I started off playing Red Decks. All the Red Decks. This article was originally going to be a "report" of which Red Deck was generating the best return on MTGA. I started out with the Opera Love Song / Cori-Steel Cutter version. Peanut butter and chocolate, right? I love an exploding car.

Sell-Sword Red | FIN Standard | Hamuda, 9th Place MTGO Standard Challenge 6/15/2025

• Creatures (19)
• 2 Cacophony Scamp
• 3 Callous Sell-Sword
• 3 Emberheart Challenger
• 3 Slickshot Show-Off
• 4 Heartfire Hero
• 4 Monastery Swiftspear

• Instants (16)
• 4 Burst Lightning
• 4 Monstrous Rage
• 4 Opera Love Song
• 4 Turn Inside Out

• Artifacts (4)
• 4 Cori-Steel Cutter

• Lands (21)
• 12 Mountain
• 4 Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1 Rockface Village
• 4 Sulfurous Springs

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Dark Confidant
• 3 Duress
• 2 Furnace Reins
• 2 Ghost Vacuum
• 2 Lithomantic Barrage
• 2 Obliterating Bolt
• 2 Torch the Tower

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... But something felt missing. Probably the fourth Emberheart Challenger.

I switched to the 4x Opera Love Song / no Cori-Steel Cutter version.

Mono-Red | FIN Standard | sandoiche, 2nd Place MTGO Standard Challenge 6/15/2025

• Creatures (23)
• 3 Magebane Lizard
• 4 Emberheart Challenger
• 4 Heartfire Hero
• 4 Hired Claw
• 4 Manifold Mouse
• 4 Screaming Nemesis

• Instants (15)
• 3 Witchstalker Frenzy
• 4 Burst Lightning
• 4 Monstrous Rage
• 4 Opera Love Song

• Lands (22)
• 16 Mountain
• 2 Soulstone Sanctuary
• 4 Rockface Village

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Case of the Crimson Pulse
• 2 Ghost Vacuum
• 2 Lithomantic Barrage
• 1 Magebane Lizard
• 2 Scorching Shot
• 4 Sunspine Lynx
• 1 Torch the Tower
• 1 Witchstalker Frenzy

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The funnest thing about any of these decks is using the +2/+0 side of Opera Love Song and targeting Emberheart Challenger. It's almost like you used the other side of Opera Love Song.

Something was still missing.

Dissatisfying.

Really, it was just that I was getting matched against all Mice decks. Some of them were mirrors and quasi-mirrors; but the bigger problem was that (I guess in response to the lopsided Pro Tour results) I kept getting paired against Sheltered by Ghosts Boros decks. So more-or-less mirrors but they had Sheltered by Ghosts. What is this? Six months ago? Dissatisfying.

I think I came to realize what wasn't registering for me. Maybe this Tweet from my friend Binary Soloist will help you get it:

It's becoming increasingly clear that you can play Arena (choose decks that don't lose to wide meta of bad decks, farm 60-70% winrate) or you can play Magic (maximize equity vs competitive meta, accept high baseline loss rate). Sadly, the Arena economy actively discourages Magic.

— BinarySoloistMTG (@BinarySoloMTG) June 20, 2025

At this point in my life I play kind of a lot of Magic. But I play at least two different kinds of Magic.

In paper I play organized Premodern at least once a week. I'm playing tonight in fact! It's largely a social thing for me. I get to hang out with people I like a lot, and we're all doing something we like a lot, all together. "Something we like a lot" may be an understatement. I live five minutes walk from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn; but I once skipped a local Cavs/Nets game to play in a Premodern meetup.

From a play perspective, I want to try all the different decks. I have a deep collection covering the Premodern era, including many of the most elaborately weird or powerful decks. In the last few weeks I've played Burn twice, Stasis twice, Goblins, TerraGeddon, and of course the boogeyman 12/12. On the one hand I feel like I can 3-0 with anything, and proving that is part of the experience. On the other, maximizing my wins isn't an overriding motivation toward Premodern; I literally want to have the disparate experiences of leading off on Jackal Pup versus putting someone in the Stasis lock versus making hundreds of mana on turn three with Priest of Titania. All while hanging out with my actual friends.

