How To Compete In The Yorion Arms Race That Is Ikoria Standard

There’s been an incredible amount of development and innovation this week in Ikoria Standard.  Between stay at home orders, MTG Arena, weekly online tournaments, and Crokeyz’s stream, we’ve seen a massive progression in the development of Yorion, Sky Nomad decks. They’ve gone from “innocent” flavors of bloated midrange and control decks to wildly powerful engine-based combo control decks with the incorporation of Fires of Invention and Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast.  Oliver Tiu won the MagicFest Online Season 2 Week 2 championship on Sunday with the following:

So how does it work?

This deck has many angles of attack.  On the surface, this is still a relatively run-of-the-mill Jeskai control deck with Yorion.  Coupled with various enchantments and planeswalkers, the most dangerous of which is Elspeth Conquers Death, Yorion can always be looming as a potential value engine.  This list eschews any creature cards other than Agent of Treachery  to incorporate Lukka as a psuedo-Polymorph enabler alongside token creators (Omen of the Sun being the most synergistic as another blink target for Yorion or as a permanent to generate advantage by picking up with Teferi, Time Raveler).  Some of your best draws are threatening a quick Agent of Treachery which then must be answered or it will be blinked by Yorion — which then itself can also be exiled by Lukka for a third Agent of Treachery in two turn cycles.  

But there’s more.

Things truly get out of hand when Fires of Invention gets involved.  If Yorion can untap with a Fires of Invention on the battlefield, suddenly it can assemble a Lukka (or Elspeth Conquers Death) and then cast Yorion to blink the material for value — including the Fires of Invention itself — and continue to cast more spells that turn.  This sequence almost always snowballs the game out of acceptable reach.  In other words, you can’t really allow this deck to untap with Fires of Invention if the game hasn’t progressed to the point where Yorion has been expended.

That sounds pretty powerful. What should we do?

It’s difficult to fight Yorion on a reactive axis.  Trying to simply answer Fires of Invention and company without developing a battlefield or working towards a powerful angle of your own will leave you buried by Omen of the Sea being blinked.  Teferi, Narset, and Elspeth Conquers Death are also plenty powerful in any type of fair game. 

That said, there are a few different ways to approach this problem.  One is finding ways to answer Fires of Invention proactively or hyper-efficiently.

These are all ways to get it done alongside traditional countermagic and cards like Aether Gust.  The key with the latter will be finding strong proactive packages to pair them with.  My current #1 underrated pick for this is Shifting Ceratops.

My iteration with this deck is raw (a night old), but inspired by learnings from various Mutate, Flash, and Kaherra Gruul Fires decks, I’ve put in a few matches with this deck and felt impressed:

Ceratops’s ability to attack into Yorion, Sky Nomad mana; not be stolen by Agent of Treachery; and one-shot Teferi, Time Raveler is a massive amount of equity in the matchup.  The fact that it’s also a large haste threat also mitigates its weakness to Elspeth Conquers Death to some degree.

The goal here is to quickly put your opponent into a squeeze between being leveled in a flash game and quickly chopped down with burst damage from your haste threats.  There’s still a lot of work to be done here, but Shifting Ceratops is definitely one of the best attacking angles against Yorion Jeskai Lukka.

Bonders’ Enclave is also on my short list of cards to play more with after seeing its use in Kaheera Gruul Fires.  It also naturally works well in a Flash play pattern.  

The Adventure Package feels like another unexplored axis of Ikoria Standard, with Flaxen Intruder especially being a high-synergy way to build your battlefield while preemptively representing an answer to Fires of Invention. Perhaps we just haven’t been creative enough?

The core of Obosh Selesnya Adventures gives up very few cards to include Obosh (notably Conclave Tribunal).  That doesn’t necessarily make it the optimal way to build the deck, but as I mentioned last week, pushing decks to incorporate companions feels like the right initial step when exploring new space.  

This deck has a lot of elements I like — a solid proactive gameplan, a good reason to include a Disenchant effect in Flaxen Intruder, and the potential for burst damage and resiliency to sweepers.

The sideboard starts to feel the effects of the Obosh incorporation, but still manages to contain a variety of solid roleplayers.

