Almost twenty years have passed since the movie was first released, but The Matrix has held the top spot in my personal hierarchy of favorite films since I first saw it as a nerdy, impressionable teenager. I like to go back to it every once in a while and remind myself of the uncertainty of our lives, how we ascribe such significance to an experience that might be nothing more than a giant computer simulation, and how we truly do have the freedom to shape the direction of our own subjective reality. There have been many more films exploring the same themes in the intervening years, but we haven’t really seen a Magic format pay homage to the Matrix . . . until now.

“As you can see, we’ve had our eye on you for some time now, Standard. It seems that you’ve been living two lives. In one life, you’re a diverse, interesting format with a W/B midrange deck winning the Pro Tour, a number of new and different Emerge and Delirium strategies competing with standby decks from the previous format to enable a skill-intensive, rich, multilayered format and . . . Tom Ross continuing to do well with Mono-White Humans. The other life is lived in endless mirror matches of end-of-turn Collected Company, where you go by the hacker alias Bant, and are guilty of virtually every annoying tendency on the books. One of these formats has a future, and one of them does not.”

If you were to go take a look at the most popular winning Standard decks from the recent SCG Invitational and the subsequent Classic (or hell, just go to the comments sections on certain recent Magic strategy articles), you might believe that Standard’s future looks like a Collected Company stamping on a human face—forever. (George Orwell’s 1984 is another classic that seems to have inspired the Standard format as of late.) Pretty depressing stuff, no? I know that when half of the Top 8 of most Standard tournaments is the same deck, it can seem like we’re just trapped in the Matrix, watching Bant Company slowly replicate itself all over our precious format.

I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be like this. Sometimes, the savior of the entire format comes from the most unlikely places, even as lowly as Eldritch Moon Limited. I don’t know if Haunted Dead is “The One”, but the Spirit Token it creates is certainly The 1/1.

Let’s get this out of the way before we get to lists, before we get to the nitty-gritty of playing these complex Standard decks, before we discuss countermeasures Standard’s own Agent Smith can take against us and how we address those countermeasures. To beat Bant Company consistently, you must play some sort of sweeper effect. (I’m disregarding Humans here because I was losing to Company with it, even if Tom Ross manages to pull off wins with some regularity). That sweeper can be Languish out of B/G Delirium or W/B Planeswalkers, it can be Voldaren Pariah out of U/B Zombies, it can even be Tragic Arrogance out of G/W Tokens, but most often it is Kozilek's Return out of Jund Delirium, Temurge, and my weapon of choice this past weekend, Standard Dredge. If you don’t have a way to undo the huge tempo swings that Company can create by casting the deck’s namesake card, you’re going to be fighting an unwinnable battle at Standard tournaments from here until rotation.

That said, with this one deck-building constraint on us, we still have a huge number of options for archetypes to take to upcoming Standard tournaments. I won’t keep you waiting any longer, since I know everyone is hungry to see the next step forward in Standard technology.

Here’s the final list I played, complete with one sideboard Mountain alongside no Red spells in the 75 (Kozilek's Return is colorless, not Red, remember?)

Dredge ? Eldritch Moon Standard | Ben Friedman

• Creatures (18)
• 1 Distended Mindbender
• 1 Ishkanah, Grafwidow
• 4 Elder Deep-Fiend
• 4 Haunted Dead
• 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
• 4 Prized Amalgam

• Spells (19)
• 4 Grapple with the Past
• 4 Kozilek's Return
• 2 Languish
• 4 Gather the Pack
• 4 Traverse the Ulvenwald
• 1 Vessel of Nascency

• Lands (23)
• 2 Island
• 2 Swamp
• 4 Forest
• 3 Sunken Hollow
• 4 Evolving Wilds
• 4 Llanowar Wastes
• 4 Yavimaya Coast

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Mountain
• 2 Ultimate Price
• 2 Den Protector
• 2 Pulse of Murasa
• 2 Pick the Brain
• 2 Transgress the Mind
• 1 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
• 2 To the Slaughter
• 1 Distended Mindbender

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However, the longer you stare at it, the more it draws you in. This deck’s mana is surprisingly better than Bant Company’s. With Traverse the Ulvenwald, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Evolving Wilds, and Grapple with the Past to set you up, you almost never have mana problems unless you screw it up and get the wrong land somewhere. This deck also has busted draws that other Emerge or Delirium decks can only dream of. Flipping Jace on turn three off of a Gather the Pack to make your opponent’s Sylvan Advocate a 0/3, turn four flashback Languish off Jace to sweep your opponent’s board, turn five reanimate a Haunted Dead and Emerge an Elder Deep-Fiend to Time Walk your opponent, then bring back a Prized Amalgam and flashback a Traverse for a second Deep-Fiend to do it all again? Yep, been there, done that. It’s cool and hip to use your graveyard as a second hand these days in Magic, and with Grapple, Jace, Haunted Dead, Kozilek's Return, and Prized Amalgam you can do that and more!

