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ScarletWeather


So list' bonnie laddie, and come awa' wit' me.

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Mar
19th
2018

Let's Play Magic: Standard Resurgent · 11:17pm Mar 19th, 2018

When I last talked about Magic the Gathering's standard format, it was about two months ago and in not-so-great circumstances. WIzards of the Coast had banned its ninth consecutive card from the format, leaving us with the most aggressive period of cards banned in the format they specifically have to avoid banning cards since original Mirrodin block. Today's piece is going to be a follow-up to that one, so if you're interested and haven't read the original yet you can do so here.

Since we last left Standard, things have changed by quite a lot. The bans have - for once - actually accomplished their intended effect and opened up the metagame a little bit, while also allowing for new cards and deck archetypes to rise to prominence. This sets the stage for the release of Dominaria next month, a set that promises to be a landmark success or failure for the company. Today I'd like to talk about what this new environment looks like, what allows it to exist, and make some predictions going forward.

And I'm going to tell the story of one of my favorite standard deck archetypes that's finally having its day in the sun: Red-Green Monsters.

Part I. Previously, on Magic: The Gathering

Before we talk about current Standard, it's important to recap what the metagame was like before the most recent wave of bans just to get a sense of what decks we have now that were already being played. Ixalan standard was dominated by two major deck archetypes that composed about seventy percent of the field together. The first were energy midrange decks (Temur Energy, Sultai Energy, and Temur Black) which together composed about fifty percent of the competitive field. The next largest single share of the metagame belonged to Ramunap Red at about twenty percent, followed by powerful lists kept back by their bad Energy or Red matchups such as UB Control, UW Approach, and UW Gift.1

Data for the current Rivals of Ixalan standard is still coalescing, making it difficult to say what overall percentages have changed. That said, among pro tour circuit players and tournament grinders it's become general consensus that most Energy decks are just dead. There are a few exceptions to this, but we'll get to them in a moment.

The loss of Rogue Refiner and Attune with Aether had two important effects on Temur variants. First, it made it impossible to easily splash for a fourth color, which absolutely destroyed the Temur Black game plan. Second, it made every card in the deck significantly less consistent and less likely to "go off" within a turn or two of being cast. When your deck isn't accelerating to 2-3 energy tun one and 7-9 energy by turn four in most games, cards like Bristling Hydra or Longtusk Cub are less powerful.

Temur Energy lived off its consistency. In an environment where energy can't be generated quickly and cheaply, that consistency falls apart. Outside a deck that produces energy reliably, Whirler Virtuoso is just a worse Pia Nalaar and in many cases Longtusk Cub is just a worse Merfolk Branchwalker. Protip: if you are playing a midrange strategy in Magic, the last thing you want to do is play a "worse" version of something else in the format.

Mom also wins the fashion war.

Ramunap Red, meanwhile, has persisted as a strategy but largely lost its valuable "free win" game plan. Without the ability to just shock the opponent to death with its lands or turn off lifelink, the deck has enough hard counters now that despite having most of its key cards intact it just hasn't been as big a tournament contender as might've been expected. Even the loss of its one-time worst predator - the energy decks - isn't enough to keep it at the top of the format.

There's another new wrinkle to this story as well, and that's the fact that Rivals of Ixalan is now officially a part of standard, which means we've added a ton of new cards. Notables include Rekindling Phoenix as a resilient flying threat for red decks, Hadana's Climb for +1/+1 counter decks, and notable sideboard cards like Naturalize or Thrashing Brontodon. These cards helped reshape older, established decks, and also provided new tools for counter-play.

Part II: The Modern Pro Tour

This is where I take a moment away from our main story to discuss the Magic News Cycle. I promise this tangent is going to be important.

The highest profile event of the Magic: The Gathering tournament circuit outside of Worlds is the Pro Tour, an invitation-only tournament held shortly after the release date of new standard-legal sets. The Pro Tour consists of several rounds of draft and a constructed format, and represents the strongest players in the entire game duking it out. If you only watch coverage of one event in the life cycle of a set, chances are it will be the Pro Tour.

This is important mostly because the Pro Tour is a metagame-predictor. While the winning deck and sometimes even the entire top eight can miss the mark on where the meta eventually settles, it's usually something of a bellwether if only because the high profile of the event means everyone gets to see what the pros are playing and how their various decks perform. Ramunap Red made its breakthrough as an archetype in Pro Tour: Hour of Devastation, for instance.

For the last two years of releases, the Pro Tour has always featured Standard as its constructed event. What makes the story of Rivals of Ixalan standard interesting is that for the first time in a long time, this changed. Wizards of the Coast announced that Pro Tour: Rivals of Ixalan would feature Modern, not Standard, as its constructed format. This meant Standard had time after the bans when it wasn't in the forefront of public attention, and developed a bit more quietly than it usually does.

