Week one of Battle for Zendikar Constructed is in the books, which means there has been some time to let the new cards and interactions percolate. On top of that, we have a week’s worth of Standard results to give us an idea of how the format is shaping up. This means there are going to be plenty of awesome decks featuring Battle for Zendikar goodness, and I can’t wait to take a look at them. This week we’re focusing on Standard, with three decks featuring Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, and Hardened Scales. Then we’ll check out an awesome take on Retreat to Coralhelm in Modern and, finally, find out what Greenwarden of Murasa can do in Vintage. Let’s get started!

There were two big questions heading into this new Standard format. First, will it be too fast for some of the more expensive cards to really shine? Second, what will mana bases look like and how many colors will a deck be able to support? Ali Aintrazi didn’t stop to ask questions, he dove right in and set out to see just how big you can go when every color is an option:

Five-Color Eldrazi Ramp ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Ali Aintrazi

• Creatures (18)
• 2 Dragonlord Atarka
• 2 Dragonlord Dromoka
• 2 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
• 2 Oblivion Sower
• 2 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
• 4 Catacomb Sifter
• 4 Hangarback Walker

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

• Spells (14)
• 2 Explosive Vegetation
• 3 Nissa's Pilgrimage
• 4 Radiant Flames
• 1 From Beyond
• 4 Hedron Archive

• Lands (26)
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 7 Forest
• 1 Canopy Vista
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 2 Smoldering Marsh
• 3 Haven of the Spirit Dragon
• 4 Bloodstained Mire
• 4 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Crux of Fate
• 1 Dragonlord Dromoka
• 1 Dragonlord Ojutai
• 2 Dragonlord Silumgar
• 1 Mob Rule
• 2 Naturalize
• 1 Seismic Rupture
• 4 Siege Rhino
• 1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
• 1 Utter End

Buy This Deck

At its core, this is a base Green deck that splashes small amounts of the other colors to flesh out its curve and provide a powerful top end. The deck touches Red for Radiant Flames and Dragonlord Atarka, White for Dragonlord Dromoka, and Black for Catacomb Sifter. The Green base gives you access to powerful and consistent ramp and fixing in the form of Nissa's Pilgrimage plus Explosive Vegetation. These cards help you find enough basics so that your dual lands will enter the battlefield untapped and allow you to smoothly ramp up to your powerful top end.

The power of this deck is that you often don’t need more than one source of a given color. This means that Haven of the Spirit Dragon and Battle for Zendikar duals are more than sufficient for you to splash all manner of cards, like Dragonlord Ojutai and Dragonlord Silumgar. The best part is that the abundance of ramp allows you to really utilize Haven of the Spirit Dragon as both a fixer early on in the game and as recursion for powerful Dragons or even Ugin, the Spirit Dragon as the games drag on.

With access to Radiant Flames, Hangarback Walker, and even Catacomb Sifter to serve as roadblocks which buy you time to hit land drops and cast Hedron Archives, you’re not worried about the midrangey aggressive decks. With Siege Rhino and other potential life gain out of the sideboard, you even have the ability to further shore up your aggressive matchups by boarding out Ulamog and his ilk for cheaper interactive cards.

This deck shows just how powerful the fixing in this format is and how flexible the five-color decks can be. This is a deck with access to many of the most powerful cards in Standard, and that gives you the ability to overwhelm your opponent with sheer card quality. The biggest concern with this style of deck is ensuring that you have the right combination of Dragons and answers for a given week. You may be able to cast all of the best cards in the format, but you have to know which ones to put in your deck first. If you have a good handle on what the format is going to look like, overpowering your opponents with awesome Dragons and Planeswalkers may be the best thing you can be doing!