It’s not all sunshine and roses, though. This deck is very hard to play. You cannot just autopilot which lands you get, nor can you just blindly play a land every turn without considering the fact that you might need to discard that land to bring back your Amalgams and Haunted Dead. Do you Jace -3 on Traverse for a Deep-Fiend, or Gather to potentially hit Deep-Fiend AND Haunted Dead or Prized Amalgam? Gather also digs deeper to find you Kozilek's Return, is that something you’d be interested in? These are questions that I don’t know how to properly answer without tons of context, and even then, the plays are not scripted the way they are with so many other Standard decks. With this deck more than most, practice makes perfect. I should know, I played my first match with this deck in round five of the Invitational, and it showed!

Briefly, I’ll go over how I came to this wacky Standard Dredge deck, and give a short overview of my tournament before discussing what innovations I incorporated between the Invitational and the RPTQ, as well as ways you should look to evolve this deck for future metagames.

Fast forward through my adventure actually driving from Baltimore to New Jersey and arriving at Team Metagame Gurus’ testing cabin after midnight, and I was essentially locked in on Jund Delirium and Bant Eldrazi. The Jessup brothers, Ross Merriam and Jim Davis told me about this exciting graveyard deck they had that was beating everything in testing, but I didn’t pay them much attention. I was locked in, for better or for worse. I even told the coverage team at the event that I was playing those two decks, and I was . . . up until the end of round 3 of the Modern portion.

I sat down after a close loss to Elves, took one look at Jim Davis’ 4c Dredge/Emerge deck and asked him, “Is this deck just broken?” He replied, “I don’t know for sure, but we think so. It was beating Bant convincingly in testing, and crushed the other delirium decks.” I looked at him, looked at the decklist sitting on the table, looked at the round clock, looked back at the decklist, then thought about how whenever I have the option, I never take the chance on a potentially broken deck, instead opting for consistency. Something clicked, I told Jim, “I’ll bring this back to you before the Standard rounds start”, and I ran off to beg friends for last-minute borrows to gather the few cards I’d need to change from Jund Delirium to this four-color Emerge deck. After a close win in round four of Modern, and a hurried quest to gather cards from the back of a friend’s car, I had all the pieces together to try to make Dredge happen in Standard.

I ended up losing the next round to G/W Tokens and was feeling pretty dejected with my play in that round as well, but I knew that the deck was better than the 2-1-1 record I had earned with it. After a 3-1 finish in both Standard and Modern the next day (including two more wins over Bant Company in Standard . . . foreshadowing much?), I sewed up a Top 32 finish and immediately began the six hour drive to Virginia Beach to compete in Sunday’s RPTQ. With Delver Deputy Dylan Donegan (try saying that five times fast!) asleep in the shotgun seat, I drove late into the night to take my second shot at glory with Zombies and Eldrazi Octopi.

While contemplating my decklist on the lonely drive down, the only changes I made involved turning the main deck Noose Constrictors from the Gurus’ original list into main deck Languishes to improve the matchup against random aggressive decks and aggressive starts from Bant Company, and cut the Mountain to the sideboard in order to board it in only against aggressive decks like Spirits and Humans. Great solo brew session, right? After a straight shot down the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, we arrived at a lovely Econo Lodge, again after midnight.

As for updates to the decklist, I think that the main deck is excellent, but you are welcome to add a Den Protector or two if you are so inclined. The easiest way to lose with this deck to a grindy midrange deck is to get your Haunted Deads all exiled with Infinite Obliteration, so if that’s a concern for you, I recommend adding a couple of Deathmist Raptors (2 Raptors and 3 Den Protectors in the 75, if you go with this package) or one or two Stitchwing Skaabs to your sideboard in order to keep the chain going in the event of an Obliteration.

Now, I’d love to unreservedly recommend this deck to all of you for upcoming tournaments, but the fact is, there are easier options that also beat up on Bant Company pretty well. Gregg Spano Top 4’d the RPTQ as well, playing U/B Zombies, and I was very impressed with his deck’s resilience and power. I’d say that unless you’re prepared to play twice as much Magic as your opponents at a tournament, you would be better off playing this deck and utilizing the synergy between Haunted Dead, Voldaren Pariah and Prized Amalgam to sweep up your Bant Company opponents.

Here’s Gregg’s list!

U/B Zombies ? Eldritch Moon Standard | Gregg Spano

• Creatures (24)
• 4 Cryptbreaker
• 4 Haunted Dead
• 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
• 4 Prized Amalgam
• 4 Relentless Dead
• 4 Voldaren Pariah

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 3 Liliana, the Last Hope

• Spells (9)
• 4 Grasp of Darkness
• 2 Ruinous Path
• 3 Dark Salvation

• Lands (24)
• 12 Swamp
• 2 Island
• 2 Submerged Boneyard
• 4 Choked Estuary
• 4 Sunken Hollow

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Distended Mindbender
• 2 Risen Executioner
• 2 Clash of Wills
• 2 Negate
• 2 Summary Dismissal
• 2 Languish
• 1 Ruinous Path
• 2 Transgress the Mind

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I would love to record some videos with either of these decks in the coming weeks, so sound off if you have a preference for a particular deck that you’d like to see me take into battle.

Until next time, if you’re stressing about the state of Standard, think of what Neo asked Morpheus when he first began his training . . . 

“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge Bant Company?”

“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”