Standard continues to evolve, Legacy is still in flux after the Dig Through Time ban, and Modern is still as wide open as it ever was. There’s still a lot of exploring left to do in these formats, and this week we have five decks that showcase just how much is possible. We’ll start in Standard with an exciting ramp deck playing the full four copies of both Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, as well as a build of Jeskai that goes wide with Monastery Mentor. Then we’ll head to Modern where we have a deck that can kill as early as turn three with Tower Defense. Finally, we have two awesome Legacy decks, one featuring Sneak Attack and Inferno Titan while the other is a twist on the Twelve Post archetype. There’s plenty of exciting technology, and I can’t wait to break some of it down. Let’s take a look!

The deck I’m most excited about this week is a new take on Ramp that Sam Pardee’s team tested for the Pro Tour and Gaby Spartz brought to bear in the Super League Championship. If you’re interested in powerful non-basics and ramping into giant haymakers, check out this take on Green-Red Ramp:

Green-Red Eldrazi Ramp ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Gaby Spartz, Super League Championship

• Creatures (13)
• 2 Dragonlord Atarka
• 3 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
• 4 Hangarback Walker
• 4 Jaddi Offshoot

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 4 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

• Spells (18)
• 3 Nissa's Pilgrimage
• 4 Explosive Vegetation
• 4 Map the Wastes
• 4 Sylvan Scrying
• 3 Hedron Archive

• Lands (25)
• 1 Mountain
• 14 Forest
• 1 Blighted Woodland
• 1 Haven of the Spirit Dragon
• 4 Sanctum of Ugin
• 4 Shrine of the Forsaken Gods

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
• 1 Ruin Processor
• 2 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
• 3 Rending Volley
• 4 Seismic Rupture
• 2 Whisperwood Elemental
• 2 Winds of Qal Sisma

Buy This Deck

As with most ramp decks, the plan here is relatively straightforward. The deck is packed with 3- and 4-cost ramp spells that help you quickly ramp up to the likes of Ugin, Ulamog, and Dragonlord Atarka. Hangarback Walker allows you to fill in any gaps in your curve while Jaddi Offshoot shores up you matchup against Red decks, particularly in conjunction with the ramp spells.

When I saw Sylvan Scrying, Shrine of the Forsaken Gods and Sanctum of Ugin, I was sold. Sylvan Scrying functions as a ramp spell by finding Shrine of the Forsaken Gods or Blighted Woodland, but also as a business spell by allowing you to find either Sanctum of Ugin or Haven of the Spirit Dragon. You even have the ability to add lands like Mage-Ring Network or Crucible of the Spirit Dragon. This utility is a huge part of what makes the deck function. Sanctum of Ugin in particular allows this deck to ensure that it rarely runs out of gas. When you have a land that helps cast your giant bombs and incidentally tutors up a backup Ulamog when you cast your first giant colorless threat, it becomes easy to clear away all of the problematic permanents on the board, or cut your opponent off of key colors.

All told, this is a deck that can easily overwhelm the more midrangey decks in Standard. Your end game is both consistent and enormously powerful thanks to Sanctum of Ugin allowing you to chain together Ulamogs and other large colorless threats. If you’re looking to do something huge in Standard, this deck is certainly a good place to start.

In the first few weeks of Standard, we have seen various flavors of Jeskai among the most powerful and popular decks in the format. As the format has continued to develop, one of the most important questions has become this: how do you go over the top of other midrange decks that gum up the ground with Deathmist Raptors and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar tokens? Josh-Utter Leyton may have the answer:

Jeskai Mentor ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Josh Utter-Leyton, Standard Super League Championship

• Creatures (13)
• 1 Dragonmaster Outcast
• 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
• 4 Monastery Mentor
• 4 Seeker of the Way

• Spells (21)
• 1 Kolaghan's Command
• 2 Dispel
• 2 Murderous Cut
• 2 Ojutai's Command
• 4 Fiery Impulse
• 2 Exert Influence
• 4 Magmatic Insight
• 4 Treasure Cruise

• Lands (26)
• 2 Island
• 2 Mountain
• 2 Plains
• 1 Prairie Stream
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 2 Smoldering Marsh
• 4 Bloodstained Mire
• 4 Evolving Wilds
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Dispel
• 1 Kolaghan's Command
• 2 Rending Volley
• 4 Disdainful Stroke
• 3 Radiant Flames
• 2 Mastery of the Unseen
• 2 Dragonlord Silumgar

Buy This Deck

This is an exciting take on Jeskai for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Monastery Mentor is a big deal. In a deck featuring as much cheap interaction as Jeskai, this is a card that demands an answer immediately before it threatens to take over the game. If you manage to untap with a Mentor in play, you can chain together enough spells to assemble a dominating ground force.

