Everything You Should Be Doing In Ikoria Standard

With a couple weeks of events under its belt, Ikoria Standard is starting to solidify into key structures and players. If you’re looking to break into the format with tweaks to an existing deck or an entirely new brew, here are the general rules you need to follow to succeed in the Lair of Behemoths.

Companions Are Broken

Okay, we all know this by now, but it’s not useful. Let’s try that again.

The Most Broken Companions Are Turbo Mulldrifters

The "Companions are fun to play vs" myth gets busted real fast playing Standard. Obosh, Yorion, and Keruga all do the exact same thing: if my opponent controls 2 uncontested permanents, they can tap 5 mana and win the game if I don't play a counterspell.

— Ari Lax (@armlx) April 28, 2020

The companions seeing the most play right now all share a specific play pattern. If you control permanents, you can cast your five-mana companion and generate an immediate, crushing advantage. It really isn’t even specific permanents, because the cards force you to build decks that only include permanents that set up your companion.

The entire Ikoria Standard format is centered on this play pattern, with Boros Cycling as the lone exception.

Spot Removal Is Bad

While conceptually your opponent needing to control permanents implies you should stop them from doing that, it just doesn’t work out.

Many of the permanents people are playing to support their broken companions are inherently two-for-ones, or in the case of Fires of Invention a giant tempo disaster to kill. If you trade for these cards you just end up buried by their natural advantage.

Beyond those, the creatures that aren’t two-for-ones fall into bad spots against removal. They cost one and you’re always trading down, and those are paired with creatures that don’t get picked off by efficient removal.

Then there’s the issue where none of the spot removal options in the format combo with good companions. You want to be advancing your battlefield so that you can “go off” by casting your companion. Getting stuck with interaction doesn’t do that, and even casting interaction doesn’t do that.

Multiple of these companions also completely exclude the efficient removal in Ikoria Standard via their deck construction restrictions. Three-mana removal just doesn’t cut it as a plan, and what’s the alternative? Not playing a companion and trying to go one-for-one against opponents starting with eight cards? How many Scorching Dragonfire does Temur Reclamation even play, like two?

Even a traditionally insane removal spell like Bonecrusher Giant where you don’t have to invest a card and it’s just a playable spell when it doesn’t act as removal and when cast as removal it fills a curve hole in multiple companion’s setups is just… fine.

Play exactly as much removal as you need to kill their non-companion cards that can solo you. I’m calling out Mayhem Devil since it’s such a breaker in the Rakdos Sacrifice mirrors, but maybe you do have to kill Fires of Invention to win.

Even worse than removal might be discard spells. There are a million interchangeable low-cost permanents in these decks, and their knockout companion hangs out in their sideboard, so what are you even trying to hit with a Thought Erasure? The only time I’ve found discard to be effective is the Obosh Rakdos Sacrifice versus Fires of Invention case, where you can hang with their midrange plan but literally can’t beat Fires of Invention. Again, see above: there’s exactly one card you need to handle to play Magic against the matchup and you load up an effective answer for it.

While they don’t quite fall under this same category, the Theros Beyond Death Titans have the same issues as discard. You cast the front side of Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath or Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger; your opponent casts something that sticks; and when they fire off a companion they get a big edge. Uro still plays fine as the lifegain buffers against later chip shots by Obosh and the ramp let you deploy bigger things to Yorion like Agent of Treachery or Elspeth Conquers Death, but Kroxa is just unexciting and neither Elder Giant is a great reason to build a deck the way they were two months ago

Spot Removal Is Bad…Unless It Stops Companions

There’s currently one viable non-companion deck, and it exists because it’s reasonably effective against companion-centric decks — Temur Reclamation.

You can’t beat these companions after they resolve. Even Obosh, which can in theory die to removal before it doubles damage, just hangs out off the battlefield if your opponent is blatantly holding up mana. Eventually they have to do something good that taps them down, and then they die.

You can beat them on the stack, before Yorion or Keruga even trigger. You also need something to do once they don’t cast that five-drop right into the answer, so the rest of your deck needs to play somewhat at instant speed.

So why haven’t the traditional Dimir or Simic Flash decks fared well?

Sweepers Are Good (Against Obosh)

The default Flash decks are bad because they just die to Obosh and aren’t set up to play the sweepers they need to not have this happen.

Obosh Rakdos Sacrifice is really the deck you can play answers against, and it turns out that sweepers do work. Only playing odd-cost cards means Obosh wants a huge surplus of one-drops so it can make plays on Turn 1 and Turn 2 prior to deploying three-drops, and it really doesn’t want anything that costs five since every card clogged in hand until then is something it can’t threaten to double down on Turn 5 with Obosh.

