Standard De-Surgent, or: How the Pro Tour Wrecked my Heart · 3:47pm Jun 10th, 2018
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.
Friends, listen to these pathetic ramblings of a madwoman who knows not what is about to occur! Laugh at her naive, crazed attempts to stay optimistic in the face of ongoing bullcrap!
*sigh*
So yeah, remember last time I did a Magic blog and said it was a good time to get into Standard? The last Pro Tour makes me wonder if that sweet moment of diversity wasn't a fluke, because the numbers are out on Pro Tour Dominaria and they are not pretty. Seven of the top eight decks were base-red with a black splash (or as a full-on second color), with the one outlier being an Esper control deck that honestly seems like a fluke. The winter of our Standard discontent isn't over by a long shot, and while things aren't hopeless my previous optimism seems a little laughable.
So anyway, let's talk about how we ended up here.
Part 1: The Backstory
I've already done two previous Magic blogs on Standard's rocky history since Kaladesh entered the format back in 2016, so I don't think a full on breakdown is merited yet again. To recap: a ton of stuff has been banned in Standard across the past three years, and at this point there are more banned cards across current Standard than I think we've had in any previous Standard environment. That's including Mirrodin Standard, a period so badly balanced that it almost killed Magic forever.
Yeah just in case you feel like this isn't a big deal for the game or its players, when Standard gets this unbalanced it absolutely results in lost revenue. And that's a problem.
Still, last time I wrote about the format it seemed like things in Standard had finally grown stable. With Temur Energy definitively dead as a top tier strategy, multiple new viable midrange decks had rIsen up to take its place. The banning of Rampaging Ferocidon as well seemed to indicate that token decks had a decent shot at breaking into top tier to keep down the rise of red decks, which were easily the most dominant strategy at the time. All in all, a pretty good forecast.
Dominaria's release seemed to only make things more encouraging. Most of the powerful cards in Dominaria either served to enable underplayed decks or helped create new decks entirely. LLanowar Elves was the obvious standout as the first turn-one mana accelerant Standard has seen in some time, but cards like Shalai, Voice of Plenty; Lyra Dawnbringer; Steel Leaf Champion and Karn, Scion of Urza all seemed to indicate a more open future for Standard.
For the first month of Magic Online competitive leagues this seemed to hold up pretty well. Steel-Leaf Stompy immediately made waves, and was followed by some of the weirder but more amusing competitive decks of any recent standard. Mono-Red Gift was a powerful novelty combo deck built around Skirk Prospector, while Raff Flash took advantage of Raff Capashen's ability to let you cast any Legendary card at instant speed to build a powerful tempo strategy that could often perform one-sided board wipes.
You may note that only one of these decks is even playing Red, and even it's more of an artifact-based combo build than anything else. So...
2. How the Hell Did Things go So Wrong, So Quickly?
This card is Goblin Chainwhirler. It's a pretty unassuming card that exists to heavily reward players who choose to play a mono-red deck by giving them a powerful turn-three play. It's not even the only card in that group - Dread Shade, Tempest Djinn, Benalish Marshal and Steel Leaf Champion all exist to give similar benefits to players who want to go really deep on a single color of mana.
Goblin Chainwhirler is the one that actually broke Standard down the center though.
When it first came out how much of a powerhouse this card was, I was scratching my head a little. Goblin Chainwhirler is by no means a bad card, but it took me a while to realize why it's so good. A 3/3 with first strike on turn 3 is a respectable enough body, I guess, but the ability to murder a board of X/1s seemed like it was going to be pretty underwhelming. After all, if you're murdering your opponent's Llanowar ELves but they've already played their Ripjaw Raptor turn three, Chainwhirler is actually just all downside. There can't be that many decks in Standard playing mutiple X/1 creatures, right?
Then I realized the issue wasn't how many decks were playing X/1s as part of their core gameplan, but which decks were playing X/1s.
Specifically, Goblin Chainwhirler annihilates token strategies and the mono-red mirror.
Those two decks are, respectively, the deck best suited in the current standard to beating red's game plan, and the most powerful aggro deck in the format. Chainwhirler gives red players a leg up over the two worst matchups it would normally have to deal with and even incidentally hates out a few other cards besides, like turn-two Walking Ballista or Glint-Sleeve Siphoner in +1/+1 counters decks. The ceiling on this card is absurd, and the floor is a respectably-sized creature that wins in combat a lot and incidentally dings the opponent for one just to add insult to injury.
That's a pretty intense goblin.