A huge component of this plan is the inclusion of Magmatic Insight alongside a high land count. This allows you to churn through your deck faster than any other deck in the format. It allows you to flip your Jace, Vryn's Prodigy early more consistently, fuel Treasure Cruises and Murderous Cuts more effectively, and find your high impact one- and two-ofs more often.

This is a new breed of Jeskai deck; it doesn’t rely on tempoing opponents out with Mantis Rider, and instead overwhelms them with Monastery Mentor and Treasure Cruise. This gives you the potential to win protracted games against control decks, go wide against Deathmist Raptor and Gideon decks, or even win games out of nowhere if your opponent stumbles. Monastery Mentor is a big deal, and it may just be time for him to make a comeback.

One of the decks I have the fondest memories of in old Extended was the aggressive Abzan deck featuring Doran, the Siege Tower. That was a deck that leaned heavily on Treefolk Harbinger to smooth out draws, allowing you to find Doran himself or Murmuring Bosk as necessary. Most importantly, the deck was able to consistently access Doran, and consequently was able to build around it, playing many cheap, high toughness creatures that wouldn’t normally make the cut. This week, Larry Waymon brings us an exciting Modern take on this type of strategy with a few important twists.

Doran ? Modern | Larry Waymon

• Creatures (22)
• 1 Gavony Ironwright
• 2 Siege Rhino
• 3 Noble Hierarch
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Doran, the Siege Tower
• 4 Spellskite
• 4 Tarmogoyf

• Spells (16)
• 3 Abrupt Decay
• 3 Path to Exile
• 4 Tower Defense
• 4 Lingering Souls
• 2 Assault Formation

• Lands (22)
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Forest
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Murmuring Bosk
• 1 Stirring Wildwood
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 2 Horizon Canopy
• 2 Overgrown Tomb
• 2 Temple Garden
• 4 Verdant Catacombs
• 4 Windswept Heath

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Qasali Pridemage
• 1 Scavenging Ooze
• 2 Choke
• 1 Rest in Peace
• 1 Stony Silence
• 1 Eidolon of Rhetoric
• 1 Dismember
• 1 Golgari Charm
• 1 Slaughter Pact
• 1 Anafenza, the Foremost
• 3 Liliana of the Veil
• 1 Creeping Corrosion

Buy This Deck

This deck plays many cards that are extraordinarily powerful in the current Modern metagame. Spellskite is incredible against many of the combo decks like Infect, Splinter Twin, and Auras. Lingering Souls is positively game-breaking against Affinity and Infect, as well as most fair decks in the format. These kinds of cards backed by the powerful removal suite of Path to Exile and Abrupt Decay will frequently be enough to keep the linear decks in check.

The exciting aspect of this deck is Doran. How much better is Spellskite when it brawls like a 4/4? Tarmogoyf, Siege Rhino, and all of your mana creatures also get a small boost, but these advantages do add up. Critically important is the ability for this deck to play Assault Formation as additional copies of Doran to provide consistency, but also as a mana sink that helps you kill your opponents, particularly when you can flood the board with mana creatures and spirit tokens.

The most important innovation that Larry brought to the table is the inclusion of Tower Defense. This card allows you to kill opponents early and out of nowhere. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which you spend your first three turns playing mana creatures, followed by Doran and Lingering Souls on subsequent turns. Think about how much damage a Tower Defense represents on that fourth turn. Effectively +5/+5 for 2 mana at instant speed is absolutely absurd. Forget disrupting opposing combo decks; Tower Defense gives this deck the ability to beat them heads up in a race.

It wasn’t that long ago that Show and Tell decks were the dominant flavor of combo in Legacy. The favored build fluctuated between U/R builds featuring Sneak Attack, Mono-Blue Omniscience decks, and U/B Reanimator strategies based on the metagame, but Show and Tell was always one of the top contenders. The banning of Dig Through Time has changed that, at least for the time being. Last weekend, Andrew Hisner showed us a take on Mono-Red Sneak Attack which shares some elements with the Show and Tell combo decks, but has some important tools for the new metagame.

Mono-Red Sneak Attack ? Legacy | Andrew Hisner

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Worldspine Wurm
• 2 Wurmcoil Engine
• 3 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
• 3 Griselbrand
• 3 Inferno Titan
• 4 Simian Spirit Guide

• Spells (24)
• 4 Seething Song
• 4 Through the Breach
• 4 Blood Moon
• 4 Sneak Attack
• 4 Chalice of the Void
• 4 Lotus Petal

• Lands (20)
• 9 Mountain
• 3 Sandstone Needle
• 4 Ancient Tomb
• 4 City of Traitors

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Defense Grid
• 3 Trinisphere
• 1 Ashen Rider
• 2 Faerie Macabre
• 3 Magus of the Moon
• 2 Pyroclasm
• 2 Shattering Spree

Buy This Deck

The Legacy metagame is shifting in a big way after Dig Through Time got the ban-hammer. The powerful delve spells fueled midrangey Blue decks like Miracles and various Sultai or Jeskai control decks. With that incentive gone, the metagame is shifting back toward Delver of Secrets variants featuring Wasteland, Daze, and Stifle. That combination of cheap threats and disruption is bad news for the slow combo decks of the format, since you allow these decks extra turns to cantrip into the disruption and burn spells they need to close out the game.

