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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 January 18, 2014
 Reddit

Preview season is the best and worst time for Magic. Excitement is at a high, speculation runs rampant, but there aren't really any new and exciting decks being brewed up just yet. In fact, most of the more contemporary formats have become rather stale as we eagerly await Born of the Gods. In light of that, this week we've got five sweet decks from Magic's eternal formats: Modern, Legacy, and Commander. We'll start in Modern to take a look at both a Skred Red deck and a deck featuring Norin the Wary. Then we'll head into Legacy for new takes on Life from the Loam and Scroll Rack. Last, we'll head into Commander to see if Astral Slide still has what it takes to compete with the titans on Modern Magic.

What do all the top tiers decks in Modern have in common? Jund, Affinity, Pod, UWx, Tron; all of these decks have incredibly greedy mana bases. That can only mean one thing: it's time to Blood Moon some people. The trouble isn't identifying how to attack the format; it's finding the correct supporting cast. Fortunately, Will de la Guardia submitted an incredible take on Blood Moon to Caleb Durward's Modern brew contest. Caleb even posted videos of the deck in action earlier this week. So what does this deck have going on? Let's take a look:

Skred Red - Modern | Will de la Guardia

This deck is awesome. You have all kinds of efficient red removal to combat fast aggressive decks. You have Blood Moon to steal games from all of the midrange and combo decks, and all of this can be powered out by Koth of the Hammer, who either applies pressure on an empty board or creates some truly degenerate sequences of play. This deck is awesome in the current metagame because you have a full seven maindeck Blood Moon effects that many of the decks in the format simply cannot beat. Sure, Magus of the Moon is a little fragile, but your opponents will still need exactly Lightning Bolt to turn the tables.

Fundamentally, Skred is the reason this deck can exist. You need to be able to kill creatures with more than three toughness. Tarmogoyf, Deceiver Exarch, and Celestial Colonnade to start with. It also turns your Boros Reckoners into Searing Winds and functions as a mechanism for you to end games quickly once you've taken control. Boros Reckoner also teams up with Pyroclasm to take down four toughness creatures like Restoration Angel.

All told, this deck seems sweet. It's got good angles to attack from, efficient threats, and flexible answers. What more could you want? If you're expecting to battle against creatures and decks with greedy mana, I say give this a shot. It's a powerful budget deck that's definitely got some game!

Our next deck is a new take on a popular budget deck. What can Norin the Wary do in Modern? Siraniki3 set out to show us that the little guy can do a whole lot of work. Let's take a look at his White-Red Soul Sisters deck:

[Cardlist Title= WR Soul Sisters - Modern | Siraniki3, 16th Modern Premier Event]

We're all familiar with Soul Sisters, right? Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant generally team up with Ajani's Pridemate, Spectral Procession, and Windbrisk Heights[card] to gain all the life and alpha strike you with [card]Brave the Elements. But what happens when you cut the cute Serra Ascendants and Windbrisk Heights[card] for [card]Champion of the Parish[card] and [card]Norin the Wary?

Suddenly, the deck has a real aggro plan. You can curve Champion into Norin and then your Champions will keep up with the most prodigious of Tarmogoyfs. You can even assemble the combo with Ranger of Eos! But that's not all Norin does. Norin lets you go deeper with cards like Genesis Chamber and Mentor of the Meek so that you have a consistent source of blockers, lifegain, and card drawing to keep up with control decks as you head into the late game. You even get Purphoros, God of the Forge to give the deck reach in the absence of Brave the Elements.

If you're looking to play a Soul Sisters style of deck, but want something with a little more synergy and reach than a pile of Squadron Hawks and spirit tokens, then this may be a great deck for you. This deck is very good against aggressive decks and the lifegain can incidentally beat decks like Storm and Splinter Twin. You could even finagle your mana to be able to play Blood Moon if you really wanted to. The deck has a real aggressive plan, has a lot of angles to attack from, and seems like a blast to play.

Thespian's Stage plus Dark Depths. This was one of the big combos to come out of the Legend Rule change that came with Magic 2014. Unfortunately, we haven't really seen the combo showing up in many places. That all changed two weeks ago in Indianapolis, where Kennen Haas took his Jund Dark Depths deck to a first place finish at a StarCityGames Legacy Open. Drew Levin even wrote an extensive article taking a look at this style of deck, and what role Dark Depths plays in Legacy.

Jund Depths - Legacy | Kennen Haas, 1st Star City Games Legacy Open

This is my favorite style of deck. This is an attrition deck, pure and simple. This deck aims to identify the resource that your deck needs most, and to cut you off of it. Whether that resource is lands, cards, or creatures, Kennen has a plan. Life from the Loam plus Wasteland can be very difficult for the basic-less Delver of Secrets decks to beat and can let you mana screw your combo opponents. Raven's Crime and Liliana of the Veil can team up to destroy your opponents hands. Finally, Liliana, Punishing Fire, and Smallpox all do a number on opposing creatures.