Whatever hope Raff Flash or Karn or even Steel Leaf Champion had at Pro Tour Dominaria was crushed in pretty short order by decks maxing out on Chainwhirler. They beat the decks designed to prey on them, they beat the mirror match, and - well, red-black has always had a historically good matchup with everything else. Which leads me to my next point,
3. Holy Shit, did Development Fail to See How Good Red Is
A few years ago during Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon standard, when I'd just started playing, one of the biggest complaints about the format was that there was no cheap red aggro deck. Red Deck Wins is an archetype with a lot of devoted followers, and most Magic players say it's the single best way to introduce a new player to a competitive format: it's usually inexpensive and it wins a lot of games even if the pilot doesn't know everything about what they're doing since RDW's motto is "if the opponent stumbles, they must die."
I bring this up because I feel like WotC's development team heard that feedback and pushed red pretty hard between Kaladesh and Amonkhet blocks. At first it seemed like a triumphant return - red deck wins was coming back in style! Only, well...
Look there's no easy way to say this: Not every format needs a dominant red deck, and Ixalan/Dominaria standard are two great examples of formats that would probably be a lot more fun to play if you just took half the dominant cards in red and yanked them out. The scary thing is that even if you banned half its ace cards though, I think you could still make a convincing case for mono-red or base-red aggro decks as a top tier competitive strategy.
That's not a good sign for overall game balance.
The current red and red-black decks in Standard are functionally the exact same deck, with some lists playing a bit more removal and edging into midrange, and some playing a bit less removal and doubling down on the base aggro plan. What they all have in common is an ungodly amount of resilient creatures and hasty threats that start putting pressure on the opponent as early as turn one. Scrapheap Scrounger is basically the only 'black' creature in most of these decks, with the rest being a mix of big red fliers like Glorybringer and smaller red aggro threats like Earthshaker Khenra, Kari Zev, Pia Nalaar, and the aforementioned Goblin Chainwhirler.
This deck is, simply put, really brutal to play against. It curves out impressively well, has few (if any) unplayable starting hands because of all the redundant creatures, and can easily take games off of control or opposing midrange decks because of its ability to smash in for high damage every single turn of the game. Unless control has the soul read and draws the perfect answer to every single one of your threats every turn, the red-black player generally has the ability to present a four-turn clock every single game starting on turn three. That's insanity, especially when considering how resilient the cards it's killing you with are.
The thing is that wouldn't be a problem if it was one or two cards in the red deck that did this, but it's actually kind of every single card at this point.
4. The Strange Case of Aggro having Amazing Late Game
One of the major differences between classic Red Deck Wins and the current red monsters eating up the tournament scene is card quality. A classic Red Deck Wins list is happy to play cards like Lava Spike, for example, because even though it's a pretty bad card anywhere else it's a great card in a deck that just wants to deal 20 to the opponent's face by turn four. Lava Spike isn't in modern red decks. In fact, they aren't even playing Shock mainboard for the most part, instead opting for more black removal spells to kill creatures.
The reason for this is that while old-school Red Deck Wins is a pile of red cards that are terrible in isolation but amazing when you jam them all into the same list - "40 lava spikes and 20 mountains" -Standard Red and Red-Black are aggro decks that can win the late game because of the sheer density of resilient, powerful creatures they have access to. In the early game this takes the form of Scrapheap Scrounger, who basically exists to have a recursive threat that never dies and crews Heart of Kiran pretty easily. This alone is a pretty powerful late-game source of damage for decks that traditionally are weak to mass life gain coming down when they run out of cards.
Unfortunately it's not alone, not by a long shot. Aside from Chainwhirler coming in to clean up blockers and force through damage, the deck also runs anywhere between two to four copies of all of the following cards: Chandra, Torch of Defiance, Rekindling Phoenix, Glorybringer, and Hazoret the Fervent. That's a planeswalker that gives you late-game card advantage, a flying creature that doesn't die to removal, a flying creature, and an indestructible hasty god.
All of these cards can be played in the red deck without sacrificing early-game speed and consistency. That is insane. It's like finding a version of modern burn that can go turn one Goblin Guide, turn two Boros Charm, and then late game consistently slam Pia and Kiran Nalaar. That's not supposed to be how the deck works in a competitive environment.
Now, normally, the major predator of this list would be token decks in current standard. Token decks create millions of blockers and can gain absolute scads of life through Anointer Priest. Unfortunately most of the blockers they create are 1/1 vampires and 1/1 servos, which means they can invest roughly a million mana into a board that just dies on turn three to Chainwhirler anyway, and that's not even getting into the problem of red being able to field 12+ power of flying creatures when it reaches the late game. That's absurd. No token deck is going to be able to deal with that.
Basically what's happened at this point is that Red has just consistently seen creature cards that are some of the highest in all of Standard, borderline better than Green - you know ,the "creature color". For contrast, Red is the color that typically gets the second-fewest creatures in a set, after Blue. It's really supposed to be focused on instants and sorceries, with the occasional high-powered flier like a dragon. Right now there is a four-mana dragon than can make a second copy of itself late game that competitive red decks don't play. They aren't playing it because there are multiple stronger red cards at four mana.
That's insane.
