Welcome, readers to my fifty-first article on this site—yes, I’m just as shocked as you that it’s been that long! Somewhat surprisingly, not one but two of my mini-articles last week were on the money, with Stoneforge and the Mind Sculptor thrown out of Standard. Without dragging out the discussion of why any further, let’s try and come to grips with the new format that has been sprung on us. This change to the format seems almost as significant as a full format rotation, as the best deck has been taken right out of the equation.

Caw-Blade is gone, and people are looking to the more degenerate combo decks lurking around the edges of the old format to take over. Valakut and Exarch/Twin are being bandied around as the starting point of the new format. The removal of “The Jace Test,” however, means a whole swathe of creatures that were previously unplayable are now being reconsidered. Brewers everywhere are crawling out of the woodwork, finally excited for Standard again. As always, the first place I’m starting is with Red.

Red Deck Wins

If the format boils down to a race between Valakut and Splinter Twin, I want my Red deck to be faster than either, because I can’t disrupt them terribly well. Fortunately, Red can be extremely fast at the moment. Goblin Guide, Furnace Scamp, Lightning Bolt, and Kiln Fiend can combine for extremely early kills, and Shrine of Burning Rage provides excellent reach.

A lot of the Red decks showing up before the ban were biased toward beating Caw-Blade, of course. Killing Stoneforge Mystic before it could force down a Batterskull and trying to keep Sword of War and Peace off Squadron Hawks meant that Ember Hauler was an all-star four-of in the main deck. This is not the case anymore, and in a world of Titans, Sphinxes, Exarchs, and Spellskites, 2 damage just isn’t going to get you there anymore. Neither is 3, so I am looking long and hard at Searing Blaze as well. 1? You’ve gotta be joking. Spikeshot Elder, you’re cut. Lotus Cobra is about the only small guy I want pinpoint removal for; other creatures that need to die either have 4+ butts or come in great swarms, to which Pyroclasm or Slagstorm are more suited.

So, we want to race, and there are a lot of cards that aren’t that useful in a Blade-less world. With a bit of quick surgery, I’ve arrived at this list for testing:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

4 Furnace Scamp

4 Goblin Guide

4 Kiln Fiend

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

4 Act of Aggression

4 Burst Lightning

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Staggershock

4 Gitaxian Probe

4 Shrine of Burning Rage

[/Spells]

[Lands]

12 Mountain

4 Arid Mesa

4 Scalding Tarn

4 Teetering Peaks

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

4 Kargan Dragonlord

4 Koth of the Hammer

4 Dismember

3 Pyroclasm

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

I am probably playing too many lands, but with the current sideboard configuration, I don’t want fewer than twenty-four post-board. Perhaps a couple of Mountains could be swapped into the sideboard for Dismembers? Some of the choices might seem a bit unusual, but I want to be as fast as possible, so my 2-drops of choice are Kiln Fiend and Shrine. Fiend means I definitely want Staggershock, and also gives me a reason to try out Gitaxian Probe—the life loss is negligible in the battles I’m planning to fight, and it gives me a free pump to Kiln Fiend as well as important information about when it’s okay to go all in, as well as a cantrip, which is just the cherry on top.

Act of Aggression started out in the sideboard, but I’m now testing it over Dismember in the main deck. Both are great answers to the Twin combo, and while Dismember has more utility against other creature decks and in clearing out blockers, Act is much better against various decks sporting Titans. Since we have a lot of burn in the main deck already for Lotus Cobras, Vampires, Fauna Shamans, and the rest, the only things I want to Dismember that I don’t want to Act are Spellskite and various Walls. Spellskite is especially obnoxious, as he can even steal your Teetering Peaks triggers, and this irritant may be enough for Dismember to get the nod, but we will have to see how the metagame pans out. Right now, I want to try to get some free surprise wins in Game 1 with Act.

The sideboard is pretty straightforward; Dismember is for Kor Firewalker, Walls, Obliterator, and other difficult to kill things. Kargan Dragonlord is for decks light on removal—few cards have suffered from the Jace test more than this little guy, and he can certainly do a job on Valakut and other decks who either aren’t playing or are siding out Day of Judgment, Go for the Throat, and so on. He also helps a great deal against Leyline of Sanctity, which is otherwise this deck’s bane. Koth of the Hammer is still a control deck’s worst nightmare, doubly so now that they don’t have Mystics and Birds with Swords to chip away at him. Celestial Purge will probably see a resurgence to deal with Koth and Splinter Twin. Pyroclasm is for Vampires, the idea being to cut back on creatures and lean on Shrine, removing all their threats and trusting they won’t be able to deal with my artifact.