Part III: The New Kids

So in the new standard meta that's forming, what do the new decks actually look like?

When Temur Energy and Temur Black died, their spirits were inherited by a dark avenger: Grixis Energy. Grixis is considered by some pro players to be the literal best tournament deck in the format with absolutely no bad matchups against anything. It keeps some of Temur Energy's high level of synergy and consistency but cuts green for black and switches the energy payoffs. Instead of finishing games with an un-killable Bristling Hydra or a 5/5 Longtusk Cub, Grixis will kill your creatures with Harnessed Lightning, draw a few cards with Glint-Sleeve Siphoner, and then poop out a million thopters with Whirler Virtuoso to finish the game. It can even run haymaker cards like The Scarab God to break midrange mirrors open.

What makes Grixis Energy a less-dominant deck than Temur is its consistency and explosive power. Part of what made Temur Energy so powerful is the sheer number of ways the deck could put itself in a proactive, dominant position by turn two, presenting threat after threat that demanded an immediate answer from the opponent. Grixis is mostly using its energy to draw cards and grind out the game so it can resolve a Chandra, Glorybringer, or Scarab God, meaning it's just softer in the early turns than its base-green counterpart. On top of that, the lack of Attune with Aether means it can't get access to three colors as consistently as the Temur decks of old.

On the flip side of things, Sultai Energy has had a much easier time adjusting to a world where it doesn't have access to its best acceleration tools. Sutai players have mostly pivoted their decks into Green-Black or Sultai Counters, a deck that plays a similar synergy/goodstuff theme to Sultai Energy. Instead of stockpiling energy counters for extra card draw or hexproof, though, Counter decks play a game plan focused on the power of Winding Constrictor to double up +1/+1 counters on their creatures, and is potentially capable of using a flipped Hadana's Climb to get a combo-style finish out of nowhere.

Of course, both of those decks are relying on fancy synergies and rigamarole to build-their-own unbeatable creature/boardstate, which begs the question: what if you just jammed a billion creatures that are absurdly strong with no help at all into the same deck?

Part IV: The Monsters that Could

Red-Green Monsters has been trying to break into Standard as a deck since the release of Amonkhet. While it's made several cameos at major tournaments and at the pro tour, the archetype has always had trouble finding an edge over its three-color competitors, which usually did the same thing but better or more flexibly. At least, until a version of the deck won the first competitive standard Grand Prix of the new  format, and rocketed into top-tier prominence.

For the uninitiated among my readers, Red-Green Monsters is an archetype like Red Deck Wins or White Weenie. The name doesn't just refer to one deck but to a broad class of decks with similar game plans that exist across multiple formats. Red-Green Monsters decks operate under the philosophy that the best defense is a good offense, and the best offense is to just play the biggest creatures you can at every point on your mana curve. While they sometimes play a bit of mana acceleration, they're traditionally less interested in playing cards that cost a lot of mana and more in cards that cost less mana than they really should. Think less Primeval Titan and more Huntmaster of the Fells.

God this new art, tho.

Green has been the base color of choice for creature-focused midrange decks in standard for a while now, which makes sense: it literally gets more creatures with bigger bodies for their cost than any other color. Since Amonkhet, red has slowly been sneaking up on it with cards like Hazoret the Fervent, Glorybringer, and most recently Rekindling Phoenix providing a strong top end for a red-green monsters deck. The possibilities of the archetype were made even more attractive by Rhonas the Indomitable, who was initially pegged on release to be the most powerful of the Amonkheti gods.

The cruel irony when you get killed by the Hour of Devastation god cards in the lore AND in the competitive meta.

The problem is that no matter what red-green players tried, the deck just never caught on to the level of Temur Energy. And to some extent, it's easy to see why. Remember my earlier comment about how midrange decks don't want to play a "worse" version of something else? In many ways, Red-Green Monsters in standard was like piloting a worse version of Temur energy.

Both Monsters and Temur had the same basic game plan: Resolve powerful threats on each turn of the game beginning with turn two and flowing smoothly into turn four, at which point you want to pressure your opponent until you win. If the game goes long, you play five-mana threats meant to break board stalls and hopefully pull ahead. Thanks to the inclusion of cards like Glorybringer , Monsters and Temur could both play this plan. Unlike Temur, however, Monsters lacked blue as an included color. This meant it couldn't play sideboard cards like Negate to beat control matchups, or Confiscation Coup to steal resolved Hazorets.

The ban of Rogue Refiner and Attune with Aether was big news for Monsters players. WIthout those two cards in the format, the payoff cards typically run by Temur became significantly less powerful and their three-color mana base became a bigger liability. Playing a two-color deck
to get more consistent mana suddenly made sense. This was coupled with the release of Rekindling Phoenix, a powerful red creature which gave the deck a superior four-mana threat to Bristling Hydra.

