A Christmas Carol: The Story of Magic Past, Present and Yet to Come

Hello fellow Oracles, it’s good to be back after a few weeks off! These past few weeks I’ve not produced anything new in part because working life really takes over, and aside from that I’ve had something of a writer’s block. Fortunately there have been some huge swings in several formats, and next Month I will be acting Captain for my local team in a 3 Format Team Trio Tournament in Manchester, England. I’m super excited to break down the decks that we’re looking towards for each format but first; don’t forget to head over to our Facebook and Twitter pages and give us a like and a follow. We have some Black Friday deals through our affiliates TCGPlayer so don’t forget to check that out as well, and as always you can keep up to date with my personal Magic journey on Instagram.

Now let’s talk Magic. Next month me and my local team will be participated in a Team event, with the 3 formats being Standard; Pioneer and Modern. I will be in the Modern seat, to the surprise of no one that knows me. I will be joined by my long-term Magic testing partner in the Standard seat, and as of the writing of this, we are still in talks about who will play Pioneer. The last couple of weeks have consisted mostly of discussing which deck we should have on our side of the table for each format, and I now feel confident enough in our decisions to share some of our insights and the current lists we are using to test. Whilst I expect some flex slots to change between now and the event, I anticipate that the Archetypes should remain unchanged, sans a big shakeup to the Pioneer format before then!

Let’s kick things off with Standard. I’ll admit I haven’t followed standard too closely recently as my efforts have been mostly focused on Modern for the majority of this year. That being said we have taken some time to really dig into the format since the ban of Oko, Thief of Crowns in order to get a taste for which decks are doing well in this new Elk-less format. It became obvious rather quickly that 2 strategies were battling it out to be top dog of the format, those being GBx Oven decks, and Jeskai Cavaliers. I expect these to be the most played decks in the Standard seat of the event, so choosing a deck to beat both of them was imperative. From the testing we have done so far, it seems that these 2 decks are reasonably even against one another, thus it seemed wise to look at ways that we could change one of these archetypes to give an overall higher win percentage, without losing points against the rest of the field. We played around with a few of the Oven decks but didn’t manage to get the results we wanted. That left Jeskai and the interesting build-around card of Fires of Invention. We agreed between ourselves that the Cavaliers may not be the best way to leverage this effect, and as a result, we have ended up with the below list:

Now, there’s quite a lot going on here. I’m not going to break everything in this deck down as we still have 2 more formats to cover, but let’s take a look at some of the more unique things we wanted this deck to do. First things first we are leveraging a full suite of Fae of Wishes. This card has been impressive in a number of formats, but it really shines in this deck. Being able to ‘Wish’ for the card you need is already a powerful effect in Standard. When you can find the best answer and play it off of Fires it becomes rather absurd. We can see in the sideboard there is a healthy smattering of one-ofs for various matchups, most of which should be self-explanatory. The other big thing we wanted this deck to have access too was a reasonably fast clock that could mostly ignore the commonly played removal. Enter Sarkhan, the Masterless. With Oko out of the format, there has been a dwindling number of Trophies in peoples Mains, making Sarkhan a powerful way to end the game with a handful of other Planeswalkers on the Battlefield. I remain fairly confident that this version of the Fires deck is correct going into this tournament, however, there is still time for the Meta to shift in such a way that we need to reevaluate, so we will be paying more attention to Standard in the next few weeks.

