This led me to one of the most powerful cards from last block, Gifts Ungiven. With the addition of 1 Island and 1 Watery Grave, the deck could easily support Gifts. This allowed the deck to be more streamlined with only one of recursive cards adding a Grave Scarab to go with Life from the Loam and Shard Phoenix.
Lands
4
“>Karplusan Forest
7
“>Forest
4
“>Mountain
1
“>Swamp
4
“>Overgrown Tomb
1
“>Island
1
“>Watery Grave
1 Yavimaya Coast
Creatures
3
“>Arashi, the Sky Asunder
4
“>Sakura-Tribe Elder
1
“>Grave-Shell Scarab
1
“>Viridian Shaman
1 Shard Phoenix
Spells
3
“>Farseek
1
“>Naturalize
2
“>Pyroclasm
1
“>Recollect
1
“>Reclaim
3
“>Gifts Ungiven
1
“>Life from the Loam
4
“>Putrefy
1
“>Thoughts of Ruin
4
“>Sensei’s Divining Top
3
“>Kodama’s Reach
3 Wildfire
Gifts Package
Adding the Gifts package of 3 Gifts, Reclaim, and Recollect allows you to Gifts up any card you want given time. Sadly these cards are not even close to Eternal Witness, and therefore there is only one of each, which sometimes leads to not being able to Gifts for them because you have already used them. However when you do draw them they are often weak, so I don’t want to play any more copies.
Game Plan
Having a powerful tutor changes your game plan against a number of decks. Most noticeably against control they really don’t like you searching 3 cards that keep coming back (Phoenix, Scarab, Loam). This allow you to force spells through a counter wall by casting Gifts at the end of their turn, then un-tapping and casting another threat. There is no real way to win quickly with this deck, so you are going to be grinding to win. Your aim is to force the game state to the point where your greater resources enable you to kill them or reduce them to zero land repeatedly. In practice this means as soon as you can you want to Wildfire and then play out a threat or Wildfire again. Using Life from the Loam you will be able to recover fast than them. Against any sort of beatdown deck with burn such as WW/r you need to be careful to not lose Lightning Helix + Char, so for a second Wildfire destroying only two lands is fine if reduces the chance of them burning you out.
Sideboard
2 Thoughts of Ruin
2 Pyroclasm
3 Cranial Extraction
3 Naturalize
3 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
2 Viridian Shaman
This sideboard is set up to deal with mostly control decks. The main is so anti-beatdown you have plenty of stuff to bring out against the creatureless control deck. If you are expecting more control/combo, then one Extraction should be main, with other swaps depending on what form control takes. Being able to search up Loam and Boseiju gives any sort of counter-based control deck real problems. This sideboard is just a prediction of what the meta might look like with answers for beatdown with Jittes and Glorious Anthems. If a bunch of new powerful decks appear then changes need to be made but in general have just anti control and beatdown card seems the best idea for the unknown.
Yet another Version
Interestingly this deck can be built in a vast number of ways by just changing which color you splash. Another option is to add White to the R/G base for cards like Wrath of God and Ghostly Prison, which fit nicely with the gameplan.
Lands
4 Karplusan Forest
4 Mountain
7 Forest
4 Temple Garden
2 Plains
2 Brushland
Creatures
3 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Shard Phoenix
Spells
2 Life from the Loam
3 Kodama’s Reach
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Thoughts of Ruin
4 Farseek
4 Wildfire
4 Wrath of God
4 Ghostly Prison
Sideboard
3
“>Thoughts of Ruin
2
“>Pyroclasm
3
“>Boseiju, Who Shelters All
4
“>Lightning Helix
3 Naturalize
Playing Wrath over Putrefy requires more White sources, so I added a fourth Farseek as well as a number of lands. Jitte is more of a problem as you can’t directly kill it anymore, however if you remove all their lands, Prison will deal with it. The sideboard is pretty similar, though the addition of Lightning Helix helps you keep your life out of burn range. This deck could probably support the addition of Gifts as well with Firemane Angel replacing Grave Scarab. This is pressing the mana base to the limits and would need a number of painlands to support it. In the future when there are more Ravnica block duals available, it might be possible to play with even more colors easily.
