How To Build White Aggro Decks In Pioneer

After Monday’s Banned List update, Pioneer is basically a new format, but rather than starting over from scratch, people are going to try to update old Pioneer decks into new Pioneer decks. For most decks that didn’t get any cards banned, this will likely mean playing them unchanged (despite the fact that a few small changes should probably be made to adjust to the new metagame, but it’s hard to know what those changes should be at first). For decks with Smuggler’s Copter or Once Upon a Time, people will likely try very similar decks with other cards in place of them. In most cases, this will likely result in a functional, but not optimal deck.

This brings us to a question I’ve been getting, “Is Selesnya Knights still viable without Once Upon a Time?”

I WON THE PTQ I CANNOT BELIEVE IT LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! THIS WAS MY DECK.

50% Luck 50% Skill 100 % Heron's Grace Champion pic.twitter.com/dDUINoOB5O

— Sam Rolph (@SamRolph3) November 30, 2019

Here’s the short answer: yes, but it’s probably not optimal.

When I built Selesnya Knights, I didn’t even consider other colors. Once Upon a Time is so good I’d want it by itself as a green splash over playing mono-white, and all the cards that were banned on Monday served to push the format to revolve around aggro decks, which collectively simply can’t beat Heron’s Grace Champion.

Selesnya Knights was less, “How do I build a synergistic white aggro deck?” and more, “How do I beat other aggro decks?” and the best answer I could find was by playing four Once Upon a Time and four Acclaimed Contenders to find and cast Heron’s Grace Champion.

Moving forward, beating aggro decks most likely won’t be the sole focus of Pioneer. In the short-term, I expect a lot of midrange planeswalker decks, control decks, and combo decks.

Without Field of the Dead, control and midrange become playable, so people should try to figure out how to play them, and with aggro decks becoming weaker, proactive players will likely explore more combo strategies that will help them beat the midrange players their aggro decks would likely lose to.

Selesnya as a color combination in general has always been great at attacking other creature strategies, but has far fewer tools for beating spell-based decks barring a “hatebears” approach. Without cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Gaddock Teeg, I don’t really see how we could build a hatebears deck in Pioneer, so that points me toward exploring other options.

That said, I love the core of Worthy Knight, Knight of the White Orchid, Thalia’s Lieutenant, and Acclaimed Contender, and probably History of Benalia (though I’m less committed to that one). These cards are still powerful and synergistic enough that there’s a solid core here; the question is just what support it needs to line up best against the metagame as it develops.

So let’s go over the options and their strengths and weaknesses to figure out how we’d want to build this in various possible metagames. Let’s start simply. How would I update Selesnya Knights?

Without Once Upon a Time, we need both more lands and more one-mana spells because we were leaning on Once Upon a Time to have enough of those, and in anticipating at least a temporary move in the format away from Mono-Black Aggro, I felt like it was probably best to move away from Knight of Grace.

This build has a little more interaction since it’s going to be less explosive, and I’ve adjusted the sideboard by adding more tools to compete against control and some combo decks with Gideon and Knight of Autumn.

This kind of strategy is pretty weak against Fog, but with nine cards that destroy enchantments, I’m hoping we can beat Wilderness Reclamation or Jeskai Ascendancy combo decks by keeping them off their namesake enchantments.

Now let’s consider our other options.

If we’re trying to beat control and combo decks as an aggressive white deck, it’s natural to look to blue for counterspells.  If that’s our goal, we probably want to lower our curve so that we can hold up our counterspells earlier and more easily, and blue doesn’t offer any additional Knights that I’m interested in. When the primary payoff is powerful three-mana plays, I’m not convinced that it’s responsible to suggest building Azorious Aggro as a Knights deck.  You just don’t have enough good Knights at the bottom of the curve, so here’s what I’d do instead:

Spirits is just a better tribe for beating up on control and combo decks with blue spells than Knights is.  This build has a slightly lower curve than I think a lot of other builds people have been playing do, and I think that’s an improvement.  I think, for the most part, people have been porting Modern Spirits into Pioneer while changing as little as possible, but I think the loss of Aether Vial means that you want to be a little more careful with your curve, and I think keeping your spells cheap helps get the most out of your lords and Rally of Wings, even if I’m adding a non-Spirit in Siren Stormtamer to do it.