Andrew has taken a different approach. His plan is to jam cards that threaten to end the game on the spot. This deck can easily cast a Chalice of the Void, Trinisphere, or Blood Moon as early as turn one. If that doesn’t resolve, you can threaten a Sneak Attack or Through the Breach, hopefully putting Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Griselbrand into play. If that doesn’t resolve, you can hard cast Wurmcoil Engine or Inferno Titan.

The power of these deck comes in the raw acceleration provided by the eleven two-mana lands backed by Lotus Petal and Simian Spirit Guide. These let you force your opponent to have interaction early and often or risk losing the game on the spot. How many ways are there to interact with turn one Blood Moon or Trinisphere on the play? How about when it’s backed up by a turn two Seething Song into Sneak Attack or Through the Breach?

That’s not to say that this deck can’t go long. The longer the game goes, the more likely you can just hard cast your giant monsters, which are still more powerful than what the rest of the format is doing despite their mana inefficiency. This style of deck is absolutely going to suffer from consistency issues due to the lack of Blue cantrips, but you gain a lot of explosiveness from the Sol lands and Red rituals. If you’re looking to jam powerful cards and end games before they really begin, this might be a good deck to take for a spin.

Our last deck is a twist on one of my favorite decks in Legacy: Twelve Post. This is a deck that relies on Cloudpost, Glimmerpost, and Vesuva to cast monstrous Eldrazi and overwhelm your opponents. One of the issues the deck has always faced is striking a balance between the power of colored spells versus colorless spells and consequently the balance between Loci, colored mana sources, and utility lands. KnivGustav has a new take on the archetype that has some interesting answers to these problems:

Twelve Post ? Legacy | KnivGustav, 3-1 Legacy Daily Event

• Creatures (9)
• 1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
• 1 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
• 1 Veteran Explorer
• 4 Primeval Titan

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

• Spells (22)
• 4 Crop Rotation
• 1 Natural Order
• 4 Green Sun's Zenith
• 2 Expedition Map
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 2 Trinisphere
• 3 Relic of Progenitus
• 4 Sensei's Divining Top

• Lands (27)
• 4 Forest
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Cavern of Souls
• 1 Dark Depths
• 1 Eye of Ugin
• 1 Karakas
• 1 Savannah
• 1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
• 1 Thespian's Stage
• 1 Wooded Foothills
• 2 Dryad Arbor
• 2 Vesuva
• 2 Windswept Heath
• 4 Cloudpost
• 4 Glimmerpost

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Circle of Protection: Red
• 1 Dawnstrider
• 1 Gaddock Teeg
• 1 Glacial Chasm
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 4 Leyline of Sanctity
• 1 Melira, Sylvok Outcast
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Rest in Peace
• 2 Thorn of Amethyst

Buy This Deck

This deck has two exciting additions that can change how the decks plays out: Veteran Explorer and Natural Order. Veteran Explorer provides early interaction that strongly discourages your opponent from attacking into it. Despite not having a reliable means of killing your own Explorers, this will force your opponent to cantrip into a removal spell before getting aggressive on the ground. Natural Order, on the other hand, is a backup to Green Sun's Zenith, allowing you to tutor for powerful singletons or ramp into Primeval Titan as early as turn three. One Primeval Titan trigger getting two Cloudposts is often enough to let you start jamming giant spells, but if you ever get a second trigger, you can typically start using Eye of Ugin to bury your opponent.

The second exciting innovation in this deck is the suite of colorless spells. Trinisphere improves your game against combo and tempo decks by buying you enough time for you to rev your engine. Strange as it may seem, Ugin is a great way to bridge the gap between Primeval Titan and Emrakul, helping to stabilize the board or just take over the game. Finally, Relic of Progenitus is a huge deal, helping to keep Deathrite Shaman under control, as well as any errant Tasigur, the Golden Fangs, Nimble Mongoose, or Golgari Grave-Trolls.

Lastly, Titania, Protector of Argoth is a great addition to this deck, as it gives you a powerful Natural Order or Green Sun's Zenith target against Wasteland decks. Either she helps you recover from a Wasteland that already hit a Cloudpost, or threatens to kill your opponent if they try to Wasteland you after she’s already hit the battlefield.