A Look into the New Extended

For those of you who weren't aware, today the Banned/Restricted list was updated, with some rather interesting changes. Although I don't play legacy, there was a potentially major change there with the banning of mystical tutor, severely hurting the power of storm combo and reanimator.

However, by far the most shocking change involved extended, which as of July 1st will be completely redone. Now only the 4 most recent blocks will be legal, instead of 7, meaning that PT Amsterdam will be Time Spiral forward. In addition, Hypergenesis and Sword of the Meek are the 2 cards banned in this new format.

So at first glance, this format appears to be more of a "super standard", where the standard decks from 1-2 years ago can get a couple new cards and compete with the standard decks of today. Although extended is not the current PTQ format, and most of us aren't going to be playing in the PT, I thought I'd take the time to overview what the format might look like initially.
Since Time Spiral block will rotate out by the time the PTQ season comes around, things will change significantly, but Amsterdam is the first major event that will use this format, and here's what I'd predict will be the major players there.


To begin, lets look at some of the dominent standard decks in the past:

1. Faeries
No doubt about it, this is the elephant in the room. Not only did fae dominate standard all the way until Lorwyn rotated out, but now they get all the past tools once again, notably ancestral vision and damnation.
Fallout and Stag may be around as hate cards, but damnation provides the answer to stag that didn't exist last season, and fallout was possible to remove with thoughtseize/v cliques. Make no mistake, in this new format you'd better be playing bitterblossoms or have a very good plan to beat them.

2. 5cc
The other powerhouse from lorwyn block, having the ability to play whatever you want with minimal mana issues is quite obviously a powerful strategy. With reflecting pools and vivids combining with the various dual lands from other sets, 5cc will exist as a strategy in this new format. With twice as many cards in the format compared to standard, 5cc has an expanded collection of powerful spells it can be playing, potentially making for a more threatening deck than ever.

3. Lark (combo or no)
While lark was often overshadowed in standard due to its poor matchup with faeries, the powerful, unanswerable card advantage the deck could achieve allowed it to demolish pretty much every non-bitterblossom deck. The success of this one will obviously depend on how popular fae is, but I can see it being a strong choice for PTQ's depending on how things shift.

4. Jund/Bloodbraid Aggro
Jund may be the form this deck took after lorwyn rotated, but red and green are the only colors required to play the elf. This appears to be the main threat to faerie domination, since bloodbraid elves cascading into fallouts, great sable stags, and all of the other aggresive creatures in the format (goyf is still a good one) seems quite good. Vengevine also seems like a pretty insane man in a deck like this.
Magus of the Moon is also an insane threat vs. the mana greedy decks, and a bloodbraid elf deck is best positioned to take advantage of it. It's possible that something like boom/bust could make an appearance, since the ability to cascade into that card is quite strong.

5. Dragonstorm
A UR build, expanding on the deck that won worlds in 2006, appears to be the most difficult to hate combo deck in this new format. While it is slower than the combo decks in the old extended, and is also weak to faeries, this deck could surprise a lot of people and be better than you think.


In addition, some of the decks from the previous extended can still exist in a powerful enough form to compete.

6. Living End
The banning of hypergenesis makes complete sense to me, as with the addition of Rise, it should be impossible to resolve hypergen in this new format and lose.
Living End is still legal, however, and the strategy that was good enough for last season's extended would seem good enough here. The only issue is that this deck would appear to be a strong underdog to faeries, but someone can figure out a way to fix that.

7. Scapeshift
While the loss of rav duals probably makes it impossible for a pure scapeshift combo deck to exist, the card itself still provides a powerful 1 card combo, and may find its way into a rg aggro deck, or possibly a landfall-based aggro deck.

In addition to these, I wouldn't be surprised if a mono-red deck is strong enough to compete, since 4 blocks worth of burn is enough to deal 20. A Boros-style landfall deck might also be fast enough to compete, but it seems much more vulnerable.


Lastly, there exist a fair number of powerful engines that have been critical in past standard decks, but were never really good enough to dominate. Perhaps with the addition of some card from a different block, they can finally be good enough to topple the "best" decks:
1. Mystical Teachings
The card fueled one of the best decks in Time Spiral block, but after lorwyn came out it basically vanished. Faeries was the only viable draw-go strategy, but with the ability to play 5 colors much easier, and 4 years of powerful instants, this card might see play
2. Windbrisk Heights
Attacking with 3 guys=free spell. Deal. While I don't believe a white weenie style deck is powerful enough for extended, heights is a good enough card that it might pop up in RW or something else.
3. Heritage Druid+Nettle Sentinel
Losing glimpse of nature removes the draw engine to let the elves deck go "infinite", but this combination of elves can generate very large amounts of mana very quickly, and Regal Force still exists as a powerful draw spell. There certainly exist powerful ways to use a lot of mana, but we'll have to see whether this is good enough as a full deck without a good draw engine.
4. Punishing Fire+Grove of the Burnwillows
This combo is another difficult to answer way to combat faeries, as well as both weenie decks and slow control decks
5. Jace the Mind Sculptor
Card's good



So there you have it, this new format appears to be very interesting, and it certainly will make the Pro Tour more interesting than it would have been otherwise. The removal of the power of Fetches+Rav Duals opens up the possibility of many interesting strategies, and plenty of crazy decks will probably pop up in the first few months.


Though I'm sure Kurtis will still be playing Ranger of Eos and Fetid Heath