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Main » Articles » 5 Decks You Can't Miss This Week

5 Decks You Can't Miss This Week

Carlos Gutierrez
Posted on November 27, 2015
 Reddit

Thanksgiving was this week, but Magic never takes a break. For many people, now is a perfect time to indulge in some cardboard craziness. Fortunately, we have five awesome decks from Standard, Modern, Legacy, and Pauper for your consideration. We’ll start in Standard with a ramp deck featuring Drowner of Hope and a crazy Disciple of the Ring brew. In Modern, we’ll find out what a more aggressive Eldrazi deck looks like. Then we’ll see if Siege Rhino has what it takes to break out in Legacy and find out how our very own Alex Ullman ruined Pauper. Let’s get started.

Drowning in Land

As Standard continues to develop, the ramp decks are starting to take over, and it’s becoming increasingly important to have a plan that goes bigger and works faster than the opposing ramp strategies. Last week, the answer was to chain together extra turns with Part the Waterveil and Temporal Trespass. In one of the Grand Prix Trials, Horie Toru had an interesting take that’s a little bit leaner.

G/U Eldrazi ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Horie Toru, 1st Grand Prix Trial

The big innovation here is the inclusion of Drowner of Hope as something between Frost Titan and Primeval Titan. This card allows you to stabilize the board against more aggressive strategies, but also ramps you right up to eight mana for Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. Drowner also interacts well with From Beyond, allowing you to start locking down the board while you hit your land drops and take over the game with your giant monsters.

The other exciting aspect of this deck is the inclusion of Jace, Vryn's Prodigy as a way to sculpt your draw and find the perfect balance of ramp and monsters. Jace also allows you to slow down aggressive draws, flashback ramp spells to cast your giant spells, and give you time to cast Dig Through Time to help find the spells you need to close out a longer game. This deck also includes Nissa, Vastwood Seer as both a speedbump against aggressive decks and a powerful card advantage engine against control and midrange opponents.

All told, this deck may not go as far over the top as the other ramp decks, but Drowner of Hope is a fantastic midgame threat that functions as both a giant roadblock and a ramp spell as necessary, helping to protect your Planeswalkers and let you cast your game-ending threats.

The One Ring to Rule Them All

In this Standard, we’ve largely seen the power of thee- and four-color mana bases powered by fetch lands and battle lands. However, there are certainly positives in sticking to just one or two colors, and among them is consistency and the ability to play spell-lands like Mage-Ring Network. This week, Matt Higgs has put together an off-the-wall Mono-Blue brew prominently featuring Disciple of the Ring:

Mono-Blue Disciple ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Matt Higgs

This is a really interesting idea. It may lack the raw power of some other Standard decks, but it definitely goes big with Disciple of the Ring. Using the combination of cheap cantrips, counterspells, and tempo cards, this deck can put a huge number of spells in the graveyard to feed Disciple. At that point, it’s easy to use Mage-Ring Network to get a ton of activations all at once.

It’s not hard to imagine using the tap ability to lock your opponent out of combat and push through big chunks of damage, especially with the ability to pump Disciple to win combat against Siege Rhinos or Tasigur, the Golden Fang. But there’s also the potential to just hold up activations as soft counters to prevent your opponent from casting spells or to untap your Hangarback Walker multiple times, especially in response to removal spells.

This is not an especially powerful deck, but it certainly pushes Disciple of the Ring about as far as it’s going to go. There are lots of cool interactions, and this deck is certainly capable of putting up a real fight at your next FNM.

Who Needs Tron Lands to Cast Eldrazi?

Our Modern deck for the week is an interesting take on the Eldrazi menace. Generally, the only decks that play cards like Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn are either Tron decks or decks that intend to cheat them into play. This build is just a little bit different. Twop’s take on Eldrazi features a lot of cantrips, colorless lands, and several of the cheaper Eldrazi.

Mono-Black Eldrazi ? Modern | twop, 3-1 Modern Daily Event

The thing that stands out most prominently to me about this deck are the lands. The deck plays four Eye of Ugin, four Eldrazi Temple, four Ghost Quarter, and four Expedition Map to help search them out. This is a deck that knows what it wants to do and doesn’t mess around along the way. So what exactly does this deck do? Well, let’s break down some of the pieces.

First, the deck plays a lot of incidental interaction in its cantrips. Nihil Spellbomb, Relic of Progenitus, and Scrabbling Claws let you cantrip through your deck to find Eldrazi Temples and other critical lands while keeping opposing Tarmogoyfs, Snapcaster Mages, and delve spells under control. In addition, Inquisition of Kozilek helps to keep combo decks in check. That’s not a ton of interaction, but fortunately this deck doesn’t need much time. It may not look like it, but the deck is deceptively explosive.

