Pre-States Standard

With school and quiz bowl starting up, I've been a little busy lately, but I'm back to offer my views on standard going into states and some strategies that I think might (not) be viable.



The most resounding conclusion that I'm come to from testing so far is that this standard format is perhaps the most uninteractive type 2 format that is existed since I've been playing. The reason for this is quite simple- there is a large gap in power levels between the better cards in decks and the worse cards in decks. Gone are the days when just throwing a bunch of green and/or black and/or white cards into a deck and calling it "the rock" is enough to get you by. You need to be doing something inherently powerful, and if you want to win, you have to hope that you can execute your broken combo before your opponent can do his (or hers, I suppose). In addition, the counters in the format are very tempo oriented and act more like time walks than actual counterspells- the only deck that is interactive is U/W, and even that deck is less of a control deck than you might think.


The implications for innovation in type 2 are fairly obvious- either our deck is going to have to use the new cards in an abusive manner, or we're going to have to be beating down pretty hard. If we're beating down, we have to have a legitimate plan against pyroclasm and monored, and if we're "combo"ing off we need to make sure we're fast enough and resilient enough to be competitive.


The combo that jumped off the page at me when Scars was being spoiled was Quest for the Holy Relic plus Argentum Armor. This is basically GG if it ever gets going. The problem is that the decks I put together were horribly inconsistent. Sure, sometimes you had it active on turn 3 (or turn 2, if you had the stone nuts), but more often than not a Quest just sat on the table with 4 counters or you keep a decent hand without a Quest and just play a bunch of shitty bears, 1/1s, and thopters. I have yet to see a build involving this combo that I would want to play.


Next up I looked at a WW-style deck based around metalcraft. I was focused a little less on artifact beatdown persay and more around having enough artifacts to trigger metalcraft guys and beating down with efficient creatures like Steppe Lynx. The problems are that the deck isn't actually all that fast most of the time and that metalcraft is easy to disrupt. Another issue is that there are so many synergies that need to be in the deck that there wasn't much room for removal or disruption, so cards like 4/5 Baloth proved to be a problematic (especially if your name is Rich Franklin).


So I tried going to the opposite end of the spectrum and build monoblack control. Basically, everything here is interactive, and the deck is full of removal and disruption. The problem is that you can't actually beat most of the one-card combos, and disrupting them is very difficult because even if you empty their hand and/or their board they can just rip it, and your clock (aside from Grave Titan) is pretty much just bear beats. While it lined up fine against aggro decks, and even did okay against U/W, against all the ramp decks the matchups are nigh-unwinnable, something that just doesn't fly right now.


Right now I've been trying to brew a list with Fauna Shamans and Vengevines. Those cards are both good on their own right, and they are synergistic. It's a lot harder without BBE, but we can choose any second color we want to and every color has something going for it in the form of removal, tutor targets, tempo spells, planeswalkers, etcetera. The only problem is, again, that grinding is not really that efficient against the ramp decks, so whatever our other color is it better contribute enough against the ramp decks to shore up those matchups.


I know there's no decklist here. That's because I haven't broken the format, and I have no idea what I'm playing this weekend, and if you don't either you should probably just play Valakut with Arc Trails and Pyroclasms in the board. Usually, that just means that something wild will get brewed the night before, though, so if you find yourself paired against me at states, come prepared for the unexpected.


P.S. So I had this article ready to go Wednesday night, but wanted to look over it once more and post it this afternoon. However, recent developments had to be accounted for.




At the shop, the master of 9th place, none other than Stu Parnes, was talking about some box of rando cards that were unplayable, and he casually remarked how "who would want the 30th Sky Eel School?" Now Stu is a great guy and all, but when I see the oppressed being put down (and it's even worse when they can't respond themselves, cause they're a fish) I have to stand up for their rights. In this case, I asserted Sky Eel School's playability in limited as well as in constructed. But Stu decided to call and challenged me to run three of that card in my standard deck at States. The stakes of the wager are unimportant (and hilarious); what is important is that I'm always up for a challenge, and, contrary to my usual course of action, I'm not about to bitch out.


This brings up the issue of how to make Sky Eel School playable, because of course by any real standards he isn't (no offense to any of our ichthyan readers intended). The idea has to be to somehow abuse the graveyard. Vengevine is way too slow, and Bloodghast just sucks right now (though as a sideboard option he could make the cut). Reassembling Skeletons being equally unimpressive, my mind jumped to reanimator. Though the actual reanimation spell(s) suck right now since there's only Rise From the Grave, the target of Iona is super-strong, and the looting effects are also not bad: for starters, we have Cryptologist, Sky Eel School, Sphinx of Lost Truths, Riddlesmith, and Molten-Tail Masticore. Since we're U/B we also have access to Jace, Preordain, and Mana Leak as filtering and disruption. I don't have the list finalized (if I end up playing this, I'll post it before States), but I feel like this may actually be a legitimate direction to take a deck in right now.