Many people believed that Jeskai would be a runaway favorite for best deck in the format after rotation. The absence of Lightning Strike and Hero's Downfall make Mantis Rider substantially better, and its ability to fly over top of both Siege Rhino and Hangarback Walker is not to be overlooked. While Jeskai was certainly a fine deck for week one of Battle for Zendikar Standard, Adam Varner was ready to dream a little bigger. The combination of fetchlands, Sunken Hollow, and Smoldering Marsh makes a Black splash pretty effortless, and Adam used that to great effect, putting up a Top 4 finish in week one of the new Standard:

Jeskai Black ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Adam Varner, 4th StarCityGames Open

• Creatures (15)
• 1 Butcher of the Horde
• 2 Dragonmaster Outcast
• 4 Hangarback Walker
• 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
• 4 Mantis Rider

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 3 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar

• Spells (17)
• 1 Dispel
• 1 Fiery Impulse
• 1 Jeskai Charm
• 2 Ojutai's Command
• 2 Wild Slash
• 3 Dig Through Time
• 3 Valorous Stance
• 4 Crackling Doom

• Lands (25)
• 1 Island
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Mountain
• 3 Plains
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 2 Mystic Monastery
• 2 Prairie Stream
• 2 Smoldering Marsh
• 3 Flooded Strand
• 4 Bloodstained Mire
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Arashin Cleric
• 1 Disdainful Stroke
• 1 Dispel
• 1 Negate
• 1 Ojutai's Command
• 2 Surge of Righteousness
• 3 Radiant Flames
• 2 Touch of the Void
• 1 Tragic Arrogance

Buy This Deck

There are plenty of awesome things going on here. At first glance, it looks like a straightforward Jeskai deck, but the addition of powerful Black cards like Butcher of the Horde and Crackling Doom actually add a lot of flexibility to the deck. Butcher of the Horde is particularly powerful in conjunction with Hangarback Walker, allowing you to turn your Hangarback Walker into Thopters at will and activate Butcher’s abilities as necessary. Crackling Doom is similarly powerful, allowing you to keep your opponent’s Siege Rhinos off the board while you continue crashing in with Mantis Rider and friends.

It’s important to note that Crackling Doom is very strong against Dragonlord Ojutai, but abysmal against the likes of Hangarback Walker. Consequently, this is likely a card whose value will fluctuate wildly from week to week, largely depending on the prevalence of Hangarback Walker.

One of the coolest inclusions in this deck is Dragonmaster Outcast, who is a reasonable 1-drop to apply a small amount of pressure, but threatens to start taking over the game once you hit your sixth land drop. Dragonmaster Outcast is especially awesome in this deck because you can buy him back with Ojutai's Command. This gives the deck an incredible amount of flexibility and resiliency, as Ojutai's Command is now much more capable of threatening to end games quickly while still providing all of the utility that we’ve become accustomed to.

All told, this is a deck with a lot of power that provides flexibility in both deck-building and gameplay. If you’re looking for something that affords a wide variety of options and play patterns, this may be a great place to start off in this new format.

Toward the end of the previous Standard, we saw a few exciting takes on Hardened Scales begin to make their presence known in the format. With the rotation of Theros and the printing of cards like Undergrowth Champion, this may be the perfect time for Hardened Scales to show us what it’s made of. Take a look at David Phelps’ take on the archetype from this past weekend:

Green-White Hardened Scales ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | David Phelps, 16th StarCityGames Open

• Creatures (22)
• 2 Abzan Falconer
• 4 Avatar of the Resolute
• 4 Den Protector
• 4 Hangarback Walker
• 4 Managorger Hydra
• 4 Servant of the Scale

• Spells (16)
• 1 Inspiring Call
• 3 Feat of Resistance
• 4 Dromoka's Command
• 4 Valorous Stance
• 4 Hardened Scales

• Lands (22)
• 1 Plains
• 8 Forest
• 1 Flooded Strand
• 4 Canopy Vista
• 4 Windswept Heath
• 4 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Arashin Cleric
• 1 Hidden Dragonslayer
• 1 Evolutionary Leap
• 1 Feat of Resistance
• 2 Inspiring Call
• 2 Plummet
• 2 Surge of Righteousness
• 2 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar
• 1 Flooded Strand

