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I. I'm Just Out Here Slaying Storms
To be honest, to begin with, I wasn't doing anything; let alone slaying anything (anyone?).
I was just tired of the last format. Say what you will about "big Standard"... Or frequent set releases... (or whatever)... But I had just come off of consecutive Event wins with my U/W Control with Whales and one of the many 
Mice / Sheltered by Ghosts variants I have knocking around and I was just tired of it. Tired of winning? Tired of Magic! Tired of Standard anyway. It wasn't until I had maybe my third triple Restless Bivouac draw that I realized I hadn't updated to include Sunbillow Verge.
Oh well, won anyway.
Thank Morphling! Thank Ugin above! Thank speedy Hazoret for something different.
But not too different?
I had no idea what to invest in, initially. This seemed safe:
I had been playing 
for basically all of Aetherdrift Standard. To the point that, as aforementioned, I had neglected almost every other archetype so much I hadn't even updated my Boros mana bases. I certainly hadn't played Jace-less, Counterspell-less, Mono-White since Duskmourn: House of Horrors Standard. But I liked the cut of Elspeth, Storm Slayer's jib and figured I had a serviceable base list somewhere.
Okay, this seems good enough...
Let's just add some [more] Elspeths...
Here's what we got to, initially:
Mono-White Tokens | TDM Standard | Michael Flores
- Creatures (8)
- 4 Beza, the Bounding Spring
- 4 Enduring Innocence
- Planeswalkers (4)
- 2 Archangel Elspeth
- 2 Elspeth, Storm Slayer
- Instants (7)
- 3 Soul Partition
- 4 Get Lost
- Sorceries (8)
- 2 Day of Judgment
- 2 Sunfall
- 4 Lay Down Arms
- Enchantments (4)
- 4 Caretaker's Talent
- Artifacts (4)
- 4 Carrot Cake
- Lands (25)
- 14 Plains
- 1 Mirrex
- 2 Sunken Citadel
- 4 Demolition Field
- 4 Fountainport
- Sideboard (15)
- 3 Authority of the Consuls
- 4 Exorcise
- 1 Rest In Peace
- 2 Boon-Bringer Valkyrie
- 1 Destroy Evil
- 4 Mazemind Tome
Export Arena
I didn't want to stretch in too many directions initially, so I didn't, for example, update my sideboard. Exorcise is a powerful and flexible card. But at sorcery speed, it's not a great card to have in your sideboard if the most important enchantment to destroy (or better yet, exile) is Omniscience. Omniscience typically demands instant speed interaction, because if it hits play (and stays in play)... You generally don't get your turn. The average combo player is just going to not put Omniscience in play if they have to pass, rather than just waiting and trying to do it all, all in one turn. That's kind of the point of having limitless mana!
And sorcery speed? Heck, they often get you even if you have instant speed interaction. Which is all to say that Exorcise was a four-of miss.
Even though I just got off an entire set season where I had multiple copies of Jace, the Perfected Mind in my main deck, I somehow forgot that it might be a card that a Mono-White Control deck might have to deal with.
But I did remember some good quick changes. Elspeth, Storm Slayer just seemed better to me than Overlord of Mistmoors; and as much as I didn't like it from Aetherdrift season, splitting Sunfall and Day of Judgment 2/2 was a necessary adoption. Sunfall is obviously better in the abstract in a deck with Caretaker's Talent, but the deck needed to get a little speed from somewhere. Mono-White with all its Carrot Cakes and Fish, lifelinkers, and wascally Wabbits can't play Temporary Lockdown. So, two copies of Day of Judgment came in.
None of that mattered.
My only reaction?
II. "I'm So Rich"
I had just forgotten what it felt like to not have to worry about colors, or mana balance. I can play four copies of Desolation Field and four copies of Fountainport? I even have space for a Mirrex? Wow this is different.
Have you ever cast a Lay Down Arms? Oh my word. I'd somehow forgotten what it was like to deploy this card for... Let me see here... 1 mana. It really makes that poor Heartfire Hero look pretty poor.
