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Main » Articles » The Best Grinding Deck in Standard

The Best Grinding Deck in Standard

Michael Flores
Posted on April 18, 2023
 Reddit

Interlude: Saturday Evening

I'm moping. Alone. Not like alone in a corner, not weeping or anything. Just moping; but kind of in an open table spot where someone can come up to me and strike up a conversation.

On that front, San Diego was anything but a miss. A flattering number of folks did in fact come up to me and tell me how much they liked my work; thanked me for the decades that I'd put in writing; or even commented about my weight. I was expecting a lot of old hands from The Dojo era (and there were one or two greybeards, one of whom dealt me my second loss actually). But most people were like "I really liked The Three Gears." So that was cool! Thanks CoolStuffInc!

The highlight of my weekend, actually, was Sunday morning. I opened the consolation 8-slot $10k with a loss, but made a new friend. KJ had Premodern decks with him and asked if I wanted to console myself between rounds with Magic at its best. We even managed to rope in Brad Nelson (now hooked). This was also the highlight of Brad's far more successful weekend.

Anyway... Saturday evening.

I'm moping. Alone. Sam Black comes up and asks how I did.

"5-4, you know, the worst record." (6-3 being the cutoff) "How about you, Sam?"

The best deck designer in the world tells me that he was long dead but eager to play in the $10k the next day. Would he be seeing me?

"I'm kind of Magicked out," I lied.

He knew I lied.

"I mean, I didn't like how I lost today."

"Were your opponents better?" No.

"Were their decks better?" God no.

"Didn't you know what you were signing up for?" How cosmic was this conversation going to get?

Around midnight I grab one of the last open slots for the $10k.

Interlude: Sunday Morning

At some point after my round one loss I find Sam and tell him that at least this time I could have controlled my destiny a little bit. I had gotten Game 1 over Esper Legends - probably the deck I tested most against running up to the Regional Championship - but might have made an error to drop it in three.

"It was probably an error," I muse. "Because if I hadn't done it, I probably would have won."

My opponent had passed with only a Seachrome Coast up. His Raffine, Scheming Seer was still only ¼, and tapped; but he had a Ludevic, Necrogenius back to defend.

I looked at my Furnace Punisher in play; and looked at the backup Furnace Punisher in my hand. "Worst case, I'll just play this other Furnace Punisher," I thought, sending the original into The Red Zone and not really considering what the worst case might be. I'm not even sure that was the mistake. Ludevic can't beat Furnace Punisher in a fight; and it has Menace anyway!

My mistake was not thinking more deeply about what my opponent could have had. Most of you - especially the Esper Legends sharks out there - probably already know what happened. He channeled Eiganjo, Seat of Empire to end the life of my hard-working Gnarled Mass upgrade. I didn't have to send Furnace Punisher to its doom! It's not that... It's that I didn't even think about it. I just thought "menace" and attacked.

Anyway, the game went long and if I had had two Furnace Punishers from turn four it wouldn't have. Justice?

A few rounds go by and I'm paired against... You've probably guessed it: Sam Black himself.

I know Sam is playing a White control deck splashing for Bitter Reunion. When I first heard about it from across the room, I assumed he had an Atraxa reanimator sub-theme. But no. Just Bitter Reunion because... Reasons?

I won the roll and narrowly defeated the best deck designer in the world in Game 1.

Sam's second land was Mirrex. He used this for an untapped, if short-term, Red on turn two to deploy, you guessed it, his Bitter Reunion. That narrow turn with only one Plains in play gave my Furnace Punisher two points that were essential to closing before Sam could stabilize.

"You won because you went first," he pointed out. Well, somebody has to go first.

Then Sam showed me just how good Bitter Reunion was in his deck in Game 2. I had a commanding position. Sam knew my sideboard strategy but I don't think that should have affected how I should approach the matchup. I had Chandra and Koth online and was feeling pretty dominating as they approached their Ultimate Limit Breaks.

On Sam's turn he flipped a Fable of the Mirror-Breaker // Reflection of Kiki-Jiki and dropped a Serra Paragon from his hand. He then played Bitter Reunion from his graveyard, gained extra life in sacrificing it, awarded the Paragon haste, turned Reflection of Kiki-Jiki on, and battled both my Planeswalkers.

I had gone from a commanding position to on the back foot in a single stroke of 1r + 1... again, from the graveyard.

Over the course of the match Sam deployed many an Ambitious Farmhand // Seasoned Cathar. After beating me in three (Game 3 was sadly not close at all; as my numerous Fables allowed me to basically discard land for... More land), Sam thanked me for the match.

"It's all part of my master plan," he said. "I guilted you last night and convinced you to play... So, I could farm you."

Stupid Ambitious Farmhand.

The Best Grinding Deck in Standard

I was super impressed by Sam's deck and was eager to test it as soon as I got home from San Diego. I found a video he had posted, copied the deck list, and started to test it furiously. "Furiously" might be a bit of an overstatement... Sam's is the best grinding deck in Standard, but it's also glacially slow.

Sam Boros Control v 1.0 | ONE Standard | Sam Black

Card Display

If you understand what makes Sam in particular such a great deck designer - even in eras when he's not the singular best - this deck is pure Sam Black. Sam's signature is discovering cards that are not actually worse than the cards other people play: They're of similar power level, but are just less popular. The best example is probably when he advocated an essentially gw Bant list splashing for one-mana permission; when a more common gw-centered strategy might be Abzan for Siege Rhino. Sam's Wingmate Rocs carried multiple teammates to top Standard records; not because the cards were better or worse, but because even elite players didn't have nearly the experience to predict or play against them, so they got just a little extra value, over and over. His workout on my Planeswalkers via Bitter Reuinion re-buy was simply not something I had planned for from my seemingly dominant position.

