How good is Golgari? Will Jeskai have a dominant performance? What happened to Mono-Red? How broken is Arclight Phoenix?

I'm really excited to see what shakes out and how refined some decks might look.

The story of this Pro Tour has to be the White Aggro strategies. The White Aggro decks, most splashing Red, dominated the top tables in Constructed to make Top 8 with *six* different representatives. Golgari ended up being a fairly popular choice and the White Aggro decks were well positioned to go through, around, and under Golgari. The White decks that performed all had a splash of Red as a way to beat Control decks and bury the mirrors. Cards like Experimental Frenzy and Aurelia, Exemplar of Justice stick out as important when you need to pivot.

History of Benalia continues to be extremely impressive. Toward the beginning of the format, History of Benalia was everywhere and the best 'combo' was a History of Benalia followed up by another History of Benalia. With Benalish Marshal and Venerated Loxodon, these Knight tokens become massive threats that win the game in short order. This one-two punch easily gets out of range of miniature sweepers like Deafening Clarion or Fiery Cannonade. For quite some time Shock has been the ideal removal in the format, but with the ever growing presence of these white lord effects, Lava Coil is making a strong case for dominance. I've talked in the past about how powerful Lava Coil is; and, with the White decks and Izzet Drakes decks doing well, Lava Coil is better than ever.

If you're looking to get an edge in these White mirrors, having fliers (think Lyra Dawnbringer) is going to be very important and Settle the Wreckage is going to be the defining card. Settle is difficult to play around considering how complicated board states can get and it's wonderful at catching you up when you're behind. With White's dominance in Top 8, the mirror is going to be relevant for the next couple of weeks.

Moving forward, White will certainly join the ranks of great Standard decks you can play, although personally I believe the deck massively overperformed. Once folks start adapting to the Boros decks, I think they will start falling off. If you're looking to beat up on White decks let me point you toward our lord and savior Goblin Chainwhirler. If Red doesn't tickle your fancy, I'm a believer that the Izzet decks can be built to have a great White matchup, especially with a card like Niv-Mizzet, Parun making creature clean-up easy.

On that note, the Izzet Drakes decks looked absolutely stellar every time they were on camera. While only Yuuya Watanabe Top 8ed the tournament with Drakes I really liked his chances to bring the trophy home. With the ability to kill out of nowhere, the deck in many ways reminds me of Delver or Shadow. With the sheer amount of card draw you can spin your wheels a lot but it's also likely that you'll find threats or answers while you're pouring through the deck. However, without any Fiery Cannonades in Yuuya's deck, he had a small disadvantage against the six White decks in the Top 8.

At first, Golgari was the deck of choice to handles the Drakes deck. Cards like Ravenous Chupacabra, Vivien Reid, and Wildgrowth Walker all help apply pressure while keeping your life total safe. If the Drake decks just has all the draw spells it's too easy to fall behind. With Maximize Velocity working as an effective Temur Battle Rage, it can be trivial to kill an opponent from a high life total out of nowhere. This often forces the Golgari player to choose between progressing their board and trying to dodge the combo kill. Against Ari Lax in the Swiss, Yuuya had to carefully navigate a game to keep himself alive at one life to turn the game into a win for himself with this combination of cards.

Rumored to be the 'broken' deck of the Pro Tour, Dimir looked atrocious. Despite Mark Jacobson losing a win-and-in it didn't seem like there was much in the way to mitigate flood and it was difficult to find a way to win. With Doom Whisperer and Dream Eater being the top end, it didn't feel like there was much in the interim to ensure safety. Discovery // Dispersal is obviously a fantastic inclusion but doesn't feel like it does enough in this kind of deck to help fix the inherent issues. I do like Ritual of Soot against the White and Golgari decks, but it seems downright atrocious against the Drakes deck. The deck looks slow enough that any fast draw from any of the aggressive decks will run it over and while Vraska's Contempt is great, the Drake deck is better at digging and finding its answers.

Moving forward, the deck I expect to be the best in the coming weeks is actually Mono-Red. I feel it underperformed and has a fantastic matchup against the White decks. With premium removal and a wrath in Goblin Chainwhirler it's easy to be a control deck that's pre boarded with multiple Frenzy's to bury your opponent. Mono-Red is clean, consistent, and best of all has some free wins against the White deck with its mainboardable wraths. Golgari is one of Red's bad matchups, but it'll be on a downswing after this weekend. Boros Angels has all but disappeared and that was easily the toughest matchup for Red. I don't like the Boros Angels deck against Jeskai, Izzet, or the Boros Weenie decks, but if Red becomes super popular again I can see it being a good choice.