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

Five Decks You Can't Miss This Week

Carlos Gutierrez
Posted on December 20, 2013
 Reddit

This week we've got five decks across Standard, Modern, and Legacy. We'll start in Standard with two interesting ways to attack the format - a unique take on midrange and a brand new tempo deck. Next we'll head into Modern to take a look at what Fist of the Suns and Gray Merchant of Asphodel can do in that format, before finally heading into Legacy to look at a new take on Miracles. Let's get started!

Over the last few months, we've seen the format start with Devotion, shift towards board control decks, and shift back towards devotion again. Is it time for a new style of midrange deck to take over the format? Something better suited to fighting against both Mono-Blue and Mono-Black? Tradewind may have found the answer with his build of Red-White, which passes on Nykthos and Fanatic of Mogis in favor of bobs like Archangel of Thune and Elspeth, Sun's Champion:

RW Midrange - Standard | Tradewind, 3-1 Standard Daily Event

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this deck. You've got tons of removal to make sure you don't lose to random creatures. You have enough spot removal to kill Pack Rat every time, White removal for Master of Waves, and plenty of burn for Nightveil Specter. On top of that, you have plenty of flying blockers to square off against Blue devotion decks, including Archangel of Thune, which seems particularly difficult to beat. On top of that, you've got Elspeth and Assemble the Legion out of the sideboard to crush the Black decks that depend on trading 1-for-1 until you die.

The big problem with a deck like this is that you don't have anything like Sphinx's Revelation to really pull ahead and close the door on a game. Instead, you're depending on Temple of Triumph and Magma Jet to scry you into the right combination of removal spells and bombs to put games away, which is less reliable than raw card advantage. That said, you're playing an awful lot of cards that are very difficult for various decks in the format to beat, so it may be that you don't need the card advantage when your card quality is so high.

Not interested in playing devotion or Sphinx's Revelation? Tulio Jaudy may have come up with something a little more unique and exciting. You see, Tulio recently took down a PTQ with UG Flash. Let's take a look:

[Cardlist Title= UG Flash - Standard | Tulio Jaudy, PTQ Winner]

This deck doesn't look like much at first glance, but look again. Did you notice that every card in the deck is an instant? Every non-land card in Tulio's maindeck can be cast on his opponents turn. He has resilient, aggressive creatures, countermagic, card draw, and interactive spells, and he can play every one of them whenever he wants.

One of the reasons that Faeries was so difficult to play against was because they could have literally anything when they passed the turn. Tulio's deck is very similar. What do you do when he passes with four mana up? Do you attack into Briarpack Alpha? Cast a spell into Dissolve? Do you even try to play around any of those cards?

Tulio's deck plays a number of very obscure cards that happen to interact well together, and contribute to a gameplan where you frequently get to "get" your opponent with a trick they've never had to play around before. This is a deck that quickly becomes bad once people know about it, but is definitely capable of stealing games while it's under the radar.

We've seen a few iterations of Modern combo decks featuring Through the Breach andGoryo's Vengeance before. Those decks featured Fury of the Horde and were easily capable of winning games on turns two and three with the right hands. But what happens when you build your deck to be a little more resilient, especialy to countermagic? Let's look at what Ithaqua decided to add to his combo deck:

Through the Breach - Modern | Ithaqua_, 3-1 Modern Daily Event

Sometimes you've got to go deep, and that's just what Ithaqua has done here. Now he's got a full twelve ways to cheat monsters into play, ten spells to dig through his deck, eight enormous monsters. You can still jam a Griselbrand or Emrakul on turn two or three with little trouble, but Fist of Suns lets you cast Emrakul on turn four.

Not only that, but the Green splash gives you access to Sylvan Caryatid] as blocker and ramp spell over Pentad Prism, which may or may not be an upgrade depending on your perpsective. However, this splash also gives you Time of Need, which is an awesome tutor for this deck, since it can be up to four extra copies of both of your giant monsters.

What Fist of Suns really does for this deck is give you much better game against counterspell decks. Now they have to counter Through the Breach, Goryo's Vengeance, and Fist of Suns, which makes it harder for them ever to apply pressure to you. You'll end up with all the time in the world to hit land drops and set up a sequence where you can threaten a monster on their end step, then cast Emrakul off of Fist of Suns and annihilate them.

We've all seen what Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx can do in Standard, and we've even started to see what it's capable of in Primeval Titan shells, but can we go deeper? Skrem certainly can. People always talk about how Mono-Black needs Cabal Coffers to be a real deck, but Nykthos is pretty close, right?

[Cardlist Title=Modern Devotion - Modern | Skrem, 3-1 Modern Daily Event]

This deck seems kind of awesome and I love some of the things it's trying to do. Deathrite Shaman into triple-Black three drops is pretty sweet, especially when your follow-up is Phyrexian Obliterator and Gray Merchant of Asphodel for ten.

This deck has a strong, proactive plan of powerful and resilient creatures, backed by some of the best disruption Modern has to offer: Thoughtseize, Abrupt Decay, and Liliana of the Veil. I'm not sure that Hero's Downfall is better than something like Maelstrom Pulse or Disfigure, but can see how being an instant can be of critical importance.

What I really like is that Bloodghast and Demigod of Revenge are cute ways for your Liliana of the Veils to generate free value against unsuspecting opponents, which can make all the difference against midrangey and controlling opponents.

All told, this deck has a powerful, proactive gameplan, and I'm not sure that there are enough Supreme Verdict decks in Modern right now to really punish you.

Now let's take a look at Legacy. Miracles dominated the format for a few months, but started to fade away with the printing of Abrupt Decay to fight Counterbalance. That doesn't mean that people have given up on the archetype. In fact, various iterations of the deck have continued to post reasonable results on Magic Online in recent months. Let's take a look at this most recent build by chihoi:

[Cardlist title=Enlightened Tutor Miracles - Legacy | Chihoi, 3-1 Legacy Daily Event]

The exciting thing in this deck is the adoption of Enlightened Tutor as a mechanism of preboarding against some of the more common decks in the format. Especially on Magic Online, the format has generally devolved into combo decks and tempo decks, and you've got an awesome suite of singletons against both of those. A surprise Back to Basics can shut basic-light decks out of the game. Rest in Peace effectively kills Tarmogoyfs, Nimble Mongooses, and neuters entire archetypes. Energy Field is all but unbeatable for some decks as long as you don't let yourself get Wastelanded.

You've even got a new win condition that you can Enlightened Tutor for: Thassa, God of the Sea. Sure, she isn't Jace, but what is? And besides, Jace isn't an Enchantment. Thassa makes your Sensei's Divining Tops infinitely better and is basically never going away since most people can't exile Enchantments. Sometimes you can turn on devotion with a combination of Vendilion Clique and Counterbalance, but you can just as easily turn it off again with your Karakas to counter Swords to Plowshares.

This deck may not be as popular as it once was in paper Legacy tournaments, but the deck is still powerful and versatile, and is more than capable of taking down events. After all, sometimes you just need a miracle to win a game.

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TAGS articles, standard, current events, deck lists, legacy, decks, commander, modern, carlos gutierrez, 5 decks

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