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Main » Articles » Finding the Best Deck in Standard

Finding the Best Deck in Standard

Rudy Briksza
Posted on February 5, 2019
 Reddit

With SCG Baltimore in the rearview mirror, it's time to look forward and see what the plan is for Standard.

Taking a gander at the metagame breakdown for the team Open, Esper Control and Sultai Midrange led the field with seven copies each. While players showed up trying to beat the Golgari base menace from last Open, it turns out this was a bit harder to manage than otherwise believed. The flexibility of the Overgrown Tomb strategies have proven to be difficult to overcome. The big mana Nexus strategies look to overpower the Sultai deck but end up being anemic in deck-building and torn apart by counterspells, discard, and a reasonably hard hitting clock. Beforehand these decks would have to rely on Midnight Reaper as a way to beat damage based Wraths and keep cards flowing. Now Hydroid Krasis gives an uncounterable way to keep cards flowing through wraths and allowing you to keep pressure up. Being able to adapt to the meta week in and week out makes Sultai a deck that is here to stay.

Sultai Midrange | Allegiance Standard | Alex Hon, 1st place SCG Baltimore Standard Classic

The big winner for the Sultai decks is likely the Thief of Sanity in the sideboard here. With Esper Control on the rise and decks like Gates picking up to prey on the Midrange decks, Thief of Sanity is the embodiment of the anti-big spell decks. Moving forward I think this card is going to be a staple for the Watery Grave decks as it appears Esper Control is really starting to take a foothold at the top of the Standard food chain. Playing a third color gives the deck a ton of leeway to adapt from meta to meta. One of the choices Alex Hon made here that stands out is his mana base. The White decks feel much tougher than they used to and part of that is likely due to the mana bases of the Sultai decks. Having a lot of lands that come into play tap or hurt you can help the aggro decks out quite a bit. Hostage Taker is an awesome piece of technology not just for the mirror but is quite impactful against the White decks as well. Quietly Hostage Taker's stock is on the rise and I expect to see it more in Watery Grave Strategies.

On the subject of Esper Control; the deck looked phenomenal all weekend. A couple copies in the Top 8 last week became multiple copies in day 2 this week in addition to seeing the deck everywhere in the Standard Classic. Additionally, Esper Control was the weapon of choice for four of the Standard seats as well.

Esper Control | Allegiance Standard | Edgar Magalhaes

The list looks very clean. While I'm not really in tune with Teferi being the only win condition Thought Erasure can play a key role in being able to beat the Nexus decks post Teferi Emblem. While I'm not sold on what the answer is I don't feel confident that it's Chromium. Against the aggro decks this card is mostly worthless cardboard. Against the Midrange decks there seems to be built in answers and in control mirrors Kaya's Wrath is an easy way to manage it. I saw Greg Orange playing with a Dawn of Hope and I think I like that the most. While it is a bit expensive and unwieldy, being able to turn Vraska's Contempts, Moment of Craving, and Absorbs into extra cards in the mid to late game is important in a deck like Esper. Since the power level of Standard has grown, it's harder for the Esper deck to compete in terms of pure card quality. Being able to utilize cards that are great at trading up are vital.

The deck that got the least amount of air time was the Azorius Aggro deck. A departure from last season this White aggressive deck has quite the strong matchup against the Sultai deck while maintaining some staying power with Tithe Taker and Hunted Witness against removal and wraths.

Azorius Aggro | Allegiance Standard | Jacob Hagen, 1st place SCG Baltimore

Azorius Aggro Allegiance Standard| Jim Davis, 9th place SCG Baltimore

With only three copies in Day 2 it's even more impressive for the deck to have won the event and sit the other two copies just outside of top 8 (including fellow CSI writer Jim Davis just missing out on breakers). In addition the deck also made the finals of the Classic as well. While it might be easy to conclude the deck simply over performed I believe it is likely closer that not enough players have picked up the deck just yet and when they do the meta will have to adjust hard to try and counter it. Post board having access to Disdainful Stroke, Spell Pierce, and Negate gives the deck a ton of room to interact against decks you'd want those cards in.

This was also the deck I thought was the best for the tournament. While I wasn't happy with exactly the list I played in the Open I made some changes moving forward. If I were going to Dallas this weekend this is what I would register.

Azorius Aggro | Allegiance Standard | Rudy Briksza

While this deck is mostly the same build as the other iterations there are some big departures from normal lists. While I won't claim to be a White creature expert I can instead talk about my experiences with the deck in my tournament. While the deck is adept at working off a low land count it's extremely important to hit your third land drop. Quite often I would lose games where I would be unable to cast the devastating 3-drops in my hand and would slowly but surely watch as the game got farther and farther out of reach. I think 21 lands is quite all right for the deck as you have some more expensive spells than previously before. Trying to cast Spell Pierce and Negate off 9 sources is a little tricky as it is but having Islands in your deck post board feels awful. Especially when it doesn't cast a third of your spells and makes trying to double spell in a turn quite difficult. While Azorius Guildgate comes with its own set of issues I think I like it much better than Island. The other missing number from my deck is Snubhorn Sentry. While Sentry is awesome at both helping keep your curve low and being a big body, I think there's enough removal and wraths in the format that Snubhorn looks pretty poor. If the Azorius Aggro deck starts to pick up however I can envision the card's stock rising greatly.

Over the course of the tournament I lost to Esper Control more than I would have liked and as such have moved to Dovin, Grand Arbiter as a way to keep pressure up and leave myself with room to recover easily from a Kaya's Wrath while keeping pressure up. Being able to draw cards is obviously a huge bonus but that's not necessarily what I'm looking for out of Dovin. We could play an Unbreakable Formation but it has only been so-so overall. I'm never super thrilled to draw it, and when you pass with three mana up and no Legion's Landing it's pretty obvious what you're trying to do.

The only other thing I would move to is more Disdainful Stroke overall. Negate is decidedly average and Disdainful Stroke pretty much covers most of what you're trying to nail out of this deck while Spell Pierce covers the other part pretty efficiently. Disdainful Stroke is a good enough card I would almost consider main decking it in Esper. I've also considered trying to find room for Heroic Reinforcements but at that stage the deck looks wildly different and is likely much worse than this iteration. As of now, I believe Sultai, Azorius Aggro, and Esper Control to be the best three decks and I think Azorius Aggro gets the nod for having a good Sultai matchup and a close enough Esper matchup to feel like the best deck in the meta.

TAGS articles, standard, constructed, analysis, decklist, rudy briksza, allegiance standard, 02052019

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