My first Event went kind of mid... Maybe two wins? But the deck overall felt good. Pilot error? New stuff I hadn't built a lot of reps around yet? I wanted to try again.
The best thing that I liked about the initial run was this:
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That was so much of a shock I didn't realize what had happened until the second Sunfall I cast. I get how many 6/6 Incubators now?
Remember what I said (above) about splitting Sunfall and Day of Judgment? That really sucks when you have Elspeth 5 in play. But I guess you don't need an overabundance of help most of the time when you have Elspeth 5 in play.
I felt super smart the first time I beat Omniscience combo. I'll conclude I'm super dumb in the third chapter of this article but bear with me a sec. The first build of the deck had 4 Get Lost and 3 Soul Partition. That is a decent amount of interaction with a "fast" Omniscience. Get Lost feels kind of atrocious in that situation (Get Lost is a measly "destroy" effect and the whole point of their deck is recouping specifically Omniscience from the graveyard), but at least it can stop them from winning the game immediately.
The opponent might have a second Omniscience in hand (boo), but if their first play is to just do an Invasion of Arcavios // Invocation of the Foundersto just get the combo rolling, you can respond by removing their Omniscience and they can be kold right then and there; at least for the turn. Not dead, necessarily, but they're going to need to get Omniscience back on the battlefield, and that can take jumping through a couple of hoops. Oftentimes if this is the play, they will just re-buy Abuelo's Awakening; in which case they're going to need something else to win (another Invasion, say).
Largely, this can mean they're just going to try the same turn all over again, maybe the very next turn. Which means unless they have specifically a second Omniscience, you can slow them down again with a single Get Lost (again). A Soul Partition is super cool in this spot because exiling Omniscience with even more cost makes it almost impossible for them to use that particular copy of Omniscience, buying you more time.
So, like I said... I was feeling super smart the first time I beat the Omniscience combo. The opponent waited a couple of turns before trying to go off again. This time their first spell off the Omniscience was in fact a second Omniscience from hand. My piece of interaction wasn't going to be able to do it. They played Invasion of Arcavios, all set to start going off with an Unnerving Grasp. But I had this beauty...
... Normally you go for Omniscience itself, but they now had two. I Exiled the Invasion, which messed up all their machinations.
The whole time I was clocking with some small number of tokens. The game had gone super long so I blew a Desolation Field to get yet another Plains in an attempt to Lay Down Arms one of the copies of Omniscience, which I figured wout be hilarious... But it cost how much now? Wow I did not have that many Plains in play. So, instead I poured all my mana into Caretaker's Talent and finished the job before they could actually do their worst.
Anyway, the initial Tarkir: Dragonstorm version of Mono-White was (maybe not surprisingly) always pretty good against all the Red Aggro type decks. Lay Down Arms takes the edge off of their showcase 1-drop, and is just so good on its mana rate. Beza is a great catch-up card. You don't necessarily have flexible answers for everything, but your draw engines are so good that you can just draw three garbage per turn in some matchups and still be able to overwhelm the opponent purely by volume.
The one thing I want to point out is how good the [0] on Elspeth, Storm Slayer is.
The archetype was always about width. You always made 1/1 and 2/1 creatures that were not imposing on their own, but could chump block forever and eventually out-last sweepers from both sides. 1/1s are not very big but when you are making two per turn and drawing three cards per turn cycle your opponent will often run out before you do.
What happens now is that with Elspeth, Storm Slayer you can immediately leverage the fact that you just have a ton of random 1/1s into a one-shot kill. (This doesn't even count making twice as many tokens, which you would do if you had Elspeth lying around for a few turns).
Does the kill occasionally take more than one turn cycle? Sometimes. Of course. But I've had numerous games where the opponent was a 20+ with much more impressive creatures... And I just used Carrot Cake over and over to eventually find my Elspeth 5... At which point I put them to -25 the very next attack phase.
All your guys gain flying.
That means most of their guys can't block.
