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Today I'd like to talk about my current favorite deck to play in Standard.
To be transparent I've been playing mostly Best-of-One Standard with this deck (meaning less Izzet Cauldron competition specifically), and no one bringing in the kitchen sink to blow up all my stuff in games two and three.
But the deck has performed swimmingly for me so I decided to do a SWOT overview of it. Briefly, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This talks about the positive and negative traits of the deck; both internally (Strengths and Weaknesses) and externally (Opportunities and Threats).
Credit where credit is due, "my" version is quite close to a deck I saw LegenVD play on YouTube. What caught my eye is the relatively newfound ability of the deck to turn one of its three-mana permanents into The Fire Crystal and kill the opponent (often from 20+ life) in a single turn. Which makes it kind of ironic that I removed some of the ability to actually cast The Fire Crystal over my tweaking and tuning process.
The deck, obviously at this point, is Azorius artifacts:
Azorius Artifacts | EOE Standard | Michael Flores
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Let's get to the SWOT!
Strengths
While the deck has essentially no one-mana plays, it also gets to soften the negative impact of its many lands that enter the battlefield tapped. That is, a Boros Control deck might have to choose between Elegant Parlor and leaving mana open for Torch the Tower on the first turn... Azorius having no one-mana plays means all its Meticulous Archives and Restless Anchorages don't impact such a decision at all.
This might seem like a small Strength (almost damning with faint praise)... But the deck is actually outstanding on curve starting on turn two.
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Here, what's better than just having lots of cards that cost two mana is that these ones specifically help the Azorius Artifacts deck to draw more lands. While the deck tops up at 3-4 mana, its operational needs in the mid-game are surprisingly greedy due to Repurposing Bay and a desire to two-spell with casting costs that other decks might find clunky, so it actually wants at least five lands in play most games.
The Azorius deck's second greatest Strength (and primary way to win) is Simulacrum Synthesizer... which is very nearly a self-contained source of card advantage. It's not exactly a self-contained source of card advantage, but the density of artifacts in this deck make it so that you can trigger the Synthesizer almost "for free" every turn, just by playing whatever you were going to play / whatever you drew anyway.
The deck's greatest Strength, though, is its synergies... And there are many.
The primary one is just that so many of its cards are artifacts. One of the small tuning changes I made to my version is the inclusion of Restless Anchorage, which produces artifacts in the form of Map tokens. While you can't do much with them (because there are no one mana artifacts to dig up with Repurposing Bay), they still help to make Synthesizer Construct tokens bigger and give you tonnage for Braided Net // Braided Quipu.
That so many cards are artifacts obviously lets you chain with Repurposing Bay with a high level of consistency. Those Clay-Fired Bricks and Cryogen Relics we mentioned a moment ago? They turn into Synthesizers and Pinnacle Starcages seamlessly.
And even when you hit your Pinnacle Starcage? You often get to draw a card with Cryogen Relic instead of just losing it! How great is that for a synergy?
Finally, Azoirus Artifacts gets to play with United Battlefront. This is a card that has been tested in a variety of permanents-heavy strategies; but I think it's best in Azorius because of how open-ended it is. First of all, you almost always hit two cards due to the construction of the deck. The only cards you can't hit are one The Fire Crystal and other copies of United Battlefront. But more than that, you can either hit a Simulacrum Synthesizer and something to trigger it, a Repurposing Bay that is going to keep the conversation going by itself... Or Pinnacle Starcage.
Pinnacle Starcage is the best card in Edge of Eternities; "real" Control decks WISH they could play this! But it's almost exclusively an Azorius Artifacts card right now because Ultima has become a Non-Negotiable elsewhere. I've said it before but it bears repeating: There ain't nothing like being able to Collected Company into your Wrath of God. BTW you're getting something else along the way.
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Weaknesses
The success of a beatdown deck in contemporary Magic is currently quite correlated to the quality of its one-mana plays. To the point that I think we collectively tend to bristle whenever we watch a beatdown deck that - gasp - didn't make a one-mana play.
As we said in the previous section... Azorius Artifacts (at least as I've LegenVD has constructed it) doesn't have any one mana plays, so can sometimes fall behind immediately, and especially when going second. This creates a strange situation where it can sometimes be raced by Red (usually Red-White) beatdown decks with a ton of explosive buffs like Wild Ride and Boros Charm... But almost never lose to decks like Mono-White Lifegain because (1-drops or no) Pinnacle Starcage is so good against them.
The most annoying Weakness - the most annoying thing this deck does to itself - is opening hands like this:
What the heck are you supposed to do with this? It's not that you can't ever cast The Fire Crystal; but with two copies of Starting Town in my build (though I've seen Sacred Foundry in some other players' versions), you're not casting it with a high level of regularity.