5. Okay, but really How Doomed Are We?
It's really hard to tell. We need more data before we make that final call. That said, we are at least moderately doomed, and potentially hyper doomed.
6. Look is Standard Busted Or Not?
Short answer: Maybe.
Long Answer: Yes, BUT.
The good news is that not all hope is lost for the current standard environment. The Pro Tour happens very early into the life cycle of a Standard set, and often displays some wonkiness when you compare the results decks put up there to their performance later into a set's lifespan. Mardu Vehicles put up a similar six-of-the-top-eight finish in Pro Tour Aether Revolt, but it ended up being one of the few top-tier standard lists to never see a ban for any of its key cards after that, and got overshadowed pretty quickly by Copycat and Temur Energy. It's possible we're just seeing skewed data because Red-Black overperformed in the specific meta of the pro tour.
There's also a time limit on this dominance. Core Set 2019 drops this summer, and after that the next big fall set - Guilds of Ravnica - is going to trigger a Standard rotation. Basically all of those resilient cards I mentioned (with the notable exception of Rekindling Phoenix) will be rotating out in the fall, and whatever shell remains after those cards rotate out is going to be a very different deck than the one we're seeing now.
That said, "hold on and wait for rotation" isn't exactly a great mantra if you're planning on getting into Standard. Currently the easiest (and cheapest) way to get a good deck to play Standard for Friday Night Magic is to purchase one of the thirty-dollar Challenger Decks, which give you a stripped down but still incredibly powerful version of a legitimate top tier strategy. All of these decks- and I mean all of them - are going to have most of their cards rotate out in September as well. That means your on-ramp window is super limited, and also means if you choose to take it you're going to be stuck playing a lot of games against Red-Black.
This is also just awkward because it's like, the sixth consecutive Standard where there's been a one or two deck format. This is coming on the heels of a Standard cycle so bad that Wizards literally went out and hired a bunch of former pros to buff up their development team, revamped their entire design cycle to give development more time with a set and more control over its individual cards, and generally promised to high heaven they had seen their mistakes. Unfortunately if Dominaria is anything to go by, this is an example of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Now, many of the problems I've just described could be alleviated by banning Chainwhirler, which is pretty likely once we get our next Banned and Restricted announcement. Unfortunately even this feels like a bit of a cop-out. Again, this Standard environment is already passing records for individual-cards-banned. Players are pretty burned out by the cycle already, and adding yet more cards to that list isn't going to help, particularly when so much of the Red/black list is good already.
This sucks. I really hoped I would get to talk about a cool, engaging tournament where a new deck or sixty broke into prominence. But it looks like for now we're still stuck in the shadow of hyper-dominant strategies that are just designed to murder the souls of those who play them.
Here's hoping for better when Core 2019 drops. We'll need it.
4880174
It does, but they really should've seen it. I have a bad feeling that no matter how good development gets, Standard has just had too many powerful cards on-boarded at once in these colors. :<
I don't play magic but that was an interesting read; thanks.
For what it's worth, at the SCG Invitational, of the 7-1 or better decks, only a couple were Rx decks. There were many UWx decks in that group, however. Link
Isn't Llanowar Elves a card from like... the very Magic the Gathering that wasn't even an expansion? O.o
This sounds blogworthy. c.c
4880439
It is! But the way Standard works is that only cards from the previous two years of expansions are allowed to be played in your deck. Llanowar Elves being reprinted in Dominaria meant it became Standard-legal again when previously it wasn't.
I agree that's blogworthy, but the problem is that it happened so long before I started playing I'd just be retreading articles already written about it with very little first-person insight.
4880484
Oh, darn. :B
All this and here I am just enjoying the fact I've recently gotten into Old School... :V
Wait... That doesn't sound right. Aren't there only 7 currently banned? Mirrodin era had 9 (though six were the artifact lands), and going back to Combo Winter there were 10. (To say nothing of the very old days when the Type 1 and Type 2 lists were connected.) That said, it sounds like just even if this didn't reach the peak badness of Combo Winter or Goddammit Affinity, this has just gone on for an absurdly long time. Do hope that the PT ends up being unrepresentative.
"Wait it out for the rotation" seems to be a perennial in Standard. Aspects of Mirrodin, waiting for the boringness of Kamigawa, goddamn fucking Faeries... But at least in this case it does seem like the (newly) oppressive deck only showed up right before the rotation is on the horizon.
In general though, it's real interesting that The Problem is aggro. In a sense that's at least refreshing to hear.
4880439 4880484 I wish I could, but I lack the perspective to do so since that's exactly when I started playing.
Huh... We should talk. I have a feeling that between the two of us, we could out-token the token butcher. But anywho - I WILL BE SO GRATEFUL WHEN KALADESH DIES IN A FREAKING FIRE!!!
Seriously SICK of my Showdown decks constantly getting Heart of Kiran to the freaking face.