The deck is designed to make games go long, so this will often be paired with jumping up to Level 3 on a Caretaker's Talent or putting +1/+1 counters on a key attacker with the other Elspeth.
This gives the deck an important dimension that wasn't present in earlier versions of Mono-White, or certainly those with ponderous threats like Overlord of the Mistmoors. Grinding value is all well and good, but at some point the opponent can just go over the top of your defenses if you twiddle your thumbs for too long. Mice can do it with enough double strike and trample (and prowess and valiant); reanimator decks, weird synergy decks, and of course Domain all have their versions. And, of course, there are Omniscience and Jace.
But the combination of one strike, immediate evasion, and essentially doubling (or even quadrupling) your power on the battlefield in a single turn allows you to plan and play for an alpha strike in a way that did exist in the past. For example, in a recent game against the artifact control deck, I just let them do whatever they were going to do with Simulacrum Synthesizer. Yes, they were making 2 13/13s per turn or whatever, but what else was I going to do with Day of Judgment and Sunfall but bide my time? I was making more 1/1s to block than they were making 12/12s and 13/13s to attack, and I just had these Incubators in reserve.
So, I was just occasionally chump blocking while drawing lots of extra cards with Enduring Innocence and digging with Carrot Cake. Eventually I found Elspeth and that was just that: I had them in one turn cycle, using tokens that had just been lying around. But from their side of the battlefield it probably looked like I was acting desperately the whole time. Yes, I just used a powerful point removal on a "free" token creature, but the alternative would have been discarding to hand size. So WHATEVER card advantage.
Cool features, right bro? That doesn't negate the fact that...
III. "I'm So Dumb"
How could I possibly have missed Ride's End?
Right?
Rest assured the card has been subbed into the main, which leaves us with this:
Revamped Mono-White Tokens | TDM Standard | Michael Flores
- Creatures (8)
- 4 Beza, the Bounding Spring
- 4 Enduring Innocence
- Planeswalkers (4)
- 2 Archangel Elspeth
- 2 Elspeth, Storm Slayer
- Instants (7)
- 1 Soul Partition
- 2 Get Lost
- 4 Ride's End
- Sorceries (8)
- 2 Day of Judgment
- 2 Sunfall
- 4 Lay Down Arms
- Enchantments (4)
- 4 Caretaker's Talent
- Artifacts (4)
- 4 Carrot Cake
- Lands (25)
- 14 Plains
- 1 Mirrex
- 2 Sunken Citadel
- 4 Desolation Field
- 4 Fountainport
- Sideboard (15)
- 3 Authority of the Consuls
- 2 Get Lost
- 1 Destroy Evil
- 4 Soul-Guide Lantern
- 4 The Stone Brain
- 1 Boon-Bringer Valkyrie
Getting the last two copies of Get Lost back in the 75 is important because they can kill enchantments (or 1/1 creature tokens) at instant speed (versus Exorcise).
With Soul-Guide Lantern I added an actual card to interact with Omniscience that I think is a little less of a vulnerable sit-there than Rest In Peace (also I like drawing a card occasionally).
The last slot belongs to Mazemind Tome. I do love Mazemind Tome... But it offers relatively little that this deck needs. The matchups where you need to slip a Mazemind Tome under, say, a Counterspell wall tend to be the same kinds of matchups where The Stone Brain is more valuable. You don't actually need to grind more card advantage against Omniscience or a Jace Control deck... If you stick any one of your engines you're going to bury them as long as you don't lose. The main problem is not losing. Hence The Stone Brain for Omniscience or Jace, the Perfected Mind.
Normally cards like The Stone Brain can weigh you down, but a deck that draws as many cards as Mono-White, with its double three-mana engines, can easily make up for the loss of card economy. Before you know it you'll be discarding to hand size and the opponent will be wondering what they're supposed to win with.
Mono-White: That's my first deck of this format.
Standard is awesome, and even though I did in fact start out "so dumb" this deck has been performing spectacularly for me. Maybe a month from now I'll have been "so dumb" for not playing even more Elspeth.
LOVE
MIKE