Matchups
I’m now going to go over some of the deck I think will be popular and how to play against them. I don’t think it helps much to offer matchup win percentages as decks do vary a lot at this stage and even after playing a large number of games knowing that you win 60% against an average player with deck X doesn’t really help that much.
WW/x
I would guess this sort of deck will be the most popular deck out there. It is the basic beatdown deck from the last block and can be built with Red for burn or Green for large creatures. All of these deck play out in a similar way making a number of small creature and pumping them with Anthems and Jittes. If you can get to the late game, your more powerful card will out class their 2/2s but you need to live that long. Anthem means if you can get two-for-one with Pyroclasm, then you should do it. They have plenty of time to draw into any burn spells they have, so you need to deal with their threats and win as quickly as possible Ideally you want to save Putrefy for Jittes, otherwise Wildfire won’t kill the equipped creature.
Black Beatdown
In order to not go over the same thing multiple times I’m going to lump any sort of aggressive Black deck along with similar G/B decks. Both of these decks have some sort of disruption along with creature like Hypnotic Specter, which you have to deal with. Luckily these sorts decks rarely play things like Cranial Extraction main, so you can normal survive to cast Wildfire that they find it difficult to recover from. Against any deck with Black in it you general want to leave things like Wildfire on the top of your deck with Sensei’s Divining Top rather than drawing them to protect them from discard. This of course requires you to plan ahead with shuffle effects. After sideboarding, Extraction is a real threat but you do have redundancy with Phoenix, Pyroclasm and Wildfire all dealing with beatdown. There is a danger of having all of your win conditions removed, which is a definite advantage of the Gifts version with the ability to dig up threats.
Gifts
It is hard to predict exactly what form Type Two Gifts will take, as I have seen a number of different versions. Neither deck has many creatures so discard effects and land destruction become much more important. Gifts needs a lot of mana to function, so you want to hit them with as many Wildfires and Thoughts of Ruin as possible. Then using recursive threats, you can wear down their removal and finish them off. The game will go very long with Life from the Loam being very powerful and letting you make land drops every turn. If they have a number of counters, you can use Boseiju to deal with them but it is safer just to bring one in so you can Gifts for it if you need it. Bring in more Extractions to deal with their Extractions and to prevent them just removing all your threats. There are a number of cards like Sacred Ground or Life from the Loam they could play that are potent against Wildfire, but they need know they need these cards.
Draw, Go Style Control
Some people like to play this sort of control deck, so there will always be some. How they win isn’t too important – you simply need to force your important spells through their counter wall. The best way to do this is get as many lands into play as possible to shut down counters like Mana Leak and Convolute. This greatly cuts down on the number of counters you have to worry about. Boseiju helps by forcing them to be a lot more aggressive once it comes down and you can deal with threats like Meloku with the un-counterable effect from Arashi.
Combo
There are all kinds of wacky combo decks out there waiting to do horrible things to you. Luckily they can’t really do much if you blow up all their lands. The important thing to work out is whether they are playing control or combo because both will often just sit there playing out lands and waiting. Combo decks often have a lot of effects that generate extra mana. Something like U/G will normally be combo because those color can’t really deal with threats on their own. A dead give away is if they Kodama’s Reach and don’t get any new colour indicating some sort of Early Harvest combo deck. If in doubt you want to just go for it with your Wildfires. If they are control, the worst that happens is that they counter your spells, but if you just wait against combo they might suddenly go off and kill you. These sorts of decks are vulnerable to Extraction, so if they do start to go off try and work out which piece is most important to remove
Mirror
Wildfire isn’t so hot when you both have built your decks around it. Life from the Loam is the key to being able to use your land destruction and recover faster. There isn’t much you can do in an exact mirror but that is rarely the case. There is plenty of opportunity to build a better version of the deck, which is more consistent/powerful than what others have. If this sort of deck becomes popular there is certain scope for changing the sideboard for the mirror but that seems un-necessary currently.
Summary
I hope that people have found these decks and advice useful. I seem to end up playing Gifts in every format, so adding it this Standard deck seemed natural. I would think that the version with Gifts is superior, but it is significantly more complicated to play, so if most people end up playing Wildfire decks then they will more likely resemble the first deck.
Good Luck,
Stuart Wright