Buy This Deck

This is a really exciting deck with lots of interesting and powerful interactions centered around the use of +1/+1 counters in conjunction with Hardened Scales. It starts all the way at the bottom of your curve with Servant of the Scale and Hangarback Walker, providing reasonable bodies with good effects that are substantially better with a Hardened Scales. Hangarback Walker is particularly absurd, since each activation will net you two counters instead of one. Similarly, Managorger Hydra will net two counters per trigger, allowing it to spiral out of control very quickly, particularly when backed by Valorous Stance. And that’s all with just one Hardened Scales; can you imagine multiples?

With that many +1/+1 counters floating around, Avatar of the Resolute becomes an enormous threat for minimal investment, and Abzan Falconer allows you to send your whole team to the air if the ground is stalled. The power of this +1/+1 counter engine backed by the resiliency of the Den Protector and Deathmist Raptor dynamic duo gives this deck a lot of raw damage output and staying power, which is a pretty good place to be in a new format.

What’s especially interesting to think about is the use of Dromoka's Command and Feat of Resistance as combat tricks in this deck. The ability to provide some amount of utility as removal and protection respectively while also functioning as a combat trick and a way to spread +1/+1 counters around at instant speed means that these cards have a lot of flexibility, particularly when Hardened Scales is involved. Suddenly you can give a creature flying mid-combat when Abzan Falconer is in play, or put extra counters on Hangarback Walker in response to a sweeper.

All in all, this deck has a lot of raw power, particularly when you draw multiple copies of Hardened Scales. Even in the absence of the deck’s namesake, there are many efficient threats backed by synergistic protection and Dromoka's Command. It’s a little surprising that we don’t see any copies of Undergrowth Champion in the 75, but it’s certainly possible that the deck doesn’t have space for another 3-drop outside of Managorger Hydra. Regardless, this seems like an awesome deck that I hope to see much more of in the coming weeks.

Another new set means it’s time for another wacky Modern combo deck. Battle for Zendikar brought us a really cool, but largely underwhelming cycle of enchantments that key off of landfall to provide your choice of two small effects. The retreat cycle has been mostly glossed over as unplayable in constructed with the exception of Retreat to Coralhelm. Take a look at Travis Woo’s vision for Retreat to Coralhelm in Modern:

Knightfall ? Modern | Travis Woo

• Creatures (22)
• 1 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Restoration Angel
• 2 Voice of Resurgence
• 3 Eternal Witness
• 3 Geist of Saint Traft
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Knight of the Reliquary
• 4 Noble Hierarch

• Spells (15)
• 1 Mana Leak
• 3 Path to Exile
• 3 Remand
• 4 Collected Company
• 4 Retreat to Coralhelm

• Lands (23)
• 1 Island
• 2 Plains
• 4 Forest
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Gavony Township
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Kessig Wolf Run
• 1 Sejiri Steppe
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 2 Flooded Strand
• 2 Misty Rainforest
• 2 Temple Garden
• 4 Windswept Heath

Buy This Deck

This deck is trying to assemble the combination of Knight of the Reliquary plus Retreat to Coralhelm. Once both cards are in play, you can use your Knight to sacrifice a shockland to go grab another land. When that land enters the battlefield, Retreat to Coralhelm allows you to untap your Knight. This creates a loop, where each Knight activation lets you float a mana and untap your Knight, slowly filtering lands out of your deck and into your graveyard while netting some amount of mana. Don’t forget that you can grab fetches for extra landfall triggers and for growing your Knight, as long as your life total isn’t in any danger.

The big question is this: what do you do once you’ve pumped your Knight and removed all the lands from your deck? Travis finishes his combo by tutoring up Kessig Wolf Run as a mana sink to give his enormous Knight a few extra points of power as well as trample to make sure he can end the game that turn. Travis also has access to Sejiri Steppe to function either as a one-time protection spell or to let you rumble past your opponent’s Spirit tokens or mana creatures.

