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Main » Articles » 5 Decks You Can't Miss This Week: #MTGOrigins Edition

5 Decks You Can't Miss This Week: #MTGOrigins Edition

Carlos Gutierrez
Posted on July 18, 2015
 Reddit

Magic Origins is here, and it's going to shake up Standard in a big way. Double-faced Planeswalkers. Tribal themes. New and exciting six drops, sweepers, and more. These weekends are the most exciting part of the Magic year, when there is limitless excitement for new cards and innovation. This week we're celebrating the new set by looking ahead at what Standard might look like after this weekend's first set of results featuring the last of the Core Sets. We'll start with three Standard brews, featuring Elves, Kytheon, and Helm of the Gods. Then we'll head into Modern where we take a look at an exciting Vengevine deck followed by a new take on Burn.

One of the exciting themes of Magic Origins is the return of Tribal to Standard. Origins prominently features both Elves and Goblins as creature types with prominent tribal support that could make a big impact on Standard. Elves in particular is exciting due to the availability of both Collected Company and Chord of Calling as additional ways to see more cards and fight against sweepers. Chris VanMeter thinks that Elves might have what it takes in the new Standard. Here's where he's starting off:

Green-Black Elves - Magic Origins Standard | Chris VanMeter

This deck is more than capable of using the combination of Dwynen's Elite and Dwynen himself to get off to a quick, aggressive start and just bury your opponent in bodies. However, the combination of Sylvan Messenger, Chord of Calling, and Shaman of the Pack also gives you a powerful way to close out games or race without relying on the combat step.

Traditionally, this style of Elf deck that relies on swarming the board is incredibly weak to sweepers. These decks become more viable when cards like Ranger of Eos and Glimpse of Nature provide card advantage to combo out before hand or grind out the control decks. The strength of this deck is that the combination of Chord of Calling and Sylvan Messenger give you a resilience to sweepers, as you can recover the card and board advantage at instant speed, and begin reapplying pressure to your opponent's life total.

Don't underestimate Gnarlroot Trapper in this deck! not only is it a mana elf, helping you get the Sylvan Messenger engine going a turn ahead of schedule; but it's also a way to help trade your Elvish Visionarys and such with Siege Rhinos and Dragonlord Ojutais. The choice of Collected Company versus Chord of Calling is still a question, but the Elf shell is here, and it looks powerful.

One card that I overlooked in the Magic Origins spoiler was Helm of the Gods. After all, I don't tend to play with a ton of Enchantments. The only decks that really do are Heroic decks or Constellation decks, neither of which seem especially interested in a pseudo-Bonesplitter. Jim Davis thinks otherwise:

White-Black Aggro - Magic Origins Standard | Jim Davis

Jim argues that Helm of the Gods is very close to a Cranial Plating, a card which has defined Modern Aggro since the format's inception. Looking at this list, it's shocking how easy it is to pack your deck full of Creatures and removal spells that are incidentally Enchantments. In a deck like this, it's not difficult to imagine Helm of the Gods consistently representing +3/+3, which is enormously powerful.

The question is whether the rest of the deck is powerful enough to hold up when Helm of the Gods doesn't make an appearance. To that end, Blood-Cursed Knight is your other payoff, and is a card that ought to be enormously important in the new Standard. Red aggressive decks have picked up a number of super powerful tools, and so paying three for a first-striking, lifelinking beater that dodges Wild Slash seems incredibly powerful. Similarly, the incidental lifegain from Underworld Coinsmith should be very relevant.

Between Helm of the Gods and Blood-Cursed Knight, the payoffs seem big enough. The big question is whether the rest of the deck can appropriately support these cards, and if the deck can stack up against powerful stand-alone cards like Siege Rhino and Dig Through Time.