The problem with this style of deck has always been that they don't have a good way to kill opponents. Punishing Fire, Mindslaver, and Creeping Tar Pit are just slow. Dark Depths plus Thespian's Stage is many things, but slow is not one of them. For anyone who is unfamiliar, here's how the combo works: Thespian's Stage copies Dark Depths, but still has zero counters. You choose to keep the copy with zero counters, resolve the Dark Depths trigger, and boom! Instant Marit Lage.

These powerful interactions are all backed by Faithless Looting, Life from the Loam, and Entomb, which give you all of the card advantage, selection, and tutoring you could possibly need. These pieces enable you to find the appropriate attrition pieces to grind your opponent out with, like Squee, Gobin Nabob and Nether Spirit.

This deck isn't perfect, but it's an exciting new take on an archetype that needed new life breathed into it. Will land-based attrition be a viable deck once again? I certainly hope so.

With True-Name Nemesis taking over the format, maybe it's time to return to a deck that's prepared to deal with resilient threats. White-based control decks used to be a thing in Legacy, often built around Wrath of God, Moat, and Lightning Rift. What would happen if you took the idea of White card advantage backed by sweepers and inevitable win conditions and upated it for today's format? This Mono-White list tries to do exactly that:

[Cardlist Title=Mono-White Control - Legacy | c-cream1]

Is there anything Squadron Hawk can't do? It's a shuffle effect. It's a card advantage engine with Scroll Rack. The Hawks never stop coming when you combine then with Mistveil Plains, which is a kind of inevitability. Forget Lingering Souls, these Hawks are way better at giving you inevitability in a Umezawa's Jitte[/ard] fight.

This card advantage engine is backed by removal like [card]Terminus and Path to Exile - which conveniently turns on Land Tax - and powerful singletons like Humility and Solitary Confinement. I mean, seriously, who wants to lose to a Solitary Confinement lock powered by Squadron Hawk, High Market, and Mistveil Plains?

On top of all that, you still have the busted Stoneforge Mystic draws where you get to do unfair things with Batterskull, and have Sword of War and Peace for Stoneforge Mystic mirrors.

All told, I think this shell has potential. I love decks that do sweet things with Squadron Hawk, and this certainly delivers. I'd like to see more than one Mistveil Plains, both as protection from Wasteland and as a way to rebuy more than one Hawk per turn. You could even play some number of fetchlands to splash a color, shuffle for Scroll Rack, or fetch up Mistveil Plains. If budget is no concern, Moat may even be a good maindeck inclusion to shut off decks like Jund, Elves, and Mono-White.

Our last deck is one that does everything I love to do in Magic. Onslaught is the set that was out when I really started playing seriously, and I remember the Astral Slide plus Exalted Angel decks of the era. These decks quickly gave way to Mirari's Wake control decks, but I still have fond memories of getting smashed by Lightning Rift. Then Mirrodin Block happened, and Astral Slide became a big deal. Suddenly Eternal Witness was a thing. Then Life from the Loam was printed for Extended. The point is, I always thought Astral Slide was sweet. It only makes sense that I'd be all over this awesome Commander deck NilsH built to function like an Astral Slide control deck from formats past.

[Cardlist title=Astral Slide Control - Commander | NilsH]

There are a lot of things going on here. First, you've got the obligatory Astral Slide, Lightning Rift, and Copy Enchantment, plus Dismiss into Dream to turn cyclers into removal. Then you've got Life from the Loam, a pile of ways to find your Loam, and a ton of cycling lands to build your own card advantage engine.

The cool stuff starts happening when you combine the engines of older formats with the awesome creatures of newer ones. Who would have thought Astral Slide plus Thragtusk would be a thing? You've still got the classics like Eternal Witness and Wall of Blossoms, but also Sun Titan, Frost Titan, Shriekmaw, and even Mnemonic Wall. The value is endless!

This deck does just a little bit of everything. It's a very traditional, attrition-based control deck. You have answers for everything. Card drawing to find the answers, recursion to re-use them. You've even got an awesome late game in Progenitus, and Finest Hour to turn him into a one-shot or generate even more value off of Titans.

What I really like about this is how open-ended the shell is. There's a ton of space for innovation and personal touches. The core of the deck is rock solid, and dominated Constructed tables for many, many years. But the spaces in between can be filled in with all of your own favorite things about Magic, which is always the sign of an awesome Commander deck.

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

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