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Let Bishops Be Bishops

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There’s a lot of space for new and exciting things in Standard now that Aetherworks Marvel is out of the picture. Without Chandra, Flamecaller and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger happening quite so early in the game, there’s space for new aggressive decks in the metagame, particularly given that Mardu Vehicles is reasonably resilient against sweepers like Sweltering Suns. Twistling put together one such take, and it’s one I’m excited to take a look at:


Bygone Bishop
This deck certainly gets off to an aggressive start. The great set of 1-drops, Thraben Inspector and Sacred Cat, allow you to establish board presence early without giving up card advantage later in the game. You’ve got Glory-Bound Initiate as a means of ensuring you’re never too far behind against aggressive decks. You’ve even got Selfless Spirit to help protect your key creatures from removal and your team from sweepers.

So what exactly are you trying to protect? There are a couple of key interactions for this deck that make it hum. Bygone Bishop is a huge engine here, since it gives you a steady stream of clues, ensures you have things to do with your mana, and resiliency against removal and sweepers. You’ve also got Oketra's Monument to help ensure you never fall too far behind on board, particularly with the steady flow of creatures to cast thanks to Bygone Bishop’s clues.

This all leads into how you actually end games. Multiple Oketra's Monuments can get out of control very quickly, especially since they make your creatures cheaper and feed into your Bygone Bishop engine. Then you can combine that kind of ability to generate creatures with Hanweir Militia Captain, which will almost immediately flip into Westvale Cult Leader. This is your heavy hitter to help ensure you keep generating creatures and your creatures are the biggest threat on the board at all times. All this token generation facilitates Westvale Abbey activations so you can close the game out with Ormendahl, Profane Prince.

This seems like a really fun deck capable of aggressive starts without running out of fuel in the late game. You’ve got a reasonably cohesive plan to make sure that you can keep pace with Zombies’ ability to flood the board, and all the token generation means you should recover from sweepers pretty effectively. If you want to give a non-Mardu flavor of aggro deck a shot in this new format, this seems like a pretty reasonable place to start.


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