Notably, while relatively weak to the other aspects of Yorion’s gameplan, Trostani Discordant is insulation against Agent of Treachery stealing your creatures.  This is likely enough reason for her stock to grow, specifically if your deck is looking for another curve-topper/Anthem effect anyway.

Fighting Yorion with Yorion

There are two viable routes here as far as I can tell, assuming you aren’t interested in playing direct mirror matches — going under them with disruption or going way over the top.  An example of the former:

There’s nothing too crazy going on here, we just have a stack of good honest disruption between Thought Erasure, Aether Gust, and counterspells alongside ways to answer Fires on the battlefield.  Hero of Precinct One pressures our opponent, enabling us to play a reactive game, while making it difficult for opposing copies of Teferi, Time Raveler and Narset, Parter of Veils to stick, which would make our countermagic moot.

Another underplayed card to take a look at is Tale’s End (which should likely find its way in the previous Flash deck’s sideboard).  This card has a lot of direct applications (fighting planeswalkers, Yorion) with many more subtle interactions — countering Saga triggers, disrupting Fable Passage, and even stopping giant Sharks from entering the battlefield.

So what if you’re trying to go way over the top?

Casualties of War is likely the best pound-for-pound answer to Fires of Invention.  Simply, once your opponent has Fires on the battlefield, they can’t stop you from casting an answer card, and Casualties is the most economical way to catch up or even pull ahead.  Casualties alone might inspire an uptick in traditional Sultai Midrange as an effective stock deck against Yorion Jeskai Lukka.  

You probably don’t click on my articles to see stock Sultai Midrange, though.

There’s nothing subtle going on here.  

Omen of the Hunt is another underplayed portion of Yorion’s potential arsenal.  We’re just trying to cast Golos and go wild.  The maximum copies of Elspeth Conquers Death and Casualties of War give us catch-up power against an opposing Fires of Invention, and Shark Typhoon is not only a strong mana sink for all of our acceleration, it happens to be one of the best hits you can have off a Golos.  

Your mana is functional, but it is certainly vulnerable to losing your ability to activate Golos to an Agent of Treachery.  I don’t have a great solution — basic Mountain sounds weak, but may just be acceptable as an additional land.  I was previously happy to play Gift of Paradise, but more Agents floating around have more or less made that plan untenable. If another metagame shift occurs, it’s a great way to give this deck more incidental percentage points against Cat/Oven due to it tacking “When this enters the battlefield, gain 3 life” onto Yorion. 

What if none of this is for me?

Until there’s a significant metagame shift (next week?), Obosh is probably your best bet if you’re looking to just get people dead and ignore the nonsense.

Obosh Mono-Red Aggro is hyper-consistent. One of the best features of Obosh being in your deck, beyond your lack of ability to truly flood out, is having an excuse to play a few more lands, which helps enable the excellent Castle Embereth.  There’s a wide variety of one-mana creatures that you can play, but I find this suite to be the happy medium between “strong with Obosh” and “not embarrassing to play.”  Gingerbrute versus Tin Street Dodger is the choice I’m least confident with, but with more copies of The Birth of Meletis showing up, I’m giving Brute the nod for now.  

Your sideboard is admittedly lacking, but you still have a fair amount of options in creature mirrors thanks to cheap interaction and Chandra.  The final Warboss and a few Slaying Fires are reasonable considerations.

The other approach is to go harder on haste one-drops and play Heraldic Banner — a goldfish-into-Obosh configuration could become significantly stronger if everyone is trying to out-Yorion each other.

The more popular style of Obosh, and another fine choice against Yorion, is Rakdos Sacrifice:

If I’m skeptical of anything, it’s the number of lands and red sources in this deck.  Between Castle Locthwain and Woe Strider, Obosh Rakdos Sacrifice has an adequate amount of mana sinks and you’re always starting the game with a five-mana card.  I like a lot about what this deck is doing, though, as it has a ton of reach paired with the ability to have aggressive starts and effectively go wide.  

If you aren’t looking to go off the beaten path, then start here.

While Yorion Jeskai Lukka is extremely powerful, the level of depth in Ikoria between a large card pool, excellent mana, and companions leads me to believe that it won’t stay on top for too long. That said, continuing to respect it and the strength of artifacts and enchantments littered throughout Ikoria Standard’s top decks will be paramount throughout the life of this format.