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Five Decks You'll Play This Weekend

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It's time for Pro Tour Shadows over Innistrad, where Mad-rid Prophets will be drafted all weekend long. While I work feverishly to keep the puns-to-sentences ratio high, let's get into the Standard metagame.

Innistradition

Not to be confused with the Innis tradition, the Innistradition of Standard decks involves tribes and other small creatures (Delver of Secrets and Geist of Saint Traft say hello). It appears, even with the Eldrazi around, the metagame is full of a lot of small creatures again. Whether that will hold up at the Pro Tour is hard to say, of course, but in a world of Dragons, Eldrazi, and dorks, the dorks are having a lot of fun.

Most reads on the metagame are from Star City Games events. April 9–10 Invitational Qualifiers gave seventy-one decks, Baltimore gave sixty-four, and the weekend Invitational in Columbus gave another twenty-seven. That's one hundred sixty-two decks to form a picture of the first two weeks. Here's the breakdown from those events, listed by the type of event:

Archetype IQs (71) BAL (64) COL (27) Total
W/B Midrange 11 10 4 25
W/U Humans 11 8 4 23
Bant Company 0 9 9 18
R/G Ramp 9 5 0 14
W/B Eldrazi 0 8 0 8
G/W Humans 3 3 1 7
Red Eldrazi 4 2 1 7
Esper Dragons 3 2 0 5
R/W Eldrazi 0 5 0 5
White Humans 0 3 1 4
The Rest 30 9 7 46

So there's a clear top three in terms of popularity, while the rest are trying to figure out their places in the metagame against them. What do those top three look like?

The key to this deck, as with many midrange decks, is the value generated by each card. In this deck's case, there are a few value packages that exist at several curve slots. Declaration in Stone and Anguished Unmaking add to white's exile theme, already played frequently with Silkwrap and Stasis Snare, to allow Wasteland Strangler's processing to be creature removal that works because you already removed a creature. Transgress the Mind can exile a creature card "in advance" to achieve the same effect. There are plenty of Planeswalkers, including the game-ending Sorin, Grim Nemesis, there are different types of finishers in Archangel Avacyn and Secure the Wastes, and there's even ramp in Knight of the White Orchid. The Planeswalkers combine nicely with the sideboard sweepers and the main-decked Languish; if Pro Tour players are working hard on the best weenies deck, they're surely working as hard on the best Languish deck to deal with it.

I expect this deck to be chosen by two types of top players at the Pro Tour. One is the player experienced with this deck and who reads the metagame well enough to decide the correct numbers of Languishes and so on. The other is the player who isn't experienced with Standard at all; this player has concentrated on the Draft half of the Pro Tour and expects to do well enough there that just a basic deck that answers the field pretty well will be needed. This is the Abzan of the new Standard; it's not necessarily the most correct answer for a given tournament, but it's never the least correct.

W/U Humans comes in second in popularity. While Max McVety took down the Invitational with the mono-white version, W/U was also in the Top 8 with a more influential pilot:

The tradeoffs for going blue—gaining access to Reflector Mage in the main deck and Dragonlord Ojutai and Ojutai's Command in the sideboard—are requiring more lands (including an extra Island in the sideboard), having some lands enter the battlefield tapped, and therefore having less chance to cast Archangel of Tithes on curve (and much less chance if the deck is running Westvale Abbey). Given how much flying matters against some decks—the White Humans/Bant Company finals was won largely by Gryff's Boon—I like Bygone Bishop in Gerry's deck for both flying and investigating.

With cards like Bygone Bishop, Gryff's Boon, and Thraben Inspector, there's a lot more velocity to these white decks than we're used to seeing. And the tradeoff between velocity and raw speed will probably be a key decision point for deck-builders this week. There's also the looming question of whether the W/x Humans archetype has such a flat power curve that the blue isn't worth splashing for since Reflector Mage is the biggest reason to play blue but the card doesn't deal with Gryff's Boon meaningfully. It is deliciously weird, given its name, that Reflector Mage is at its worst against the mirror.

No matter how many Human decks there are without Reflector Mage, it still will see high play thanks to Bant Company:

Bant Company was three of the Top 8 in Columbus, and the decks in Columbus all agreed with Jim Davis's winning Baltimore list on which creatures mattered in the main deck, though quantities varied slightly. Duskwatch Recruiter is as good as I thought it was when it was spoiled, and Tireless Tracker is better (I only thought of it as an improved Seer's Sundial, which, in its defense, it definitely is). It's clearly an excellent choice for the weekend—Collected Company has a strong, visible resume—though it has plenty of decision points that might not make it as user-friendly as W/B midrange for the Limited masters this Pro Tour.