One obvious note about this deck: Rally of Wings is usually going to be the first card you sideboard out unless you expect your opponent still won’t have any removal after sideboarding. It’s a Game 1 card that’s there to steal games, and it’s very good at it, but once both players add more interactive cards, it gets worse very quickly,

If you want interaction against spells and you want to play the Knights package, your best bet is to look to Orzhov, where you can support your Knights with discard spells:

I’m sure I’m supposed to have more removal, but it just doesn’t seem good.  Maybe it’s arrogant to think I’m going to have the best creatures, but it’s really more that I think I need to push my synergies against other creature decks in order to have the best creatures, so removal feels like it’s just playing their game.  Similarly, I’m probably supposed to like Gideon more than Sorin, but I feel like I really want the lifelink from Sorin.

Aryel, Knight of Windgrace is definitely experimental, but it seems like a reasonable top-end that could take over a game pretty easily. I could even see running a second copy if it plays well.

I like the look of this deck more than Selesnya. Knight of the Ebon Legion is just an amazing card; Order of Midnight is really nice with a lot of relatively cheap, high-impact creatures to return; and the sideboard looks very good in this deck.  I also really appreciate the lower curve that cutting Heron’s Grace Champion allows, and I like how Sorin out of the sideboard can fill that role.

If we’re more concerned with lowering the curve than we are with adding black disruption, we can also consider Mardu:

This deck has amazing mana as long you’re willing to not play any cards that cost any colored mana other than a single white unless they’re Knights or otherwise castable by Tournament Grounds, but provided you’re willing to make that concession, this is a hard-hitting aggro deck.

The maindeck is four Thalia’s Lieutenant and 36 Knights (32 of which are Human), so the synergies are going to snowball really well, but you’re also maximally one-dimensional.

If we drop black, we can cast colored noncreature spells and get a little more flexibility in our creatures.  In Boros I’m interested in pushing the go-wide elements a little:

I hate trimming Knight of the White Orchid from the maindeck, but I think Reckless Bushwhacker could be really good with Worthy Knight and Skyknight Vanguard to make tokens, and this deck doesn’t use extra lands very well, since it loses the mana sinks black was offering with Knight of the Ebon Legion and Stormfist Crusader.

This deck is positioned very similarly to the Mardu deck in that both of them are pure aggro decks with little to no disruption. They’re just pushing different, but similar synergies.  I’m really not sure which is better.

Thalia’s Lieutenant decks do not have to be Worthy Knight decks, but Worthy Knight does play extremely well with Thalia’s Lieutenant.  Similarly, Worthy Knight decks technically don’t have to be Thalia’s Lieutenant decks, but so many of the Knights you’d want to play are Human anyway that it’s hard not to want to go in that direction.

You could play mono-white without a splash, but I’m not really sure what the selling point is, given how easy it is to splash, especially splashing an enemy color.  If you want to stay in mono-white, you only have eight good one-mana Knights, and you want more one-drops than this, which pushes you to include something like Kytheon, Hero of Akros; Thraben Inspector; or Giant Killer.  All of these are Humans and not Knights.

If you abandon Worthy Knight you still want Knight of the White Orchid, but you might change your one-mana creatures and you probably give up on Acclaimed Contender and History of Benalia.  Those cards are good, but playing fewer three-mana spells in a white aggro deck isn’t necessarily a bad thing and you make room for Always Watching or Thalia, Heretic Cathar or some other good three-drop. Since you have more options at the bottom of the curve and fewer tribal commitments, you also get to consider Venerated Loxodon, which plays really well with Always Watching, because vigilance means you don’t have to take a turn off attacking to cast the Loxodon.

There are a lot of other great Humans to choose from, so I’m definitely not sure I’ve chosen the best mix.  If you want something like this and don’t like one of the cards or something isn’t playing well for you, here’s a list of my other top choices:

This deck is in a similar space to Boros and Mardu, where it’s only really able to interact in combat and with opposing creatures.  It has its own synergies and similarly has a lot of power and some good sources of card advantage and removal, so it’s a reasonable aggro deck, but similar to the other decks, if someone is playing sorceries and instants and has built their deck in a way that’s mindful of being attacked, you’re not going to be able to do much about it.

The sideboard offers good tools against opposing creatures and removal spells, but no real tools against opposing combo decks.  You could adjust this somewhat with cards like Deafening Silence or maybe even Gideon’s Intervention, but if your opponent has time to resolve a card like Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, you’re probably going to lose (though Mastery of the Unseen and Mutavault can give you a fighting chance against that card in particular).

Those are the most appealing directions I see for aggressive white decks in Pioneer at the moment.  If you liked the synergies in Selesnya Knights, I don’t think you have to give up on them, but I think, at least based on the direction I expect the format to go in the near future, I’d start by shifting to Orzhov.