What do we mean when we say "best deck?" It sounds simple, right? It's the one that wins the most.

But when it comes to a game with multiple formats it starts to get complicated. It doesn't help that many of these formats rotate and change, and all of them (the official ones anyway) have new cards printed on a regular basis.

Even if we narrow things down to a single format, it remains a thorny topic. Does the best Standard deck right now beat the best Standard deck of a previous year? How would Badgermole Cub fare against Necropotence or Tolarian Academy decks of the 90's?

What are the best Magic decks to ever exist?

Many videos and articles have set out to answer exactly this question. MTGoldish have been running a really fun and interesting bracket of World Champion decks. Even this is imperfect, however. It's a bracket, which means that any deck can lose one match and be eliminated. Caw Blade might run the table against other decks, but if it meets a bad match-up in round one, you'd never find out. The sample size is tiny and there is a lot of room for user error when it comes to playing decks for the first time.

A Different Approach

What if we looked at things differently? What if we looked at it in a way more suited to an article? Say goodbye to "which Best Deck beats the other Best Decks." Say hello to "which decks dominated their standard format the hardest?"

A little bit of setup is required here. Firstly, since Standard is the most widely played competitive format across Magic's history, that will be the focus. Secondly, this will be based mostly on Pro Tours and World Championships. This does run into sample size issues, but nobody said this was going to be scientific. Restricting the scope to the best of the best should at least replace quantity with quality.

Specifically, we are looking at share of top eight. Again, this is not perfect, but there is only so much one article can achieve. A better metric would be something like what percentage of pilots made day two, or top eight. That data isn't readily available for every tournament, however, and goes way beyond the scope of this article.

Necro Summer

With all of that in mind, there have been quite a few elite level tournaments where one deck dominated the top eight. The first contender is the Necropotence decks of the mid 90's. Both Worlds 1996 and 1997 had three and four Necro decks. There were a few differences between individual decks, even within the same tournament, but the engine remained the same.

This is hardly a surprise. Necro Summer is a legend in competitive Magic circles. Necropotence is one of the most powerful card advantage engines of all time. It fueled multiple archetypes over multiple years. Necropotence-powered decks definitely get onto the shortlist, no question.

Dr Teeth

It took a few years before a deck truly dominated a tournament. There were several instances of a deck having three or four entries into a top eight, but never an overall majority. Then, in 2002 we got our first sixer.

Psychatog was, at the time, the best Creature ever printed. At Worlds that year it accounted for the majority of the top eight. Five of those decks were near identical, with one splashing Red for a smattering of tech-y options. The final of the tournament was a Psychatog mirror. It was Atogs all the way down. It would take years for a deck to even come close to the stranglehold that Psychatog held over Worlds 2002.

Beaten Black and Blue

In the following years, meta games were typically more varied. Several decks had three top eights in the same tournament and Mirarri's Wake did manage another four, but never more than that. There were some near misses: Affinity managed three top eights in 2004 even after some of its best cards were banned. For a while, though, Standard drifted along nicely.

Then Faeries happened. At Worlds 2008, Faeries was the new hotness, and it won the tournament while putting five players into the top eight. The deck was not only good on its own merits, but also hard to hate on thanks to its flexible suite of counter magic. Decks would play Cloudthresher in the main deck and still lose to a Bitterblossom or a well-timed Spellstutter Sprite.

Jund 'em

Jund makes for a unique entry on this list. In the "best vs best" kind of content, it's an archetype that often struggles. Traditional Jund decks were at their best when they could attack a meta game. Jund players love to debate minutiae like the correct number of Thoughtseize and exactly what removal is best right now. In a best of the best tournament, using stock lists, Jund suffers.

But unlike many decks in this article, it appeared twice in the research. At Worlds 2009 it made up three parts of the top eight, though it didn't win the tournament. The following year, at PT Chicago, three very similar lists made top eight again. This time, one of them did go on to win the whole thing. On power level, Jund doesn't get near the top of typical "best decks ever" content, but its staying power cannot be denied.

The Control Years

The early 2010s were dominated by Blue control decks. Your mind no doubt springs to the Cawblade meta game. That led to such absurdities as playing Jace Belern as removal for Jace, the Mind Sculptor under the old Planeswalker rules.

And yet, Cawblade didn't get much time to shine on the Pro Tour. It took down a ton of Grand Prix and other competitive tournaments, yes, but it only won one PT. It only had four spots in that top eight. A year before that, Dimir Control put five players into the top eight of Worlds, including the winner, Guillaume Matingon.

Similar to Jund before it, Dimir Control was a meta game call. The lists from Worlds 2010 are extremely heavy on removal and light on threats. It was a deck that disappeared quite quickly after that event, too, but you can't ignore how much it dominated the event in question.

Pro Tour Dark Ascension

PT Dark Ascension was the next major event to have four of the same deck in its top eight. Except, it didn't really. There were 16 copies of Delver of Secrets, true, but in three quite different builds.

Realistically, the Esper decks were Spirit typal decks, splashing for the Flashback on Lingering Souls. There was a Human typal deck, which was similar, but slightly more aggressive and obviously with a different Creature type. Finally, there was the Delver deck that you probably remember. This was more of a tempo deck, with Snapcaster Mage and Sword of War and Peace.

Unfortunately for Delver fans, none of them won. Three Kessig Wolf Run decks went over the top of the puny Blue and White Creatures. It makes it hard to pick a Delver deck if they never actually won a Pro Tour, no matter how many top eight places they had.

Red Decks Win

In the latter half of the 2010s, things got aggressive. Pro Tour Origins was harmless enough: three red decks in the top eight, including the winner. Fair enough. A couple of years later, PT Aether Revolt had six Mardu WBR) Vehicles decks in its top eight, including the winner. PT Hour of Devastation that same year had six red aggro decks. One of them was splashing black, but the list was very similar to the mono red deck that won the whole thing.

It got worse before it got better, too. In 2018, seven Goblin Chainwhirler decks surrounded a solitary Esper Control player. It's important to note that there were different flavours of Chainwhirler available - some mono red, some Rakdos . Still, the game plan was roughly the same: kill the opponent quickly.

This represents the record for biggest top eight share, by the way. On numbers alone, the winner would be Goblin Chainwhirler 2018. But amusingly, the following event, Pro Tour Guilds of Ravnica had six Boros decks, post-rotation. Red really was the best colour in Magic for quite a while back there.

The Modern Era

Nowadays, with so many more games played and so many more tournaments, the methodology starts to fall apart. Izzet and Rakdos Control had four slots in 2021 and 2023 respectively. Rakdos, in particular, was a scourge, with multiple cards getting banned in Standard. A single PT-level event doesn't really do justice to how much black-red decks dominated that year.

The power of red decks continued into 2025. PT Final Fantasy had just two decks in its top eight, both of which were heavily red. Izzet tempo decks, featuring now-banned Cori-Steel Cutter battled Mono red decks. An even split of four each didn't help the fact that both were trying to end the game as quickly as possible in slightly different ways.

Picking a Winner

Maybe it's recency bias, but it's hard to look past how dominant red decks have been in the last decade. Modern aggro decks might actually give the old 90's combo decks a run for their money. In terms of dominance of their own format, though, it's not even close.

It's especially hard to look past Goblin Chainwhirler being in 28 out of a possible 32 slots. Going purely by the numbers, and by the methodology, 2018's red decks are the best Standard decks of all time. Or, perhaps more accurately, they were the most dominant Pro Tour decks of all time. The actual greatest ever? That's still debatable.