Collected Company
As one of the only three-colored decks in the format, Bant Company has a lot of sideboard options. These were mostly agreed on over the last two weekends, but Collected Company allows for some silver bullets that might tip the scales this weekend. Gatherer doesn't reveal a load of great options—they are limited somewhat by the lack of colorless mana among the lands—but some might be spicy. With so many important enchantments in the white decks, Ainok Survivalist might be a reasonable backup to Dromoka's Command in getting rid of them. Void Grafter has some potential in saving creatures from Declaration in Stone while being an acceptable flash body the rest of the time. Surprisingly, most everything else that you'd consider for a Bant Company deck is in the list above, apart from Stratus Dancer, which currently makes some sideboards.

Although this isn't shown in the table above, Bant Company took nineteen of the Top 32 slots at the Star City Games Open taking place during the Invitational this past weekend. Maybe that indicates it's the safe pro pick in Madrid, but I think it's more the safe Grand Prix–level pick than the safe Pro Tour pick—it's good at stopping the kinds of extreme aggro that players try to luck-sack a Grand Prix with (or are able to build on the cheap), but it's right to expect the Pro Tour to be less skewed, in which case, a deck with a greater variety of answers seems safer.

Two Spicy Metaballs

What's lurking under the surface that's an innovation away from making a difference? Todd Anderson's U/R control had another Top 8 in the hands of Jameson Perdue, but it hasn't taken off yet. If it didn't rely on Drownyard Temple for card advantage, it could dip into a third color for access to Radiant Flames, which deals with aggro early and doesn't kill Thing in the Ice.

So that's one possibility. My first pick for spice this weekend is something that's already incorporated Radiant Flames well:

Radiant Flames and Chandra, Flamecaller make a sweeper package that might be enough to address the waves of white creatures at the top Standard tables. Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet—remember that guy?—survives Radiant Flames, can make a ton of Zombies out of those flames, and can stand stoutly in combat. Ultimate Price is a little safer to run than was initially expected since the colorless Eldrazi aren't too prevalent; Ruinous Path can deal with them as well as the Planeswalkers that tend to show up where small creatures don't.

Besides the sweepers, the reason I like this deck is its good use of Arlinn Kord, whose repeatable tokens and removal have the potential to grind out several opponents. As a follow-up to Radiant Flames, she seems difficult for even Bant Company decks to fight through. Arlinn giving +2/+2, vigilance, and haste to Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet or The Gitrog Monster is a big deal as well when it comes up. There was a lot of hype around Arlinn but no home for her; the metagame is well-suited for her abilities, so this deck might be good enough to make inroads this weekend.

On the complete opposite side of things, color-wise and strategy-wise:

There's Wasteland Strangler again, interacting not only with Silkwrap, Stasis Snare, and Anguished Unmaking but also with Angelic Purge. Angelic Purge is exactly what Demonic Pact decks were looking for: a way to deal with Demonic Pact's downside without taking up too many combo spaces. Angelic Purge is a fantastic catch-all that will sacrifice either Demonic Pact or Oath of Jace most frequently; it also can sacrifice a Silkwrap or anything else that Wasteland Strangler has emptied. At some point, Starfield of Nyx starts recurring enchantments and closes out the game by sending them into the red zone. It seems it would take a while, but with Demonic Pact able to deal damage to players as one of its modes, it doesn't take as long as it looks.

This strikes me as a very Shota Yasooka deck in terms of thought process; the surprise angle doesn't minimize its potency. The only Standard cards capable of dealing with more than one enchantment are Quarantine Field, Tragic Arrogance, Crush of Tentacles, Displacement Wave, The Great Aurora, Nahiri, the Harbinger, and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. Outside Tragic Arrogance, that's not a fearsome list, and it's possible a Demonic Pact deck could go unhindered throughout the Pro Tour. It certainly is one of the only decks to shrug off Reflector Mage.

Conclusion

Whether you want to slice the new Standard as the impact of Shadows over Innistrad's arrival or Khans of Tarkir's departure, the landscape is very different now. The big three decks all should see some play—they're in too even of numbers to shift that dramatically over a weekend—and there's plenty of unexplored space. Are there Innistrad tribes—besides Humans—ready to rumble? Can the Eldrazi or Dragons reclaim what they've ruled for months? Having three blocks to clash in the Pro Tour leads to a lot of flavorful battles, and that in addition to brewers' surprises should make for an exciting Pro Tour.


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