This left one problem for the deck to solve: how to beat control. Temur always relied on the strength of its sideboard negates to do that, but in red/green no such option exists. Initially players began to experiment with recursive creatures like Scrapheap Scrounger, playing just enough black sources in the deck to reanimate it. This sort of worked, but Scrounger really isn't a good enough card to justify splashing a third color into a deck that is competitive in part because of how consistent its mana base is.

Then the breakthrough happened.

At Grand Prix Memphis, the first standard event to feature Rivals of Ixalan, Tyler Schroeder took down the tournament with the final form of the Red-Green Monsters list, and he did it with the help of two pairs of cards that partner up well.

One of the other major issues Red-Green faces as a color pair is that it lacks ways to get ahead on cards once its hand starts to empty. Chandra, Torch of Defiance helps provide card flow, but she can only get you ahead on cards if you flip something with her that you actually want to cast right away - sometimes her +1 just reads "deal two damage to target opponent". She also does nothing to help you smooth out your early turn draws, which can be very important when your entire game plan revolves around making impactful plays every single turn for the first four turns.

To deal with this gap, Red-Green monsters lists have been experimenting with Merfolk Branchwalker and Jadelight Ranger pretty much since they were printed. Branchwalker is just a solid creature that either draws you a land or lets you decide whether or not you like your next draw, and Jadelight Ranger is the same but more (with the added benefit of potentially turning on Rhonas). Schroeder's deck not only took full advantage of the merfolk, but went even deeper than most lists.

Schroeder opted for a build of the deck that plays seven different creatures with Eternalize, an ability that allows them to be resurrected from the graveyard as 4/4 token versions of themselves at a high cost. The two chosen, Earthshaker Khenra and Resilient Khenra, are pretty solid cards in their own right. What makes them invaluable to the deck's game plan isn't how strong they are, though, but how well they play with Explore as an ability.

If you don't see the synergy, let me lay it out for you. When Branchwalker and Jadelight Ranger explore, if they see a nonland card on top of the library then their controller can choose to either keep that card or throw it into the graveyard. On top of smoothing out draws, this means that if the Monsters player sees a Khenra on top, they can choose to put it into their graveyard and know that they'll be able to cast it later. They've effectively just "drawn" a card, in other words.

As an added bonus, Eternalizing a creature isn't the same thing as casting it in game rules terms, which means that counterspell heavy control decks can't disrupt an eternalized creature with their blue spells. Between the Khenra/Explore package and the ability to sideboard into Carnage Tyrant, this gives Monster decks serious game against blue-black control.

Schroeder's innovations have brought red-green monsters to the top of the field, the first time an entirely new midrange deck has broken through into prominence since Temur Energy dominated Worlds last year (more than half the field ran it). And his innovations haven't only been in the main deck. Key sideboard cards like Atzocan Archer have shored up the deck's ability to compete with evasive creatures and mono-red, while his decision to maximize his own flying creatures the deck can literally go over the top against most other midrange decks uncontested. He even played Struggle//Survive as a way to beat The Scarab God by emptying everyone's graveyard at once.

Part V: So What's the Big Deal, Anyway?

Long answer short: The Standard bans actually worked.

Part of WotC's problem across the previous standard environment was that they just could not catch a break. Almost immediately after the first big ban of Smuggler's Copter, Emrakul and Reflector Mage the format spat out a new bogeyman with the perfected Aetherworks Marvel deck. Then before the dust even had time to settle on the decision to ban that value engine, copycat combo midrange exploded into dominance (and apparently would've been practically unbeatable if given access to tools from Amonkhet). And then, like a zombie, that list rose from the dead to become Temur Energy. In many ways the more decks WotC banned key pieces from, the less healthy the meta seemed to become.

Yes, this isn't the whole story. There were bright spots in between each of these bans. Between the Copter ban and the Marvel ban we had a brief period where mono-black zombies was one of the strongest decks in all of Standard. Between the Marvel and Felidar Guardian ban, Mardu Vehicles actually re-established itself by taking seven of eight pro tour quarterfinal slots. Ramunap Red became the first aggressive Red Deck Wins archetype to win a standard event in... gosh, quite some time. Even after the tournament that prompted the Copter ban, the finals were a legendary control player showdown. Not everything has been terrible in terms of diversity and options.

What makes this time different is that the rogue breakthrough decks of previous banlists were all archetypes that didn't attack the game from the same angle as the deck being banned. Mono-black zombies was a tribal aggro deck that could fight through removal thanks to its high count of recursive creatures. Ramunap Red not only had the option to drop a turn four 5/4 indestructible haste creature, but also to steal wins by converting its lands into damage. These decks were successful because they weren't playing the same game plan as the existing dominant midrange stategies, and were capable of closing games before those decks could get full 'value' from their powerful creatures and synergies.