The best part? This deck is more than capable of winning a normal game of Magic. Collected Company into Geist of Saint Traft, Eternal Witness, and Knight of the Reliquary puts on the pressure and helps you fight through removal spells. You can also race people by playing a turn two Geist or Knight off mana creatures, or tutor up a Gavony Township to go wide. You even have the ability to use Knight of the Reliquary to tutor up matchup-defining lands like Ghost Quarter and use Eternal Witness to recycle those lands until you’ve taken over the game.

This deck is the most recent of many Modern decks that try to have a normal, proactive game-plan with the potential for a combo finish if your opponents put their shields down. I don’t know if the combo is too cute or not, but the shell certainly seems powerful enough to force your opponent to tap out and deal with Geists and Knights, which would give you the opening you need to resolve a Retreat and combo out. Is this deck good enough? There’s only one way to find out.

The release of Battle for Zendikar makes this an exciting time for most constructed formats, but it’s particularly exciting for Vintage given the recent banned and restricted shakeups. With the format in upheaval, Nat Moes is looking to explore a tried and true archetype with a Battle for Zendikar twist. Check out his take on Greenwarden of Murasa in Oath of Druids:

Greenwarden Oath ? Vintage | Nat Moes

• Creatures (1)
• 1 Greenwarden of Murasa

• Spells (43)
• 1 Ancestral Recall
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Chain of Vapor
• 1 Dig Through Time
• 1 Memory's Journey
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Vampiric Tutor
• 2 Dark Ritual
• 2 Hurkyl's Recall
• 2 Mental Misstep
• 4 Force of Will
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Show and Tell
• 1 Tendrils of Agony
• 1 Time Walk
• 1 Treasure Cruise
• 1 Yawgmoth's Will
• 3 Cabal Therapy
• 4 Preordain
• 4 Oath of Druids
• 1 Black Lotus
• 1 Lotus Petal
• 1 Mana Crypt
• 1 Mox Emerald
• 1 Mox Jet
• 1 Mox Pearl
• 1 Mox Ruby
• 1 Mox Sapphire

• Lands (16)
• 1 Island
• 1 Polluted Delta
• 2 Tropical Island
• 3 Underground Sea
• 4 Forbidden Orchard
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Tolarian Academy

Buy This Deck

This deck is awesome! The goal is, as always, to use Forbidden Orchard to activate Oath of Druids, put an awesome creature into play, and win the game handily from there. I’ve seen a few takes on Oath of Druids featuring Eternal Witness over the years. The goal of those decks has always been to Witness back Yawgmoth's Will and do something super busted, the problem being that you’re reasonably likely to either whiff off Yawgmoth's Will or not have enough mana to combo off that turn.

Greenwarden of Murasa working in conjunction with Cabal Therapy solves both of these problems. Ideally, you can use Cabal Therapy to strip Force of Will or other disruption from your opponent’s hand and rebuy both Black Lotus and Yawgmoth's Will. Even if you missed though, you can usually find a winning combination with a free Restock. Black Lotus plus a tutor. Yawgmoth's Will plus Chain of Vapor to bounce and replay all of your moxen to net a little extra mana.

Regardless, you should be able to find some combination that lets you chain enough mana and spells together to find Tendrils of Agony and storm your opponent out of the game.

I don’t know if this is has the same kind of raw power and resiliency as the Griselbrand builds of Oath of Druids, particularly since Show and Tell is not an especially powerful sideboard option for this build. However, Greenwarden of Murasa makes you much more likely to win the game on the spot if an Oath of Druids trigger resolves, which is certainly valuable. The potential to just win could be improved by adding Time Vault and Voltaic Key as another two card combo to mill over and rebuy with Greenwarden, but whether or not that’s necessary will become more evident as we spend more time exploring this exciting new variant on the classic combo Oath archetype.