Holiday Shuffle

Posted on November 27, 2015

As the holidays roll around, we tend to find Magic enter a fairly stagnant state. This year, I was expecting much the same up until this week’s results came in. Of course, many of the same decks were dominating the field at both the Grand Prix in Kobe and the StarCityGames Open in Kansas City, but we also have some new lists, a budget deck that makes Standard’s entry barrier a little lower, and an update to the Rally deck I posted last week, so let’s get started.

W/B Warriors ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Joe Soh, Grand Prix Kobe Top 8

Planeswalkers (2)
2 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar

While calling this deck “budget” is a bit deceptive, it can easily be changed around to be so much easier than anything else I have seen in the past few weeks. With Gideon, Ally of Zendikar being the only card outside of the mana base you probably can’t find in Draft leftovers, it intrigues me that we are just now seeing this deck finish well. W/B Warriors is a deck everyone last year was waiting to break out, and it just felt a turn worse than most of the field. Though the mana base was much easier than that of Abzan or other aggressive strategies, the payoff was just not there to not want powerhouses like Siege Rhino and Fleecemane Lion in your seventy-five.

I am truly interested to see if this is a fluke or if this deck will continue to put up results over the coming months. This is a much less daunting deck to get into than almost anything else in Standard—unlike Atarka Red or some of the other, cheaper decks, you do not have to have fetches to make this deck operate, and that is huge. Build-around themes are very hit-or-miss generally, and while I am always about creating a lower entry to competitive Magic—which these archetypes generally do—I have played through enough Faeries to respect just how powerful they can be if balanced improperly. Though I felt W/B Warriors was going to fall just a little short, it is nice to be proven wrong in this case, and I hope a few people can make use of this deck—or something similar—to ride out until rotation while not losing a ton of value.

I used to always attempt to line a deck like this up during this season, as I used to regularly be M.I.A. at Magic events for a few weeks, visiting family and everything else that comes with the holiday. Having something cheap, yet competitive means if you do manage time to play, you are not unable to take advantage, but if you are as busy as suspected, you will not come back to your deck being worth fifty percent of what it was or suddenly terrible in the metagame.

While the cheap decks are obviously ideal for budget Standard, that, of course, is not the majority of this format, but as with the theme of Jaceless decks I have been somewhat following, I am a huge fan of Josh McClain’s list from this weekend. I wish I would have looked at Snapping Gnarlid when I was fooling around with decks like this a month or so ago, as that may have been the key. I am a huge fan of seeing Thunderbreak Regent and Draconic Roar even if they are not the focal points of the deck. This seems to have a great deal of aggression backed up by some of the better mana sinks we have in Standard to finish off your opponent. This curve rewards good sequencing while minimizing the punishment for flooding late game through cards like Tasigur, the Golden Fang.

Temur Black ? Battle for Zendikar Standard | Josh McClain, StarCityGames Open Kansas City Top 8

Planeswalkers (2)
2 Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker

While I do like where this deck is placed, I feel the card selection is far from a tuned list. Perhaps it is more consistent than it looks, but with so many different threats and answers with no early-game draw, I’m led to believe some games can stack against you quickly with no real way to dig yourself out. While the creature base does look fairly sound, I am having a tough time with the spells in particular. I would have to test to see what the weak matches are, but I could see Painful Truths helping this list somewhere in the seventy-five against decks that can stifle the early-game creatures. I keep finding Virulent Plague underperforming against good players, and that leads me to look at cutting these one-ofs I have been seeing in the ’boards.

While the deck does certainly have the potential to serve the curve with giant creatures, it also has a access to a wide array of directions a list like this could go—much like Abzan, Temur is very flexible in the route to victory, and I would like to play off that if I do decide to work with this list over the coming weeks.

So last on the docket for the week is an update to Abzan Rally working from the list I posted last week. I spent a great deal of the past week jamming this deck in leagues and two-man queues, as my schedule did not allow for a great deal of tournament time, so the player quality I was facing may have been lower—that’s something to keep in mind while making changes. A common mispractice I see people make is to test against their one or two friends who may have a limited selection of decks or a particular play style that will bias results. This can lead to over-sideboarding for a match or expecting the same lines of plays from everyone. And that can certainly hinder your ability to learn different plays or sideboarding strategies. While testing on Magic Online can give you a wide array of decks to test against, you do not know those pilots, and even if they do not play the deck optimally, they may have different lines of play or play around cards others may not.

I tend to find that, while it is best to test in larger events for any sort of Preliminary Pro Tour Qualifier prep, it can be helpful for fleshing out decks to play leagues—the buy-in is less painful if you do not have a good testing session, and the decks will be more varied, meaning you will see strengths and weaknesses against a broader field. In the coming month on December 16, I have the opportunity to play in a 5k here in Lansing hosted by Pasttimes and BC Comics. I am on the fence about the weekend, as it is close to the holidays, but if I am going to play, now is the time to start testing. As Abzan Rally is the deck I now have the most play with, that is what I will probably be piloting.

With all of that in mind, I will probably spend the next week doing general Magic Online testing before I begin testing certain matches the week after. I was able to gain some insight into other builds of the decks through social media, the comments last week, and a few conversations with people who have played versions of Rally. I can certainly see the merit to the four-colored list, but while I do believe you may lose points in some matches by replacing Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, I feel others become better as well. I am finding that a lot of decks are easy to play against and have a general line for victory that Jace helps amplify, but the upside of Jace, in my experience, has actually been lower than that of Liliana, Heretical Healer.

These small perks in matches that have proven difficult, giving me an edge, is much more important to me than adding a percent to good matches with the extra draw from Jace when looking at a big tournament setting. Liliana having lifelink has been much more relevant than I initially believed, and though she does come down a turn later, her impact on the board is much greater. Jace matches up poorly to removal and creatures, and while a looter is great, this deck does not have the best ways to abuse a transformed Jace. Liliana, on the other hand, has the ability to loop through Nantuko Husk to kill from a higher life total and is much better coming into play from Rally the Ancestors—even the multiples produce a token each. Her interactions with Fleshbag Marauder have me considering more in the seventy-five, as we have a second copy in Standard. The big-mana decks don’t care to be discarding cards, and control doesn’t care to have her stick around either—both are matches in which Jace is lackluster.

While she is not great in every match, I believe I would rather look elsewhere for the extra reach and card advantage, and one comment last week brought up a card I hadn't considered for some reason. Sultai Emissary is a great replacement for some number of Elvish Mystics, if not the entire set. Not only do we have a creature, we have a better board to play a turn-three Husk into, and as Shawn pointed out, we do have Grim Haruspex, so from time to time, we gain even more value. I will test this out more this week, but from what I experienced earlier, this is probably a great fit and also a way to ease mana on turn two, as all of your cards produce black mana, only leading into an easier turn-three Liliana.

Next week, I will post an updated list and some of the matchups I have tested against to see where we are against the field. If you are traveling this weekend, be safe, and enjoy the holiday. I will be back next week—probably still eating leftovers.

Ryan Bushard

@CryppleCommand