The first major Standard tournaments in the post-M12 world have come and gone, and I’ve been poring over the new data for you fine folks. Those tournaments were of course Japanese Nationals and SCG: Cincinnati, with the respective winners being Ryuuichiro Ishida with Tempered Steel and Tim Pskowski with Caw-Blade. Of course, two tournaments is a relatively small sample size to work with, but in the absence of other data, I’ll manage with what’s available.

I’ve had a chance to do a little bit of play-testing with the Top 8 decks of each tournament, and the decks I’ve been most impressed with are Makihito Mihara’s third-place Valakut and Tomoya Fujimoto’s second-place deck, which I’d like to dub “G/W Do Somethings.” Every creature in the deck does something either when it enters the battlefield or when it dies. Let’s look at it in a bit more detail:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Obstinate Baloth

3 Acidic Slime

3 Blade Splicer

3 Lotus Cobra

4 Birds of Paradise

4 Hero of Bladehold

4 Nest Invader

3 Wurmcoil Engine

1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite

[/Creatures]

[Planeswalkers]

4 Garruk Wildspeaker

[/Planeswalkers]

[Spells]

3 Journey to Nowhere

1 Birthing Pod

[/Spells]

[Lands]

3 Plains

4 Forest

2 Marsh Flats

2 Verdant Catacombs

3 Stirring Wildwood

4 Razorverge Thicket

4 Sunpetal Grove

4 Tectonic Edge

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

1 Acidic Slime

1 Gaea's Revenge

2 Lone Missionary

3 Spellskite

1 Thrun, the Last Troll

2 Celestial Purge

2 Summoning Trap

1 Creeping Corrosion

2 Oblivion Ring

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

Some of the card choices seem odd to me, like the singleton Birthing Pod. I mean, if you’re going to the trouble of having a Birthing Pod chain, it seems to me that you want to play more than one of them. I haven’t played extensively with the deck, so I might be missing something. Other than that, the deck is very robust even if it is a little weak to combo. Some cards I like are Blade Splicer, which is great in a Birthing Pod deck, and the Creeping Corrosion in the sideboard. Tempered Steel is a deck now, and unlike Block, you can actually play Creeping Corrosions in the sideboards of good decks. Elesh Norn is also a giant beating if you can manage to get it into play. Splinter Twin decks can’t actually win with it in play, and anyone relying on Squadron Hawk and Hero of Bladehold is going to look really silly. The cost is somewhat prohibitive, which I why I recommend playing more Birthing Pods to be able to have it in play more consistently.

Speaking of combo, is it just my imagination, or has Splinter Twin been hated out? It was nearly absent from Japanese Nationals, and there were only two Splinter Twin decks in the Top 16 of Cincinnati. The other projected boogeyman, Valakut, was the most popular deck in Japan, claiming 22% of the metagame and three of the Top 8 spots. The best-performing of these players was Makihito Mihara, who won a spot on his national team. Let’s look at his deck list:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Birds of Paradise

2 Avenger of Zendikar

3 Overgrown Battlement

4 Oracle of Mul Daya

4 Primeval Titan

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Summoning Trap

2 Lightning Bolt

2 Explore

4 Cultivate

4 Green Sun's Zenith

4 Rampant Growth

1 Tumble Magnet

[/Spells]

[Lands]

10 Mountain

5 Forest

1 Raging Ravine

2 Terramorphic Expanse

2 Verdant Catacombs

4 Evolving Wilds

4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

1 Gaea's Revenge

1 Obstinate Baloth

1 Thrun, the Last Troll

1 Back to Nature

2 Creeping Corrosion

3 Memoricide

4 Pyroclasm

1 Tumble Magnet

1 Swamp

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

This list makes excellent use of Green Sun's Zenith, one I nearly didn’t catch. The singleton Birds of Paradise turns your search spell into a Rampant Growth when you need it. This makes the deck even more consistent. Counting the Zeniths, the deck has fourteen ramp cards that cost 2 or fewer mana. It’s unfortunate that he couldn’t make room for Solemn Simulacrum, but if you want to try out a few, you could cut an Avenger, a Summoning Trap, and a Tumble Magnet. The Trap is only really there to keep people honest, and loses a lot of value if your opponent knows how many you have. One card I would cut in a heartbeat is the Raging Ravine. With the six Welfare fetch lands (otherwise known as Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds), I don’t think you want more enters-the-battlefield-tapped lands. Any time I see Raging Ravine, or even worse, Khalni Garden, I cut them immediately for basic Forests. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I feel that you really can’t be durdling around with cards like this. The sideboard Memoricides are interesting, as the decks you would want to side it in against generally feel safe tapping out until you hit the dreaded 6 mana, so you’ll sometimes get to mise them. Like the Summoning Trap I mentioned before, this plan loses a lot of value when your opponent knows you have it, so it might not be a good idea to run it in the future. It’s fine for the mirror, I suppose, but you can’t rely on it to win the game for you.

If you’re looking for a straight aggro deck, you could do worse than pick up a Tempered Steel deck. There are a few examples to choose from, but they all have the same basic game plan: Play a bunch of cheap artifact creatures, slam down a Tempered Steel, and smash face. Cards like Glint Hawk Idol and Inkmoth Nexus make the deck somewhat resilient to Wrath effects. Like all non-Red aggro decks, Tempered Steel suffers from a lack of reach, so you have to be willing to accept that sometimes your opponent is going to stabilize at a low life total and beat you. Adding Red to the deck is probably not the answer, as it has a comically low land count as it is, and you really need to cast your good cards. Since it’s relatively cheap to build, I expect this deck to be very popular, so it’d be a good idea to start packing some main-deck artifact removal. Nature's Claim I like especially because it’s cheap and can also hit your opponent’s Tempered Steel.

The final deck I want to examine is Shouta Yasooka’s Tezzeret Control:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Consecrated Sphinx

1 Wurmcoil Engine

[/Creatures]

[Planeswalkers]

2 Jace Beleren

4 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas

[/Planeswalkers]

[Spells]

1 Consume the Meek

1 Stoic Rebuttal

2 Disfigure

2 Doom Blade

2 Mana Leak

1 Black Sun's Zenith

1 Sorin's Vengeance

3 Inquisition of Kozilek

3 Preordain

1 Batterskull

2 Torpor Orb

2 Tumble Magnet

3 Ratchet Bomb

4 Everflowing Chalice

[/Spells]

[Lands]

3 Swamp

4 Island

1 Inkmoth Nexus

4 Creeping Tar Pit

4 Darkslick Shores

4 Drowned Catacomb

4 Tectonic Edge

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

1 Consecrated Sphinx

3 Calcite Snapper

1 Jace Beleren

1 Doom Blade

2 Disfigure

4 Flashfreeze

2 Duress

1 Torpor Orb

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

The first thing to note here is the low artifact count—only twelve, so Tezzeret’s +1 ability isn’t reliably going to net you a card. That means that Tezzeret’s job here is to go aggro and make 5/5’s. This also explains the presence of Sorin's Vengeance. What we have here is a deck that is capable of ending the game quickly once it establishes control. In some matchups, like Valakut for instance, you want to start getting aggressive as soon as possible, as the long game favors them. I feel that the sideboard could do with more Consume the Meek to fight Tempered Steel, but as it is, it is well-suited to beat Valakut, which is what I suspect Shouta had in mind when he played the deck. I would suggest making changes if your local metagame isn’t full of Valakut.

Well, there you have it: an open Standard metagame. The decks I’ve written about today are but a small slice of what’s out there. Until a top dog truly emerges, you have your choice of what to battle with, be it midrange, combo, aggro, or control.

Until next time,

Nassim Ketita