One of the most exciting cards to come out of Magic Origins is Kytheon, Hero of Akros. As long as you're willing to invest in a bunch of small, White creatures, this card offers the potential to get a Planeswalker for the low, low price of one White mana. That's a deal that's difficult to pass up, particularly when Raise the Alarm is in the format. Here's Josh Silvestri's take on Mono-White aggro featuring Kytheon:

Mono-White Aggro - Magic Origins Standard | Josh Silvestri

We've seen a lot of takes on Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx during its tenor in Standard. White has never been a color that has been able to take full advantage of Nykthos until now. The combination of Archangel of Tithes and Knight of the White Orchid gives the White deck more opportunities to play creatures with lots of White symbols and use the mana advantage from Nykthos to overwhelm opponents with effects like Mass Calcify, Secure the Wastes, or Mastery of the Unseen.

Kytheon is particularly powerful because this deck has so many ways to flip him on turn three. Raise the Alarm does it all on its own, as does just curving out with additional one drops. Knight of the White Orchid is a card that also gives you opportunities to cast extra creatures. You can deliberately miss your third land drop before casting your knight to get up to four lands and cast an extra two-drop to gain tempo and board presence.

In addition to swarming the board, this deck gets a psuedo anthem in the form of Consul's Lieutenant. Gideon does a great job of helping you attack with the Lieutenant for free, giving your random Brimaz and Soldier tokens a bonus as you try to chip in for the last few points of damage.

This is a deck with a lot of explosive potential as well as staying power, and I can't wait to see how good Kytheon is in this shell, and to find out exactly what a White Nykthos deck can do.

Vengevine is a card that defined Standard during while Rise of the Eldrazi was legal and got Survival of the Fittest banned in Legacy. There's been a couple of attempts to break Vengevine shells in Modern, but they have been largely unsuccessful. At least until now. Legion273 took down the Magic Online Modern Festival with this sweet take on Jund Vengevine:

DredgeVine - Modern | Legion273, Modern Festival Champion

This deck is pretty typical of Modern Dredgevine decks. You have Golgari Grave-Troll, Stinkweed Imp, and Life From the Loam to help you hit Vengevines, Faithless Lootings, and, in some builds, Bloodghasts. The problem is that these decks are enormously inconsistent, and can't consistently apply the kind of pressure they need to race combo without getting very lucky with Dredges.

This deck uses the combination of Rotting Rats and Gravecrawler to cast two creatures and rebuy a graveyard full of Vengevines. Satyr Wayfinder and Grisly Salvage help set up the Dredge engine, while Gurmag Angler provides a backup plan that utilizes this deck's ability to stock its graveyard at a breakneck pace.

The most exciting piece of technology in this deck is the addition of Gnaw to the Bone as a way to gain a huge edge in matchups like Burn and other aggro decks that will try to race you. It's not especially difficult to imagine a scenario where you put a few Vengevines into play on turn three or four and are also able to gain ten or more like off of a Gnaw to the Bone. Similarly, sideboard cards like Ancient Grudge, Ray of Revelation, or even Ghost Quarter plus Life from the Loam are much easier to find when you're flipping five cards at a time into your graveyard instead of drawing one.

Our last deck this week is an exciting new take on Burn from Grand Prix superstar Pascal Maynard. One of the most important pieces of the Burn deck is the aggressive creatures that act as recurring sources of damage. Many Burn decks splash White and Green for cards like Lightning Helix, Boros Charm, and Destructive Revelry. That color combination lends itself to a certain powerful one-drop that has generally been left out of Burn decks:

Nacatl Burn - Modern | Pascal Maynard

Wild Nacatl is a super-powerful one-drop in Modern that is capable of dealing upwards of six damage, and attacking through bears like Eternal Witness and Snapcaster Mage. Creatures are among the most important cards in the Burn deck, representing recurring sources of damage that quickly add up to more than any other Lava Spikes or Boros Charms as far as mana efficiency goes. The additional damage output makes an enormous difference, and can mean the difference between winning and coming up two damage short.

The problem is that Wild Nacatl doesn't have haste, which makes it a poor top deck. Goblin Guide and Monastery Swiftspear can still represent two or three damage when they come off the top in the late game, whereas Wild Nacatl may be better on turn one, but gets worse as the game goes on. This means that you're making your deck a little more powerful at the cost of consistency and longevity. The good news is that this is a trade that Burn decks are typically willing to make.

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TAGS articles, standard, constructed, magic online, legacy, modern, decklist, carlos gutierrez, 5 decks, five decks, five decks you can't miss this week

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