Imagine a first turn Eldrazi Temple followed by Eye of Ugin. On turn two, this deck can cast an Endless One for four. If you had a Relic of Progenitus on turn one, it wouldn’t take much more to cast a turn three Blight Herder and generate tokens. From there, you’re startlingly close to a turn four Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. Alternatively, you can just start casting Oblivion Sowers and ramping up to Eye of Ugin activations, use Wasteland Strangler to take over against Wild Nacatl decks, or use Void Winnower to lock Scapeshift and Splinter Twin decks out of their combo finish.

This is a really interesting deck with a surprising amount of explosive potential, and I’m excited to see if it develops further.

Siege Rhino Crashes into Legacy

We’ve seen many variants on the Cabal Therapy and Veteran Explorer strategies in Legacy over the years. Everything from pure G/B builds with Grave Titan and Thragtusk at the top of the curve to R/G variants with Primeval Titan for Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and Burning Wish for Scapeshift. This week we’re featuring yet another take that prominently features one of the most maligned cards in Standard. Welcome to Legacy, Siege Rhino.

Abzan Control ? Legacy | eheh_dude, 3-1 Legacy Daily Event

This deck does a lot of cool things, and seems very well-positioned in the Magic Online metagame. Given that you expect to play primarily against Miracles and various other flavors of combo, the combination of Cabal Therapy and other discard with enormous, resilient threats makes for a pretty punishing game-plan against those strategies.

This deck thrives against decks that can’t effectively leverage the additional lands generated by Veteran Explorer. Most decks in Legacy top out at 4 mana, meaning all they’re really going to use that mana for is cantripping a few extra times or hard-casting a cards like Batterskull and Force of Will. This deck, on the other hand, curves right up to Thragtusk, Sigarda, Host of Herons, and, yes, Siege Rhino. All of these monstrous threats will put enormous pressure on opposing Swords to Plowshares, particularly as the game goes on.

Perhaps the most exciting piece of this deck is the Green Sun's Zenith toolbox. This deck, more than anything in recent memory, has an incredible suite of cards to pull on. From Eternal Witness to buy back disruption spells to Meren of Clan Nel Toth for grindy matchups, and even Vexing Shusher against Counterbalance, there’s a tool for every situation.

Ruining Pauper

Pauper is one of my favorite Constructed formats, largely due to the highly interactive nature of the games. My deck of choice has always been the big mana deck of the format, Tron; though, I did love to play Cloudpost until it was banned. Unfortunately, Tron variants have been pushed out of the format by the more aggressive decks that don’t give you time to get Tron online. Alex Ullman put together an awesome new take on Tron that utilizes a key Battle for Zendikar common to buy the time necessary to leverage your mana advantage:

Ruin Tron ? Pauper | Alex Ullman

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this deck. The most exciting new inclusion in this deck is Ruin Processor. One of the biggest disadvantages to this deck is that you spend the first few turns spinning your wheels and cycling through cards trying to assemble Tron. Meanwhile, most opponents are going to be casting cheap creatures and attacking your life total. If they have a Counterspell or removal spell for your first creature or two, you’re often just dead.

Ruin Processor solves that problem by gaining life when you cast it. Bojuka Bog is the primary enabler in this build, but some opponents will be playing delve spells like Gurmag Angler or Hooting Mandrils. It’s also conceivable that this deck could play something like Journey to Nowhere. Additionally, Ruin Processor costs exactly seven, rather than Ulamog Crusher’s eight, which allows it to come down on turn three and dominate the board.

The other monsters in this deck are Fangren Marauder, Maul Splicer, and Gurmag Angler. Fangren Marauder is a fantastic curve topper that can single-handedly swing a race in your favor, but it is soft to removal spells. Enter Maul Splicer. This card tends to be underrated in these types of decks, but 7 mana is the magic number, and the three bodies make for a very impressive threat against both aggressive and controlling strategies.

Last, Gurmag Angler plays an interesting role in this style of deck. Angler gives you a giant threat you can cast if you can’t cantrip into Tron lands. However, Angler is also a way to easily cast multiple threats in one turn to overwhelm opposing countermagic. There is also the added benefit of allowing you to manipulate the contents of your graveyard for a card like Haunted Fengraf, which is a common Expedition Map target in this style of deck.

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TAGS articles, standard, constructed, deck lists, legacy, decks, commander, community, brew, carlos gutierrez, 5 decks, five decks, #mtgbfz, five decks you can't miss this week, battle for zendikar

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