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Main » Articles » Five Decks You'll Play This Weekend

Five Decks You'll Play This Weekend

Brandon Isleib
Posted on January 6, 2016
 Reddit

Welcome to Gathering Magic's weekly quintet of decks you should be aware of this weekend, whether you're playing a major online event, going to a Grand Prix, or hitting Friday Night Magic. This week, it's a mélange of decks across formats.

Standard: Trying to MOCSense of the Situation

Standard is fairly well brewed out these days; nevertheless, it continues to adapt on the margins. This week's Magic Online Championship Series winner shows us where Standard has been going:

Mardu ? Standard | Phizzle

The big notes out of this deck are that Abbot of Keral Keep doesn't need a bunch of cheap spells to be good and that Duress and Hallowed Moonlight are important parts of the metagame (Reid Duke was main-decking both in Dark Jeskai in Sunday's Daily). The reason both are so playable is that several decks' creatures are coming from noncreature spells. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar isn't a creature card; Secure the Wastes promises a load of creatures but isn't a creature card; Collected Company normally represents two creatures cards but isn't one; and Rally the Ancestors normally represents winning the game but falls to Duress and Hallowed Moonlight. Duress also hits control and ramp spells hard, but that's been known for a while; the key is that several creature decks right now lean heavily on noncreature spells like Collected Company and Rally the Ancestors to gain enough value to win.

Metagames like this, wherein theoretically narrow cards are playable, tend to act like rubber bands—they eventually snap back into place violently. Oath of the Gatewatch is probably that correction because most new sets are, but it's hard to know until the whole set is revealed. Another creature to help the Rally the Ancestors archetype might make things worse—or at least narrower—before they improve.

Modern: Bringing to Light an Old Standard Com . . . Wait, What?

With Bring to Light as the hottest new tutor in Modern, people are still exploring how best to use it, particularly in Scapeshift lists. In many cases, innovations in an Eternal format are imported from other environments where they were impactful. Here? Not so much:

Bring to Light Scapeshift ? Modern | Heibing

Ranger of Eos is not a card I normally see hanging out in sideboards, especially when the main deck has no creatures. So what's going on? Heibing has a three-card package as a plan for long games: Bring to Light tutors for a lone Ranger of Eos and Ranger of Eos tutors for two Dragonmaster Outcasts. Ranger of Eos and Dragonmaster Outcast were in Standard together back when, and yet, they didn't make much of an impact back then. Why play a combo in Modern that barely made a ripple in Standard?

The basic answer is that Dragonmaster Outcast came out in Worldwake. So did Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and Jace heavily punished all creatures that lacked enters-the-battlefield effects. The R/W deck of the era, Boros Landfall, already had speed on its side; it wasn't winning the long game against Jace by going bigger. Ranger of Eos was the top of its curve to find Steppe Lynx and Goblin Bushwhacker, not durdle.

So the environment in which this combo would have been great was especially hostile to it, and it lay forgotten until now, when a Modern ramp combo deck is using a G/U tutor to fetch a R/W creature suite. Magic's breadth is awesome.

Legacy: The Other Mirror Breaker

Although this week's Dailies results didn't show it quite as much, the Counterbalance–Miracles engine is as strong as ever. It's strong enough that some people are successful slanting their decks toward the mirror:

Jeskai Miracles ? Legacy | Decan

The lack of Entreat the Angels is unusual—Terminus still allows it to be called Miracles, at least—but the main things to see here are the Spell Snares and Predicts. Spell Snare is an extra answer to Counterbalance (and several other things, of course, most notably Snapcaster Mage). But it's Predict that gives Decan's plan away. Both Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top allow the top card of a player's library to be known pretty often. If Sensei's Divining Top is put back on top of the library to draw a card, Predict is a fantastic way to get rid of it while drawing two cards. When the Top isn't around, Predict's fine for flushing away any nasty card revealed to Counterbalance; it can serve the same role if you definitely don't want to draw the card on top of your library (whether revealed to Counterbalance or put there by Brainstorm). It's a narrow card, but in a world of Miracles, it holds its own, and at this point in Legacy, it might well be correct to main-deck specifically against it.

Vintage: The Uncaring Bears

As a sucker for easy to understand Eternal lists, the extreme focus here appeals to me:

White Hatebears ? Vintage | kimkaphwan42

When you see Elvish Spirit Guide and Simian Spirit Guide in the same deck, you know something's up. Here, it's landing something disruptive on the first turn—Containment Priest, Kataki, War's Wage, Leonin Arbiter, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Spirit of the Labyrinth each has decks it particularly loathes, but Vintage tends to have enough common threads to make them more broadly applicable hate than in other formats. Although the creatures are different types—there are seven Humans, eight Clerics, and eight Spirits—Cavern of Souls is here anyway; I assume the named creature type is whatever is cast on the first turn it would be used.

The sideboard has clusters of cards that sub in for whatever main-deck cards are irrelevant. Swords to Plowshares is extra copies of Path to Exile; Rest in Peace is extra Containment Priests (as is the extra Containment Priest, of course); Leyline of Sanctity is extra copies of Spirit of the Labyrinth versus Storm; and Stoneforge Mystic, Batterskull, and Sword of Fire and Ice comprise a package of general applicability.

This deck type's main drawbacks are drawing the wrong bears or having to go in blind on the first turn as to which bear will prove most disruptive. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and the artifact hate seem to be the safest, but I'd be kicking myself if I had a chance for a first-turn Containment Priest and then found out I was playing Dredge. In any event, there's a lot to like here, and it's nice to see a Vintage list that's easily understood from the deck list.

Pauper: A Common Turn-One Play

Here's another deck that wants to get going on turn one:

Goblins ? Pauper | syakisyaki

When Gavin Verhey looked at this archetype two years ago—one of the most recent mentions of the archetype online—he'd built a version with Goblin General since he was previewing its "demotion" to common in Vintage Masters. But why do that when you can hoard 1-drops like they're on clearance? With twenty-six creatures and four Lightning Bolts, exactly half the deck costs a single mana; the first turn is emphasized so much that Jackal Familiar, the smaller, non-Goblin Mogg Flunkies, is here. With Electrickery an omnipresent Pauper sideboard card, maybe the best way to go wide is to do it as quickly as possible, and this deck can't get much quicker.

Conclusion

The holiday break between major events and the Oath of the Gatewatch prerelease has felt interminable; I'm glad it's almost over. As we grow used to the two-set block, the small set will more regularly be looked to as the set to give critical mass to linear themes established in the large set, such as Allies and devoid. I hope the new toys will be as functional as they will be shiny.

Order Oath of the Gatewatch at CoolStuffInc.com today!

TAGS articles, metagame, constructed, magic online, analysis, modern, decklist, brandon isleib, 5 decks, five decks, five decks you'll play this weekend

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