Now let’s talk about Pioneer. This still new format has been taking players by storm and has proven to be quite the catalyst for innovation, brewing, and nostalgia amongst Magic fans. As it currently stands, Pioneer is the format that we are least locked into with our deck choice. Given the willingness of Wizards to ban any card that begins to cause a problem (a decision I agree with and have been impressed by thus far), we are remaining open to changing this decision as the format changes. That being said, we have to spend our time wisely so we have given a good chunk of time to figure out what deck we believe should sit in the Pioneer seat. We decided that we need to be doing the most powerful thing, or be prepared to beat it. Looking at the format as it is right now it seems reasonable to say that the most powerful decks are Mono-Black Aggro and Bant Field, with the former having over double the metagame percentage of the latter. With that in mind it seems wise to prepare for the Mono-Black deck being the most played deck of the tournament and to beat that deck we’ve settled on Sultai Midrange as our deck of choice, let’s take a look:

Now as I said, we aren’t especially locked into this decision right now, and as you can see there are a bunch of singletons that we’ve been testing. Overall I’ve been impressed with this deck against a lot of the field. Having access to all of the best removal in the format helps keep the Aggro strategies in check, and these powerful threats that provide inevitability let us win most games that go long. The main problem match-up is Field of the Dead, and we have been dedicating a lot of time to figuring out how best to improve it without warping the whole deck. In the initial draft, we played considerably fewer creatures and resembled more of a control deck, and by adding threats like Wicked Wolf and The Scarab God we have managed to improve our Field match-up by a few points simply by having a way to apply pressure on the battlefield whilst slowing them down with our Thoughtseize effects. There is definitely still room for improvement in this list but I expect this to be a mainstay of the Pioneer format and I believe we will take a similar shell to the Tournament.

Finally, we get to Modern, my favorite format to play, and the seat on the team that I will be filling. Modern is wide open right now and there is a vast array of viable decks for a tournament setting. Those that have read my previous works will probably be able to guess that I am leaning towards playing a deck containing Urza, Lord High Artificer. Interestingly that still leaves a number of viable shells to choose from, all of which I believe to have their merits. I’ll begin by eliminating the weakest option, in my opinion, that being the Paradoxical Outcome shell. Whilst arguably the most fun build of the deck to play I do believe it is the weakest, and that mostly comes from the sheer density of sub-par cards you have to play to make your engine work. That coupled with a slightly higher than average number of Damping Spheres showing up made my shelve my POs rather quickly in testing for this event. Included in this I lumped the Ascendancy version as many of the same weaknesses are shared between the two. Next on my list of viable Urza shells was the classic 4 Colour Thopter-Sword shell. I have been impressed by this version more and moreover the last few weeks, and I think it is a very reasonable consideration for a larger modern tournament right now. The deck is much more resilient than the Outcome variants and plays considerably less weak cards. The inclusion of the combo also helps race against the faster decks of the format such as Burn and Amulet, both of which have been popular lately. Whilst I have found this shell to be powerful and I have wielded a positive win percentage with it, I found that I was more often than not sideboarding in such a way that turned the deck into a Midrange shell rather than a Combo one. Those of you that follow the SCG circuit or more specifically Team Lotus Box will be aware that this is a problem that has been addressed, and the solution came from Zan Syed and his team with their dominant Urza Food strategy. Let’s take a look at the list I’ve been working with based on the ideas that Lotus Box has put forward.

This list is fairly close if not the same 75 that Zan has been playing recently. I’ve been a huge fan of Karn in this deck and I believe that is correct moving forward. I have given some thought to trying to squeeze one or two extra Artifacts in there, likely a Witching Well or a second Everflowing Chalice over the 3rd Cryptic. Other than that I think this is the 75 I will play for the event. This deck has been described by many as the modern day ‘Jund’ due to the vast majority of match-ups being 50% or better. Currently I have a 73.6% win percentage across Paper and Online testing which I am rather pleased with. I feel like Urza is almost objectively the most powerful thing you can do in the Modern format, and in the current meta the best way to leverage Urzas’ power seems to be in this shell.

So there we have it, these are the decks that we are currently spearheading to take to the Team Trios tournament. There’s still plenty of testing to be done and we are very excited to take part in what will be the first team event for us. Check back later this week to see what I’ve been brewing up for the Lincoln (UK) Legacy Tournament this Sunday. Spoiler Alert; there will be Urzas. Thanks for taking the time to have a read, leave a comment if you enjoyed this and want to see more content like this. Until next time, MoxAmethyst Tapping Out.