Craig Wescoe
7/12/2012 10:55:00 AM
Last week I talked about some of the biggest impacts I envisioned M13 having on Standard, and earlier this week I gave my 3-month and 12-month
financial predictions for M13. This article is all about M13 and how it will change Standard, focusing on four specific decks that profit significantly from the release of M13. In order, I will discuss Monowhite Exalted (the next big white weenie deck), Grixis Control, Naya Dragon Pod, and almost-monoblue Illusions (splashing black). I consider each of these four decks to be a contender, though likely in need of a bit of tuning. I would recommend picking at least one, whichever one stands out the most to you, and giving it a try. Specific questions regarding the decks can be addressed in the forums.
Monowhite Exalted
Surprise, surprise, this was the first deck I built for post-M13 Standard. The original configuration was slightly different - not including
Faith's Shield. But after playing a few games, I realized it needed a card like
Faith's Shield for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, when you jump a creature with Ajani (-3 ability), it's devastating for it to die to a
Doom Blade or
Vapor Snag or whatnot. So the shield protects our threat. The second, almost as important, purpose of
Faith's Shield is to make a creature
de facto unblockable. When you attack for ten in the air with an exalted
Champion of the Parish, the last thing you want to happen is for the opponent to simply chump block with a Spirit token or
Birds of Paradise.
Faith's Shield thus makes sure your creature lives and connects when you go to the air with your Planeswalker.
One card absent from the list is
Silverblade Paladin. He acts as a pseudo duplicate copy of
Ajani, Caller of the Pride by offering double strike. This combines nicely with the exalted theme of the deck. The problem is that there are other three and four mana cards that we want more in the deck.
Angelic Destiny, Ajani,
Sublime Archangel, and
Mirran Crusader are each fantastic in the deck. If we continue adding more cards that cost more than two mana, the deck will not curve out as often and thus each card will be less effective. In fact, I even ended up cutting the fourth Ajani solely for the purpose of slimming down the deck's curve. Paladin just isn't as important or as powerful as the alternative options.
Another noteworthy absence is that of removal in the main deck. In the sideboard I chose to include
Dismember and
Oblivion Ring for matchups where opposing creatures or Planeswalkers need to be dealt with, but I wanted the main deck to be as creature dense as possible. The underlying premise is that in game 1 we're almost always the aggressor. And when we're not, our creatures can play defense long enough for us to turn the corner (see
Doomed Traveler,
Knight of Glory, and
Mirran Crusader) or they can help catch us back up in the race (see
Nearheath Pilgrim). No main deck removal may be a bit too ambitious, and there should probably be 2-3 copies of
Oblivion Ring in the main, but I wasn't sure what to cut for it, so I'll leave that for further testing.
A combo that Jeremy Neeman suggested in a similar style of deck is
Immolating Souleater. Souleater and Ajani can combine for 20 damage on turn 3. Play Souleater on turn 2 and Ajani on turn 3. Then spend 18 life to make it a 10/1 and then use Ajani's -3 ability to go all Air Jordan with your fire-breathing Artifact Hound. The problem is that this combo is very high risk. If an opponent has mana open, they can literally kill you with a
Vapor Snag or
Incinerate, and can essentially kill you with a
Doom Blade. And even when they're tapped out,
Gut Shot can take out the 10/1 flying double striker mid-combat. With
Faith's Shield in the deck, we have some extra protection for the combo, so it's possible that adding such a dimension to the deck is worthwhile, but my intuition is that it's a little too cute and fragile. It also requires you to be ahead or tied in life. Otherwise the Souleater is pretty mediocre.
If attacking with white creatures isn't your thing, then I'm afraid it's just not going to work out between us. Call you maybe? Sorry, maybe not. But I have another friend you might be interested in. Her name is Grixis and she draws cards, kills things, and ramps into huge
Demons and dragon-walkers. Here's what she looks like:
Grixis Control
As I was going through what M13 had to offer, this is one of the decks I envisioned being a potential tournament player.
Griselbrand and
Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker are some of the most powerful cards in standard. The difficulty is, of course, getting them into play. Fortunately M13 has a very practical way to accomplish this, namely
Gilded Lotus.
The Lotus not only ramps you straight from 5 to 8 mana but it also gives you sufficient black mana to take on Griselbrand's quadruple black cost. It's like the two cards were made to be together. The Lotus compensates for the demon's two greatest drawbacks (each concerning its mana cost) while the
Demon makes sure you'll never run out of things to do with all that extra mana the Lotus produces. The other neat thing about
Gilded Lotus in this deck is that you have plenty of reactive cards that can be played the turn you play the Lotus. So much like with
Solemn Simulacrum, you're ramping your mana while also interacting meaningfully with the opponent's board, all in the same turn. I'm sure the numbers are not perfect, but I've spent more time tuning this list than I can remember ever tuning a Grixis deck (i.e. a couple of hours). If you're a Grixis Control player, you should be able to take this list and run with it. It's borderline up to speed as is. With a bit of tuning against the top decks in the format, I can easily see it winning big.
Some people enjoy the thrill of wiping the opponent's board, drawing dozens of cards, and really leaving the opponent feeling like they got destroyed. Others prefer a more
Humble approach, one that squeaks out victories in a variety of ways while having access to a number of different toolbox type cards to tutor up with a tutor-engine. If that's more your kind of thing, here's an updated version of an already proven strategy:
Naya Dragon Pod
Brian Kibler, the Dragonmaster himself, has been advocating Naya Pod pretty much ever since the SCG Invitational in Baltimore (or just prior to it). After watching him play some matches with it online, I've come up with a few ways I believe the deck can be improved.