By stark contrast, I play Standard almost every day on MTGA. Dozens of games some days. But my deck selection is basically the opposite. I think Binary Soloist got it right. There's Magic and there's Arena. In Arena I just try to figure out a deck that I can use to farm Standard. Prior to Final Fantasy, that was Control for me. I was able to easily win Event after Event with it.

In Arena I can turn a slight profit in gems playing in Events, but the ancillary payoffs include "free" packs and Play-In Points. The gems payout keeps the economic engine of my Arena account going; the packs are enough to give me a spread of Wildcards that allows me to try maybe not every deck, but sufficient decks to continue to play profitably. But the Play-in Points are the secret profit center. The last Play-In weekend I failed to get a Pro Tour invite, but walked away with tens of thousands of gems... More than enough to keep my Arena habit going for the foreseeable.

Being a historical ace at Red mirrors, that's where I started in the new metagame - one that purports to be mostly Izzet Cutter with a little bit of Omniscience but a Pro Tour won by the over performing Mono-Red... I haven't found my MTGA edge for the format yet. As Binary Soloist (a former Mythic #1 player) told me, "At a 55% win rate you'll just lose all your gems."

I'll occasionally Tweet how much I like Standard. How it's a great format. I think that to me that correlates very closely with my ability to find a deck (or as with the last format two or three decks) that produce very predictable results and a de facto "infinite" rate of return in Events. I realize now that this is probably quite different from how the average reader evaluates the health or fun of a format.

Back to the original concept behind this article: I don't know if I won any Events with any of the Red Decks. Maybe one. If I turned a profit it wasn't substantial.

Why not try something different?

This is what I've mostly been playing the last few days:

Mono-White | FIN Standard | Michael Flores

• Creatures (5)
• 2 Enduring Innocence
• 3 Beza, the Bounding Spring

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 2 Archangel Elspeth
• 2 Elspeth, Storm Slayer

• Instants (7)
• 3 Ride's End
• 4 Get Lost

• Sorceries (7)
• 3 Ultima
• 4 Lay Down Arms

• Enchantments (8)
• 4 Caretaker's Talent
• 4 Temporary Lockdown

• Artifacts (4)
• 4 Carrot Cake

• Lands (25)
• 14 Plains
• 1 Mirrex
• 2 Sunken Citadel
• 4 Demoltion Field
• 4 Fountainport

• Sideboard (15)
• 4 Soul-Guide Lantern
• 4 The Stone Brain
• 4 Authority of the Consuls
• 1 Devout Decree
• 1 Beza, the Bounding Spring
• 1 Boon-Bringer Valkyrie

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I'll cut to the chase. My overall win rate with Mono-White is greater than my win rate with Mono-Red was. I think I won one Event so far. So not quite the returns to call mom yet; but also still better than Mono-Red. To be clear, I think I'd have been doing better with Mono-Red; except I'd get paired with two or more Sheltered by Ghosts decks every Event. Stupid metagamers! Who even does that? Mono-White can mostly ignore Sheltered by Ghosts rather than being blown out by it.

The main inducement to Mono-White versus remains Lay Down Arms (if you really wanted to play Caretaker's Talent in , you could). This card is a mana efficient answer to Shrieking Nemesis and Vivi Ornitier; who both notably survive Temporary Lockdown. Your mileage against Vivi is going to vary somewhat because letting him sit around for any length of time might kill you; and Wild Ride can create an immediate explosive turn where Vivi not only bonks you for 6+ the turn he enters, but casts Stock Up for "free". Stock Up isn't more powerful than Caretaker's Talent (I recently beat all four Stock Ups, but I certainly complained the whole match); but it's quite a bit faster.