It is easy with this deck to get turn-four kills against people who aren’t interacting with you meaningfully, and with any luck forcing the combo decks to interact will push back their combo turn to the point that you can win the race. Control decks can’t rely on Ratchet Bomb, Black Sun's Zenith or Day of Judgment, as these are just too slow. Pinpoint removal, Leyline of Sanctity, and Firewalker are much better answers to this style of aggression. Remember, you don’t have to bin your Furnace Scamp at the first possible opportunity, as they may not even have blockers or removal in hand—Gitaxian Probe people enough times, and you will start to see that they don’t have it a surprising amount of the time—they are generally more likely to keep hands that let them be proactive, at least until they’ve seen what your plan is.

U/R Twin

Of course, if you can’t beat them, the other option is to join them. In theory, Twin should be advantaged over Valakut, as its critical turn is earlier than Valakut’s is. Without Jace, the Mind Sculptor, you only have one real win condition in this version of the deck, so the rest of the cards you assemble around your four Twins and four Exarchs have to be focused on finding those two cards and ensuring you survive to get them both into play. I am only just coming to grips with the deck, but taking my cues from Valeriy Shunkov, I’ve been fooling around with the following:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

2 Consecrated Sphinx

4 Deceiver Exarch

2 Spellskite

[/Creatures]

[Planeswalkers]

1 Jace Beleren

[/Planeswalkers]

[Spells]

2 Dispel

3 Into the Roil

3 Lightning Bolt

3 Mana Leak

2 Foresee

4 Gitaxian Probe

4 Preordain

4 Splinter Twin

2 Shrine of Piercing Vision

[/Spells]

[Sideboard]

1 Consecrated Sphinx

1 Lightning Bolt

2 Combust

2 Mental Misstep

3 Act of Aggression

4 Pyroclasm

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

As you can probably tell, I am a bit in love with Probe at the moment. Going all-in on the combo is risky, but rather than jump at shadows, Probe lets you get perfect information while shrinking your deck so you can draw your combo pieces more frequently. Dispel is the counterspell of choice because, as Drew Levin and others have noted, you basically just want to counter their counters and their removal for your Exarchs. I’m playing a variety of digging spells so I can see what works and what doesn’t—either Foresee or Shrine should probably just be a four-of, but I don’t know which it is yet. This deck gets a lot of free wins and will just crush anyone unprepared for it, but I need plenty more practice with it before I’d be prepared to take it to a tournament.

U/B Tezzeret

In the absence of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, blue mages are on the search for their new planeswalking messiah—it looks to be a three-way battle among Venser, baby Jace, and Tezzeret. My personal preference is for Tezzeret, and my first stop was back at Martin Juza’s PT: Paris deck with Kuldotha Forgemaster. The deck is reasonable, but the inability to shuffle Blightsteel Colossi and so forth back into the library without Jace to help was a real pain, and Dismember is the current removal spell du jour—that just so happens to kill Forgemaster pretty well. The deck is certainly worth further work, but it may just be trying too hard when you can just plonk down threats on four, five, and six instead of messing about with Forgemaster.

Tezzeret does have some awesome new friends to play with. Oddly, it seems Phyrexia taking over has unlocked the power of Mirrodin’s artifacts, with Spellskite and Phyrexian Metamorph playing excellently with Tezzeret, helping you maximise his plus ability while also protecting him. Some sort of Wellspring package might be worth translating over from Block to maximise the card advantage, but you could also go in a more midrange, disruptive direction like @Smi77y from 60cards.com is doing here. The combination of removal, discard, Spellskites, and Spreading Seas lets his deck force the opponent off balance while Tezzeret starts throwing out 5/5’s. Metamorph is the answer to whatever pain-in-the-ass monster your opponent has managed to get out, whether it’s a Phyrexian Obliterator or Sun Titan. Smi77y even has his own Obliterators in the sideboard to make life awfully difficult for aggressive decks. Torpor Orb randomly hoses the Exarch/Twin combo and slows down Valakut, while it will happily beat for 5 if Tezzeret asks it to. If you want to play control but liked how Caw-Blade let you exercise your aggressive impulses, Tezzeret could be a good deck for you.

A Brave New World

Just like that, my interest in Standard has been rekindled. This is the perfect time to be brewing and testing decks—whether you’re working on ideas you’ve seen here or elsewhere, or your own original creation, this is your chance! I recommend giving the Red deck above a run at your gauntlet—while most every other Red list I’ve seen is still playing Ember Haulers and other slow stuff, the predicted metagame makes me want to deal 20 damage as soon as possible. It’s only a short while until M12 is going to shake up the format once again, so get out there and brew for this format while you can—show us what Caw-Blade was holding back! As always, all thoughts are welcome in the comments or on Twitter, and I’ll see you next week when we start to get some post-ban results coming down the pipe.