The biggest change is the inclusion of
Thundermaw Hellkite. This dragon is so good in a deck with mana acceleration, and especially so when you have the ability to tutor it up with
Birthing Pod by sacrificing a
Huntmaster of the Fells. I noticed the deck can have some difficulty fighting through
Lingering Souls tokens or opposing Restoration Angels. The Hellkite takes care of both these problems in overkill fashion.
Geist-Honored Monk and
Mikaeus, the Lunarch are grindy cards that eventually allow you to turn the corner (usually), but when the deck's biggest weakness is that it's always vulnerable to
Bonfire of the Damned, giving it this super-aggro dimension really helps to limited the amount of turns the opponent has for drawing their super wrath. The same is true when it comes to ending the game before triple
Sun Titan starts making all your hard work not quite enough. If we rely on the dragon to be our Plan A, there is no longer a need to keep the opponent in the game. Forget trying to gain incremental advantages and instead just put them to zero. Roar! *dragon breathing fire noise*
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The biggest difficulty with adding the dragon is compensating for its double red cost.
Cavern of Souls doesn't (usually) help us cast the Dragon like it does a
Zealous Conscripts, and the deck was already (justifiably) skimping on red sources due to its primarily being a green/white deck. I'm of the opinion though, that stretching the mana a bit is more than worth it in order to accommodate for the Hellkite. By adding a second mountain,
Borderland Ranger + Restoration on
Borderland Ranger gets you straight to Hellkite. With the help of a turn one mana creature, this can be as early as turn 4! Moreover between
Birds of Paradise and
Birthing Pod, the deck can pretty reliably get the Dragon into play, whether from your hand or your library.
If being like Brian Kibler is not your thing, then you're doing it wrong. But I understand anyway, and that's why I've given you an alternative: you can be more like Todd Anderson. Solid alternative, right? Here's where that might land you:
Blue/Black Mill-usions
Back when M12 first came out, Todd championed a monoblue aggro deck featuring predominantly the Illusion tribe. The deck took off almost immediately and ended up being the early precursor to all the UW Delver decks we see so prevalent in today's metagame. With M13 now ready to take on Standard, it's possible we see a resurgence of the Illusions tribe.
The above list is more creature-centric than a Delver deck and thus
Delver of Secrets would not flip as often. I'm pretty sure if we added
Delver of Secrets to this deck, it would just be a worse Delver deck no matter what we took out for it. Eventually I see Delver decks and Millusions decks diverging into two distinct archetypes (or rather, remaining distinct and not converging). I don't yet know which will prove better, but certainly Delver has started with a sizeable lead. Given one particular new addition to the deck, however, that lead gap may soon be shortened.
Jace's Phantasm is constantly being compared to
Nimble Mongoose. This is not unreasonable on the surface since both are creatures that require a significant investment in setting up the graveyard in order to get full value out of the aggressively-costed creature. On the other side of the spectrum, we see people comparing it to
Flying Men.
Flying Men was a real tournament player back in the day. Back in Arabian Nights (yes, I am old), it was not uncommon to see
Flying Men attack alongside
Serendib Efreet and
Mahamoti Djinn. In conjunction with
Unstable Mutation, you could make your own Serendib quickly and effectively.
Nowadays creatures are more powerful than they used to be. So in order for
Flying Men to be constructed worthy, he needed to have the
Unstable Mutation combo latently tacked onto himself without the need for a separate card. Well, we still need the second card in most scenarios, but instead of giving him +3+3 immediately and then -1/-1 each turn thereafter, he gets a permanent +4/+4. Furthermore, if one gets the bonus, they all get the same bonus. This means that if you have two on the battlefield and cast
Mind Sculpt, they each become 5/5 flyers for as long as cards remain in the opponent's graveyard.
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Ok, so this makes
Flying Men a little better, but it means we still have to play a card like
Mind Sculpt, which is not much different than playing
Unstable Mutation (i.e. we're still ‘down a card'). And what happens when we don't have the
Mind Sculpt? All we get is
Flying Men. So the most pressing question concerning Jace's Phantasm's playability is how we can otherwise make use of
Flying Men. Fortunately
Lord of the Unreal can provide a sweet follow up to the Phantasm, making him into a 2/2 hexproof flyer ready to swing in for two. This is like two explores! Err, I mean two
Flying Men! Then if we follow that up with a
Phantasmal Image copying
Lord of the Unreal, we have a 3/3 flier and a pair of 3/3 ground creatures, each of which has hexproof!
Jace's Phantasm is essentially
Phantasmal Bear #5-8 in the Illusions deck, but with a bigger upside. And unlike
Delver of Secrets, it does not force you away from the creature-centric focus in order to support the Delver. Instead it keeps you feeling more like a Merfolk deck than a Delver deck. And even when you don't draw
Mind Sculpt, using
Snapcaster Mage to
Thought Scour the opponent for a second time will often be enough to turn on the Phantasms. And if we still need some help, Nephalia's Drownyard can help us to get there. And course when all else fails,
Jace, Memory Adept immediately, by itself, mills ten cards. That's insta-overrun for your phantasms.
It's uncertain how this style of deck will stand up to the current Standard decks, but it feels like it has potential, and it certainly feels like the most effective way to make good use of the Phantasm. The old
Lord of the Unreal +
Phantasmal Image combo was one of the most powerful things the old Illusions deck had to offer, so bringing that back alongside a new and improved supporting cast should certainly merit attention. The question of course is when and how will this type of strategy be better than conventional UW Delver? Maybe in the beginning when people are unprepared for it? Maybe in another month or so when diehard blue modo mages have finely tuned the list? Maybe just before
Phantasmal Image and
Lord of the Unreal rotate? Who knows? All I'm saying is that I consider this deck a potential contender. If you agree, then give it a try!
Craig Wescoe
@Nacatls4Life on twitter
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