So every game proceeds to the same point around Turn 3 or Turn 4. They have a bunch of irrelevant creatures on the battlefield, but you need to make sure they don’t have those creatures when they hit five mana for Obosh. If you want to win, you need to mop up that nonsense and those Flash decks aren’t quite up to that job right now.

This is also one reason why the Lurrus Rakdos Sacrifice decks have fallen out of favor relative to the Obosh Rakdos Sacrifice decks. I covered this last week in the context of Keruga Jeskai Fires matching up against both these decks. Sweepers are good at stopping the runaway games from Obosh Rakdos Sacrifice, but that’s not the end of the line. You have to beat their follow-up, beat their Obosh, beat their Woe Strider escape or 7/6 Dinosaur Zombie or whatever. With Lurrus, your next sweeper is also a game-ender.

Shatter the Sky might be the biggest winner from pre-Ikoria Standard since it wraps up the big and small aspects of Obosh Rakdos Sacrifice. Deafening Clarion and Flame Sweep hitting a turn earlier is nice, but the second small sweeper has bigger diminishing returns. Whichever card you cast isn’t going to be good against Yorion or Keruga decks, so you may as well have the one that bails you out in all the scenarios you could want a sweeper.

Of course, I don’t think anyone has figured out how to play the best anti-Obosh sweeper in the format quite yet but they are starting to try. Here’s an experimental Temur Reclamation list that’s making a deep run into this weekend’s MagicfFest Online.

Yorion Has No Single Reliable Plan, Just Power

There are a million ways to build a Yorion deck. All the current lists include Azorius, but that’s not a hard and fast rule. It just happens that Omen of the Sea and Teferi, Time Raveler and Elspeth Conquers Death are pretty good to blink.

But with an 80-card deck, you end up diluted. Any four-of is the same consistency as a three-of in a normal 60-card deck. Many common plans, like lining up Teferi, Time Raveler with Mystical Dispute on Turn 4 against Temur Reclamation or simply casting Fires of Invention on Turn 4, just happen at random and aren’t things you can London Mulligan for effectively. That makes your deck inherently exploitable by the Temur Reclamations of the format.

So Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast has become the go-to attempt to prevent your deck from becoming an unreliable midrange muddle. Your broken plans of Fires of Invention and Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast aren’t individually reliable, but drawing one or the other is a pretty good bet. You’re actually pretty good at presenting two broken things a game on top of your companion, so you can just bash right through walls of countermagic. It’s also worth noting the layering of Dovin’s Veto with Mystical Dispute in the sideboard as ways to reliably battle back against Temur Reclamation.

I don’t have a ton of thoughts on the Yorion nonsense mirrors and how to sort your way out of those, but it seems like the most important thing is Agent of Treachery triggers. If you elect to play Yorion Bant over the Jeskai Fires-Lukka version, I would be very sure to build your deck in a way that if you Agent of Treachery their Lukka you can immediately turn any of your spare three-drops or a Yorion into another Agent of Treachery. Lukka ending up on three loyalty after flipping the first Agent is oddly a bit of a drawback in this situation.

Brewing a Way Out

Lurrus of the Dream-Den is the actual most powerful companion, but its place in Ikoria Standard so far has been relegated to extremely exploitable aggressive decks. The successful Lurrus decks in other formats have been much more flexible and interactive, or at the least executing a plan that doesn’t directly overlap with Lurrus plus a recast one-drop in terms of answers.

Looking through the format a few times, I think the answer to a mixed-bag Lurrus deck is Pteramander. Ajani’s Pridemate is too supported by creatures and ends up back in the same place all the other Lurrus decks are, and Hero of Precinct One is just not my jam. This early brew is loosely based on some Azorius Flash decks that have bounced around, but adding Lurrus to a deck never actually hurt it, even if there is tension between it and Pteramander.

Or maybe the deck I’m trying to build already exists with a slight adjustment to the one deck I haven’t touched much on. Cycling is a Lurrus deck that can threaten wide with Valiant Rescuer, tall and fast with Flourishing Fox, or just the knockout with Zenith Flare. It’s in a good position to splash Extinction Event with Savai Triome, and that also brings with it black disruption for Fires of Invention and a bunch of other goodies. I lost to the following list in a MagicFest Online Qualifier on Monday, and while I think Gutterbones and Kroxa would be better off as any one-mana cyclers, I think the rest of the deck looks precisely on point for what I want to do in the format.

Small tweaks like this leave me hopeful that we will see small developments to the format each week, but the raw power of the best companions makes it difficult for large shifts to occur. Expect these baseline rules of the format to remain largely in place for a long time to come.