Pictured: Bright Spots

Red-Green Monsters is different. In many respects it's literally just playing the game plan of Temur Energy but cutting blue mana for card filtering and extra evasive threats. It's the first time bans targeting a midrange list haven't just resulted in the existing midrange lists mutating around the ban without ceding market share.

New cards are actually breaking through into standard now at a rate they hadn't previously - up until Schroeder's deck, nobody was running Resilient Khenra in standard because Longtusk Cub was usually a better bargain. That's not only good news for people brewing decks in the present, it also signals that Dominaria might be about to make a much heavier impact on Standard than previous sets. Midrange decks almost always want to run the most efficient version of a given card or effect, and that means they are in a state of constant evolution and re-evaluation when new sets add cards.

Part VI. Conclusion, or, Get Hype People

It might be a bit early to call this, but I think the winter of our Standard discontent might finally be drawing to a close. For the first time since the bans began, not only is competitive attention divided between standard and other constructed formats again but standard itself is experiencing a mini-rebirth. Decks are evolving, new lists are breaking through to prominence, and for at least a little while the format diversity is pretty high.

Between this and the approaching April release date of the new Challenger Decks, thirty dollar decks that can provide a viable on-ramp to new Standard players, it might actually be time to pick up Standard again if you've been taking a break. Dominaria promises to introduce a variety of nifty, powerful effects into the format and this is our last chance to play with cards from both Kaladesh block and Amonkhet before some of them rotate in the fall. And trust me, you definitely want a chance to play with Amonkhet cards before they rotate. They are the workhorse of standard and I can and will write a whole article on how much I love that block.

Hell, even if you aren't interested in Standard it's just a good time to get back into Magic or pick up the game, period. Pauper, the competitive all-common format, has seen a sudden rise in popularity and despite price spikes caused by pump-and-dump schemes targeting key singles it's still a great way to get into a non-rotating format where decks don't cost more than your rent. Commander continues to enjoy extensive support, with new preconstructed decks due later this year. Hell, even Modern is doing great - and this despite concerns that the recently-unbanned Jace the Mind Sculptor would destroy the format and proved WotC just doesn't care about players.2

I'm just glad to report something positive for once. Magic is officially twenty-five years old this year, and it's cool that it gets to celebrate that anniversary with all of its constructed formats in a good place.

1I don't have time to explain every single one of these decks in detail, so quick summary for those uninitiated: UB control is a blue-black control deck looking to counter spells, kill creatures, and dominate with The Scarab God after the opponent runs out of relevant cards. UW Gift is also a control deck but it trades black for white and plans to wrath the board three or four times before finishing game one with Approach of the Second Sun, and often had a cheeky sideboard plan where it would bring in mid-size creatures in games two and three when the opponent cut removal. UW Gift is a blue-white combo deck based on resolving a God-Pharaoh's GIft and reanimating Angel of Invention or Champion of WIts.
2Again, this is an article for another time. But I swear to god, Magic players would find a way to call WotC a sellout compan destroying their own game if you printed literal hundred dollar bills and put them into packs.

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Comments ( 8 )

Heh. DailyMTG has spoiled me; I keep mousing over the card names and expecting the images to pop up. :derpytongue2:

When Temur Energy and Temur Black died, their spirits were inherited by a dark avenger: Grixis Energy.

I'm pretty sure this is a superhero origin story.

In any case, thank you for another installment of what Standard's up to these days. You're pretty much the only person who can make me interested in that question. (Heck, I doubt I'll watch any Pro Tour that doesn't feature an Unstable draft.) Here's looking forward to whatever Dominaria may bring.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

That dumb anime game I play now is coming up on a new expansion, which means an old one getting rotated out. I'm intrigued to see what that's like to live through, and this is weirdly amplifying that excitement. :D

4820622
I, too, am hype for the new Vanguard rebrand. I might pick it up for a hot minute again to see if they fixed the bugs.

EDIT: "What do you mean, other dumb anime games exist?"

White Weenie: the eternal, the immortal, the deck of God himself

Another solid post.

The bans have - for once - actually accomplished their intended effect and opened up the metagame a little bit, while also allowing for new cards and deck archetypes to rise to prominence.

I'd argue that banning Marvel, up until Ixalan came out, worked. That format was pretty neat for the short time it existed.

Still, standard is pretty sweet right now. At least, until it becomes Karn: the Gathering.

And this is why I feel like I can mostly keep up with Magic without ever going to Magic sites except pretty much skimming PT coverage. Okay, and Finkel's and Baby Huey's Twitter feeds, which are only partially Magic.

I just went to my first FNM Standard event and 4-0'd with Black White Vampires which cost like half as much as several of the decks I went up against. There was a guy piloting Mardu Vehicles who hadn't lost a game in 5 weeks whose streak I just ended.

Feels good man.

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