Slow or no, I loved it and even rebooted my YouTube channel! I made a video with Sam's rw and would love if you gave it a look (a look but also a like and subscribe, thanks):

No, really. Please look and let me know how I can improve. I basically invented doing YouTube for Magic before there was even such a thing as Twitch, but realize I've got a lot of room for improvement.

Anyway, over the course of testing two things became apparent that I've already said in this article:

  1. Sam's rw is the best grinding deck in Standard, and

  2. Sam is Magic's best deck designer right now

The comeback capability of this deck cannot be exaggerated. I had a looooong game against Esper where the opponent activated Gix's second ability, twice. I have played I don't know how many hundreds of games of Standard and did not realize Gix had a second ability.

Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor

They flipped over Reckoner Bankbuster and even The Wandering Emperor but I was able to grind them out anyway! Sam's deck can get you life on demand from numerous sources, and it has countless ways to generate card advantage.

This version isn't perfect, but it's nevertheless a better Serra Paragon deck than any of the usual Mono-White. Buying back Bitter Reunion is one thing, but the fact that the deck has the Red splash at all is what makes it super special.

Cabaretti Courtyard

Cabaretti Courtyard is just a Plains that comes into play tapped most of the time; but in the mid-game (say on turn five, if you've tapped out for Serra Paragon but haven't played your land for the turn yet) it gains three life. That's awesome! It's so low opportunity cost and so powerful. Cabaretti Courtyard itself gains one life and Serra Paragon's ability gives it two more points of oomph where I think the intent was to nerf powerful re-buys.

The Red splash in this deck is for Bitter Reunion, sure; but also for Fable of the Mirror-Breaker // Reflection of Kiki-Jiki.

Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is widely considered the best card in Standard. It's mostly-consensus closest competitor is Wedding Announcement // Wedding Festivity. They both grind out value and make multiple creatures (and maybe but not always) draw extra cards. You can see in the first version that Sam has some tension between the two three-mana enchantments.

Fable itself is worth dwelling on for a moment. My strategy sliding from Red Aggro to more of a controlling Planeswalker Red Deck after Game 1 was, in part, justified by beating Mono-White over and over after sideboarding. I think they have a pretty good but not locked down Game 1, but that Fable of the Mirror-Breaker tilts the matchup dramatically in favor of Mono-Red for Two and Three.

All I wanted to do was draw into mana to play Koth the next turn (also Fable can draw you into Koth), and that if my Mono-White opponents were going to exchange their high-end stuff for Knockout Blow and Sunset Revelry that would be great. Their decks would be out of position and I'd be better at their game than they were.

Sam had somehow anticipated everything that made my deck - my sideboard, more - so good and incorporated it into a deck that could make even better use of the strategy. If you discard to Fable of the Mirror-Breaker's Chapter Two, in order to draw into Serra Paragon... I think you can see what's going on here. It's not that that's better than Koth; it's that you're starting at a better baseline and denying an opponent the ability to exploit an asymmetry. Ultimately, rw is the best grinding deck in Standard in part because it is such a good Serra Paragon deck.

Think about that in relation to Mono-White. You have the same powerful four-mana draw engine / threat two-in one. Only one deck has continuous re-buy possibility on land via Cabaretti Courtyard, has filled the graveyard with spells like Reckoner Bankbuster and Wedding Announcement // Wedding Festivity in anticipation for future re-buys; and can potentially double up Paragons with Reflection of Kiki-Jiki so it can play free lands and cast extra spells in the same turn with a single Angel. The other deck has... Basic Plains.

The down shot is that it is slooooow.

To put it another way: Black wasn't dead early on day one because he lost.

Speeding Up Sam

After finishing highly in the first two Events I played (I think I nabbed a Play-In Point in one of them) I texted Sam to tell him how much I liked his deck... But it seemed different from the one he had played against me on Sunday.

He sent me more-or-less the below:

Sam Boros v. 2.1 | ONE Standard | Sam Black

Card Display

The Mirrex that helped me win Game 1 was added in order to give the deck more untapped mana on turn two. It certainly does a good job of that.

Sam went with lots of copies of Archangel of Wrath for the same reason I kept trying to cut Thundering Raiju from my Red Deck for Koth, Fire of Resistance: it just kept coming in. The Mirrex, in addition to Treasures from Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and Reckoner Bankbuster, are the only ways you can double kick the Archangel. Just know that for when you try this deck.

The Archangels are more synergistic with Reflection of Kiki-Jiki, faster on defense, and of course have lifelink. I like how Sam leaned into this strategy's real center of excellence with four copies of Serra Paragon. He just went up to the fourth Wedding Announcement in part because it's a re-buy-eligible card anyway.

Having played both versions, I do have to say I like the original shell better. I won a lot of games by stabilizing over the course of multiple turns via The Eternal Wanderer (in particular her third ability). That said, Version 2.1 is a great example of a deck designer willing to kill his darlings. Example: There are zero - zero, zilch, nada - copies of The Wandering Emperor in the latter seventy-five. That is a three-of if not four-of Staple in almost every White Control deck played in Standard!

Is it right?

Does Archangel of Wrath - especially a measly four-mana Archangel of Wrath - really measure up? I have found myself thinking often about how many free wins are gotten by an opponent just not attacking into four open mana, for a Planeswalker who will never Wander in, to somehow intercept.

This is a great deck (pair of decks?) and I wanted to do whatever I could to help make sure Sam got wider recognition for how innovatively he attacked the metagame, slowly or not.

Reminder: Please go watch my video!

LOVE

MIKE

TAGS articles, standard, constructed, analysis, decklist, mike flores, sam black, boros, michael flores, red-white, one standard, mom standard, 04182023, bitter reunion, serra paragon

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