In addition to my casual exploits, I play Friday Night Magic regularly at a small store. But the fact that it’s Standard doesn’t mean I want to play duel-oriented decks. And my current Standard deck not only gets better with multiplayer; it’s basically a Commander deck in principles and gameplay. This deck’s a blast to run, and if you’ve been wondering what to bring to a tournament or grew bored with Standard before Dragon’s Maze, try the following:

Commandard

• Creatures (17)
• 4 Borderland Ranger
• 3 Vorapede
• 1 Thragtusk
• 2 Deadeye Navigator
• 4 Luminate Primordial
• 3 Sylvan Primordial

• Ramp (8)
• 4 Farseek
• 4 Urban Evolution

• Sweepers (10)
• 4 Supreme Verdict
• 4 Planar Cleansing
• 2 Cyclonic Rift

• Lands (25)
• 3 Forest
• 2 Plains
• 1 Island
• 3 Temple Garden
• 4 Hallowed Fountain
• 4 Breeding Pool
• 4 Sunpetal Grove
• 2 Glacial Fortress
• 2 Hinterland Harbor

• Sideboard (15)
• 4 Loxodon Smiter
• 3 Rhox Faithmender
• 4 Rest in Peace
• 2 Psychic Spiral
• 2 Alchemist's Refuge

Buy This Deck

This is a straightforward deck pulled directly from multiplayer style. Ramp when it’s safe, sweep when it’s unsafe, and drop bombs that address your opponent’s bombs. It’s why many are drawn to Commander, and it’s why I’m drawn to this deck.

And when the opponent commits those resources, your bombs double as countermeasures. If a cautious opponent saved his best creature for an empty board, Luminate Primordial trumps it. I’ve been impressed with Luminate Primordial as both a post-sweeper play and as a way to force through surprise damage. Casting and flashing back Lingering Souls for a quartet of Spirits in front of a Vorapede doesn’t work if I drop Luminate Primordial the turn after. Sylvan Primordial with Planar Cleansing makes this deck the best in the room against noncreature permanents. I’ve found the reach to be important as well, as the only Standard flyers that can kill it are format unstaples Avacyn, Angel of Hope, Archdemon of Greed, and Withengar Unbound.

Deadeye Navigator might seem like goofy overkill (over-the-top-kill?), but it’s important in locking the game up. If it gets going with a Primordial, you will leave your opponent perpetually landless or creatureless. Given the number of sweepers, it’s also normally correct to just play it as a 5/5 and hope you draw something to bond with it. Keep in mind that if you want to rebond it with an upcoming play, blink it and leave it unbonded. It’s taken me awhile to get used to that.

Vorapede is critical to the sweeper plan. Never send Vorapede into a situation where it might have to undie – it should undie only off your sweepers. That’s because your intention is to cast Vorapede into an upcoming board wipe, to force opponents to commit creatures. Deadeye Navigator can reset the undying if it needs to, which is nice of it. Vorapede and Luminate Primordial mean most of your attacking is done vigilantly; that has proven more important than it looked on paper.

The deck’s rough color requirements make Borderland Ranger the correct speed bump. As slow as this deck is, you have to have for Supreme Verdict as soon as possible, so a dash of color-fixing is useful. You have more power in your deck after turn five than most decks in the format do, so blocking to live until then, even if you’re far from dying, is just fine. Cyclonic Rift is played similarly—if it’s turn two and there’s an Arbor Elf on the other side, feel free to bounce it if you don’t have a Farseek. Your late game is so good that delaying opposing development for a turn is worth it.

The sideboard is more about what shows up at my store than anything else. Loxodon Smiter and Rhox Faithmender go in against fully aggressive decks, mostly for Sylvan Primordial and Deadeye Navigator. This deck is incredibly weak to counterspells, so the Smiter and Alchemist's Refuges are there to shore up that match (and for the humor of having lands in the sideboard). The color commitments are so harsh in this deck that the Refuges make me skittish in the main deck, but the sideboard is fine for them. Psychic Spiral joins Smiter and Refuge if there’s a mill plan. Sylvan Primordial’s already an out to Nephalia Drownyard, so you’re not helpless in Game 1 against mill control, but the Spiral obviously helps out.