I think I intended to cast The Fire Crystal one time ever, against an Azorius Control deck that had already slammed me with Ultima, twice. They were probably unsure why they were still alive. I worked them over and over with Braided Quipu, but was apprehensive about putting another Simulacrum Synthesizer in play after the two big sweepers. Anyway, I was just digging to my second Starting Town with Quipu and Fomori Vault, but ended up winning with my incidental stuff - a Spring-Loaded Sawblades that had eaten one of their Restless Anchorages - and a flipped Clay-Fired Bricks that I had copied with my White Station. I have to say the end game was kind of a riot.
... Not that I ever got to cast my The Fire Crystal.
That that card is the difference that makes the difference for this archetype AND you can't cast it is kind of embarrassing.
What else is embarrassing is how bad I actually am at playing this deck. I originally wanted to title this article "I'm not even good at this deck" [but I keep winning anyway] but I ultimately figured that wouldn't be that helpful to you. I mean look at this...
I cannot tell you the number of times I've screwed this up. MTGA has nefarious gremlins that (I think?) set you up so that your Starcage goes on the stack first, meaning that your Synthesizer Construct will resolve first (and then get eaten up by your Starcage). You have to order it properly yourself. And like I said, I still screw this up sometimes.
How about this?
If you don't quite get it, this is a Construct ready to attack next to an Adagia, Windswept Bastion... That has never been Stationed. This deck plays two Stations. Not that you'd ever know it because I am constantly forgetting to put any counters on mine. BTW if you get Uthros, Titanic Godcore to 12+ that's basically a card they banned in Extended; and while Adagia is less explosive, it can really help you out in long and grindy games where the opponent might have had Ultima. Because if they didn't have Ultima I don't know how you got to that end game as you probably would have run them over, otherwise.
Opportunities
What may be obvious is that Simulacrum Synthesizer is an artifact. So is every other spell in the deck besides United Battlefront. You might be wondering why this observation is in the Opportunities section and not the Strengths one... It's because I'm not highlighting the synergies here but rather the fact that most opponents are probably not good at killing artifacts.
So, unless they have specialty cards like Ultima or Abrade (the latter of which has become increasingly popular because of Agatha's Soul Cauldron), if you play something, it usually isn't going anywhere. You're more likely to lose your Simulacrum Synthesizer to an opposing Perilous Snare than anything else in Standard play right now; which often leads to weird end games where the last Perilous Snare creates a chain reaction of disappearing Perilous Snares that transform the look of a battlefield seven ways.
I can say that this is a very good (if not very fast) and unapproachably synergistic deck that has performed consistently for me 100 different ways, but the most meaningful (and funniest) is that Mono-White Lifegain is actually one of the best performing decks on MTGA right now (in particular Best-of-One) and Azorius Artifacts annihilates that deck. It's not just that they have almost all creatures that get trapped under Pinnacle Starcage - no matter how big Ajani's Pridemate gets - but that they have no direct damage or haste; so in the late game, if you've stuck around at one life, you're probably not going to lose that last life point.. Even if you have to fight past fifty on the other side due to all your opponent's synergies.
Which is just to say that this deck lines up well in the metagame.
Threats
This is the big - and I mean BIG - one.
If your opponent is a White control deck of any stripe (other than the mirror) you kind of have to expect that they're going to hit you with at least one of these.
That's going to leave a mark.
Unless they're specifically a Blue-White (or multicolored Blue-White) version, you can usually recover. A single United Battlefront might do it, actually... But Blue-White can Counterspell to keep in the game and then out-pace you with Stock Up and Consult the Star Charts.
... But it was Ultima that put you there.
Two copies of Ultima are very hard to beat. Also water is wet and the sky is Blue.
Besides Ultima, the presence of key artifacts in the format (in particular Agatha's Soul Cauldron in the most popular deck, headlined by Vivi Ornitier) mean that more people are playing with artifact destruction cards, which is obviously bad for this deck. They don't have to blow up "everything" if they can, say, get all their stuff back from under a Pinnacle Starcage for just one turn, and then alpha strike you.
Besides that, I don't know that there are that many "Threats" to this deck in the format at all. Other than the natural predators to combo-synergy decks (just real card advantage and Counterspells from truer Control decks). Azorius Artifacts is arguably the most synergistic deck in the format, and has one of the highest ceilings despite keeping its curve manageable. If someone wants to beat you, they usually have to do it by being faster; but in a sense that's a "Threat" every deck has to deal with, isn't it?
LOVE
MIKE
