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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 June 29, 2013
 Reddit

Magic 2014 is on the horizon, about to shake things up yet again, but we're still not done with Dragon's Maze. Getting tired of Red-Green, Jund, and Deathblade? Let's take a look at some of the sweeter things you can do in your favorite formats:

We've seen all manner of Rapid Hybridization aggro decks featuring Young Wolf and Strangleroot Geist since Gatecrash. Larry Swasey has been playing around with a deck that's very similar, but a little more streamlined. Let's take a look:

RUG Aggro - Standard | Larry Swasey

So we've cut Rapid Hybridization and all the interactions that go along with it. This means that your nut draws are much less powerful, but that your deck is more consistent. It's pretty miserable drawing a Young Wolf without any way to take advantage of it, but you're usually pretty happy with a Dryad Militant.

There are no frills or cute interactions, this deck just wants to push through damage as fast as possible, using cheap evolve creatures and removal. This also seems like one of the better Experiment One decks in the format. Experiment One gives you resiliency to Supreme Verdict, and this deck is uniquely situated to suit up its Experiment Ones with Spectral Flight and Rancor and protect them with Simic Charm.

The two things I'm most concerned about looking at this deck are Boros Reckoner and Voice of Resurgence. You have a reasonable number of flying threats and ways to take to the sky, but these guys buy your opponents tons of time to outclass your threats with their bigger and more powerful spells. Are Simic Charm and Ghor-Clan Rampager enough to fight through that? There's only one way to find out!

People have been experimenting with four-color Unburial Rites decks as a way to get the edge over Junk Reanimator, the idea being that Faithless Looting and Sire of Insanity make you significantly faster and more powerful in the early game. The biggest issue for these decks has been their mana. It's pretty difficult to cast both Grisly Salvage and Boros Reckoner in the same deck. Let's take a look at how LFCeline has dealt with this issue:

4c Heartless Rites - Standard | LFCeline, 3-1 Standard Daily Event

Heartless Summoning is a card that people have tried to play since it's been printed to varying degrees of succes. Whether you're powering out Wurmcoil Engines and Frost Titans or Angel of Serenity and Sire of Insanity, the card is very powerful, you just need the right creatures to interact favorably with the format.

In this case, you're ramping into Thragtusk and Angel of Serenity, with Luminate Primordial as a backup Angel. This is actually perfect for this format, and puts this kind of deck in a very good position. Against the Burning-Tree Emissary decks, you just need early blockers that can trade with Emissaries and Flinthoof Boar so that you don't die to the followup Hellrider. Both halves of Thragtusk will still trade with creatures, and your Angels will still mop up the mess and leave behind a giant roadblock and clock.

Against the midrangey and control decks, all you need are giant value creatures at the top of your curve that are moderately sized and create large changes in the board state. That's exactly what Angels and Primordials do. Sure, your Thragtusks are way worse, but your other fatties are so good that it shouldn't matter.

Back when Guildpact was released, I tried building a deck that used Ink-Treader Nephilim in conjunction with token generators, Lightning Helix, and cards like Wildsize to generate huge amounts of card advantage, life, and value. Needless to say, when Sam Black featured this deck built by Victor Wlaschitz on DailyMTG.com, I was excited beyond words:

Ink-Treader - Modern | Victor Wlaschitz

There are a lot of sweet tools for Ink-Treader decks now that weren't there before. Niveous Wisps and Cloudshift are absolutely incredible, because now you don't have to be a three-card combo. Your combo is value creatures and blink effects; Blade Splicer and Cloudshift is just fine on its own. Kitchen Finks and Eternal Witness will still buy you tons of time. And if you ever find an Ink-Treader Nephilim, you can just end the game on the spot.

It's important to note that Ink-Treader triggers when you target it, not when the spell resolves. That means that your opponent can't counter your spell to stop you from blinking your team. This just seems like a sweet deck; you play value creatures to buy time and then start doing unfair things later in the game. You can even set up loops where you Momentary Blink your team with Ink-Treader, and then buyback your Momentary Blink with Eternal Witness. How's that for value?

Varolz, the Scar-Striped has started making waves in Standard, but is it good enough for Legacy play? Finn seems to think so and, as the guy who first championed the Death and Taxes archetype, he's probably someone you want to listen to. Let's take a look at his Varolz brew:

Varolz Aggro - Legacy | Finn

  • Sideboard (0)

There's an awful lot going on here. Fundamentally, this is a Green-Black take on midrangey creature-based combo. Your combo is Varolz plus either Phyrexian Dreadnought or Death's Shadow. As early as turn three you can be scavenging 13 +1/+1 counters onto an Inkmoth Nexus or Silhana Ledgewalker and putting your opponent on a very fast clock.

You have a ton of redundancy thanks to the combination of Green Sun's Zenith and Living Wish to find missing combo pieces. The real question is how many combo pieces you need, and what your sideboard is going to look like. The suggested sideboard starts with Overgrown Tomb, Death's Shadow, Varolz, Karakas, and Inkmoth Nexus. I'd probably add to that Eternal Witness and some number of Scavenging Ooze, but you could also go for Dark Depths combo with either Vampire Hexmage or Thespian Stage post-M14.

My biggest issue with this deck is the lack of interactive elements. Other decks have counterspells, Lightning Bolts and tons of discard backed by Planeswalkers or a fast combo kill. You have a bunch of vulnerable creatures and lands in a format with Swords to Plowshares and Wasteland, and your only interactive elements are Thoughtseize and Abrupt Decay.

It's possible that this deck wants to be GWb Maverick, with just single copies of combo pieces that can be found with Zeniths, Wishes, Knight of the Reliquary, and Fauna Shaman. This gives you a more proactive gameplan in Thalia, Guardian of Thraben plus Wasteland, protection from Mother of Runes and a solid backup plan in Knight of the Reliquary.

The final Dragon's Maze Commander we have yet to look at is none other than Emmara Tandris. This guild champion has a reasonably sized body for her casting cost, but doesn't have nearly as large an impact on the game state as other commanders at comparable casting cost, such as the Planeshift/Planar Chaos Dragons. However, if your board is already full of creature tokens, then Emmara is kind of awesome; and it becomes very easy to make your tokens all but invulnerable. Let's take a look at Azure124's take on the Selesnya guild champion:

Emmara, Token Queen - Commander | Azure124

The thing that I like about this list is that you have a ton of cards that generate large amounts of tokens on their own. There's very little messing around with attrition-y effects like Mobilization or Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree. Why would you want to make a token here and there when you can just cast White Sun's Zenith or Entreat the Angels?

So what does this deck do? Well, you make a bunch of tokens, make them gigantic, and protect them with things like Emmara and Eldrazi Monument. Conveniently enough, most of your effects that protect your tokens also protect Emmara, which makes it doubly difficult to interact with her. The only thing I'd really like to see is some mechanism of giving Emmara hexproof to protect from things like Cryptic Command and Swords to Plowshares.

The awesome thing about this deck is that the number of Crusade effects give you a sort of resilience to sweepers, the bane of token decks everywhere. They can Wrath of God away your Emmara and tokens, but one Beacon of Creation later and you've got a board full of 5/5's and they need to find another sweeper or die. That gives you a kind of inevitability that can be pretty difficult to overcome.

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

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