If you contrast this version with the one I posted at the beginning of last season, I mostly added four Temporary Lockdown, shaving a little Enduring Innocence; and subbing in Ultima. These are all nods to an Izzet Cutter deck that hadn't yet emerged yet. Even with all these concessions to Cori-Steel Cutter, you have to be wary. First of all, you can blow up your own Carrot Cake inadvertently, and absolutely do kill your own tokens all the damn time. More than that, a well-placed This Town Ain't Big Enough or Into the Flood Maw can create a very unfriendly chain of events that puts the opponent right back in it, even when you thought you were "ahead" on the battlefield.

Funny thing about Into the Flood Maw... In order to get rid of your Temporary Lockdown (even temporarily), they have to Gift you a Fish. If you have Enduring Innocence or Caretaker's Talent, this will usually also entail giving you one or more cards as a result. I've been down to zero cards, gritting my teeth, terrified of the Into the Flood Maw sequence... And then paid immediately with interaction that kept me alive and right back into a spot where I could re-play the Temporary Lockdown. A little worse for it life total wise, but in the immortal words of Monty Python, "not dead yet."

The one card you really have to get used to is Ultima.

This card is great because it gives you a little oomph against Heartfire Hero and a lot of security against Cori-Steel Cutter while leaving your Planeswalkers and enchantment engine intact. "On paper" that's great; but it does take some getting used to.

For example, you can't sweep the board and then activate your Planeswalker. You kind of have to make tokens first (sometimes just for one loyalty counter and nothing else) knowing they are going to die to the Ultima. So even though Ultima is pretty gas at what you strategically want it for, it can be very limiting tactically. This is actually kind of confusing the first few times you play it on MTGA. The first time I cast it, planning to play a post-sweep Carrot Cake, I found myself wondering if I had time traveled to MTGO and hit F6 or something.

The one thing that bears mentioning if you're trying to angle the metagame with Mono-White is that the second most popular deck of the Pro Tour wasn't even the winning Mono-Red strategy, it was Azorius Omniscience.

This is a very, very bad matchup. Game 1 is maybe the most lopsided in the entire format; it's even worse than Mono-Red against some kind of Boros quasi-mirror that has Sheltered by Ghosts. I'd say Game 1 is right around 0%; but I actually won the first one I played against Omniscience, so it's not actually 0. (I did then proceed to lose the next two Game 1s, both of which cost me Play-In Points as they were in the final round(s) of Events).

Here's how I did it:

First, my opponent literally didn't see Omniscience in the first half of their deck. That was the main reason I could win. You can interact with Get Lost but this doesn't save you from a second Omniscience, second Abuelo's Awakening, or just a permission spell.

Second, I tried to play as quickly as I could. I just slammed +1/+1 counters and tried to be as precise as possible against their life total. Any topdeck could be an Omniscience, I theorized; so, I needed to get out from under a topdeck.

It wasn't more ingenious than that. I got lucky and I played to minimize their ability to get lucky.

You can't even take out enough cards to get all the bad ones out (I can't really say they're all "dead" cards because most versions of Omniscience combo at this point win with a repetition of Marang River Regents rather than a Jeskai Revelation). You could theoretically side 14/15 against Omniscience but the last six would all be kind of bad. Anyway, one Soul-Guide Lantern will buy you a nice breather (even if it doesn't win the game) but one The Stone Brain will make them really have to work for it. It won't literally win the game, but you'll be in a spot where your remaining creature kill + draw engine will be able to out-last a finite number of Marang River Regents that are actually going to have to attack you. I'm currently toying with the idea of naming Marang River Regent first, but haven't had the stones to Stone Brain that way yet.

So, that's where I am right now in the new Standard. Almost hopeless against the second most popular deck; stressed out but favorable against the Monstrous Rage twins... Completely humiliating most of the random things people try thanks to the sheer volume of cards drawn; or...

Slaying Storms So You Don't Have To.

LOVE

MIKE