Given the board wipes and Primordials, this deck can be ported without changes to the multiplayer table; it might not make you popular, but it ought to hold its own. I’m not exaggerating when I say this deck feels like you’re bringing Commander to Standard; this deck has the exact same lines of play in every format. For once, your kitchen table can playtest your FNM deck.

This deck’s cheap apart from the lands; Supreme Verdict and Vorapede are the only essentials over a dollar. But this build of the deck needs dual lands so Farseek can do its thing and so you can curve the Vorapede into Planar Cleansing. If you’re short on dual lands, swap Deadeye Navigator and possibly Cyclonic Rift for Mindshrieker; it’s a quality mana sink like the Navigator but only requires colorless mana. Nimbus Swimmer could fill a similar role. Planar Cleansing is probably a little more important to the deck concept than Vorapede, so if you were finding and problematic with your mana base, Deadbridge Goliath might approximate the utility of Vorapede; Geist-Honored Monk could work as well.

People have wanted to break Urban Evolution; from what I’ve seen, this is the kind of deck that maximizes its potential. Sphinx's Revelation gets the hype and the price tag, but Urban Evolution isn’t as far behind the Revelation as the price difference might seem. If you’re like I am—a casual enthusiast at FNM—this deck will bring a smile regardless of where you play it.

Because It’s Thruller . . . Thruller Night

I’ve loved drafting Return to Ravnica block, but it hasn’t called to me much as a multiplayer set apart from jamming Guildgates into existing decks that have wanted them. Even with them, my casual decks have fewer cards from the current block than from Odyssey block, and I wasn’t even playing Magic in Odyssey block. But this tribal Thrull deck I made last week is among the most fun decks I’ve built in a long while. Get your Gatecrash on with a fun tribe:

A Thrull a Minute

• Creatures (24)
• 4 Dutiful Thrull
• 4 Thrull Parasite
• 4 Mourning Thrull
• 4 Kingpin's Pet
• 4 Thrull Champion
• 4 Treasury Thrull

• Spells (13)
• 4 Orzhov Keyrune
• 3 Spirit Mantle
• 3 Zealous Persecution
• 3 Mirrorweave

• Lands (23)
• 10 Plains
• 9 Swamp
• 4 Orzhov Guildgate

Buy This Deck

Besides the fun you get playing with Thrulls (even Orzhov Keyrune becomes a Thrull), there are a number of synergies that make this deck surprisingly powerful. It’s not that powerful, mind you—some hard removal would do it good—but it has plenty of gas to earn some wins.

All that’s fairly linear. The instants are what give the deck its real fun. You have enough creatures to make Zealous Persecution a decent aggro play that sometimes wipes tokens. But more importantly, Mirrorweaving one of your 1/1s turns Zealous Persecution into a deluxe Plague Wind (if you Mirrorweave into Thrull Parasite, you can even remove +1/+1 counters from creatures that normally would survive). Mirrorweave can also be a bizarre Holy Day if you animate Orzhov Keyrune and turn every creature into an unanimated artifact (although you’ve also just given everyone a temporary mana boost) or a chance to return most of your graveyard to your hand if everything’s a Treasury Thrull.

The most fun, however, is to Mirrorweave everything into Thrull Champion. Amoeboid Changeling is the “normal” combo with Thrull Champion, but I’ve done that deck before and didn’t want to splash blue. But if the entire board is nothing but Thrull Champions, you can create a ridiculous stack in which every creature is trying to steal every other creature without a Spirit Mantle on it. I will keep playing the deck until that happens. I’ve had five Warp Worlds resolve on the same main phase, but it’s possible that Mirrorweaving Thrull Champion might beat quintuple Warp World for the Johnniest play of a lifetime. If you’re lucky and your opponents’ creatures are tapped, you could Mirrorweave and actually profit, but there’s no harm in just making the game weird. Well, not Weird; wrong guild . . .

Conclusion

If I said that my thinking was out of a box, that would be the opposite of thinking that was out of the box. And it took a while before Gatecrash turned from the former to the latter for me. Now that it has, though, there’s a load of fun to be had. Whether you want to play a casual deck in Standard, play a Standard deck in casual, or just beat down with Thrulls, you have options.