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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 July 19, 2014
 Reddit

What does Magic 2015 have to offer for your favorite constructed formats? Let's take a whirlwind tour of every format from Standard to Vintage and see if we can find something new and exciting. This we've got Slivers for Standard, Lotus Cobra in Vintage, and an exploratory look at the new Legend, Yisan, in Commander. These are five awesome decks you won't want to miss.

New Standard means just one thing. Saito decks. Tomoharu Saito's #SaitoWayfinder is packed with awesome decks to start off the new format. This time Saito's got everything from Green devotion to White Aggro, but there's one deck in particular I want to take a look at. Let's see what Saito can do with Sliver Hivelord:

[Cardlist Title= Five-Color Slivers ? Magic 2015 Standard | Tomoharu Saito]

No spells, no sideboard, no problem. This is a list that knows exactly what it's trying to do. Curve out with Slivers and mana creatures into a Sliver Hivelord. Beat your opponent to death with enormous slivers. Couldn't get much simpler, right? All it takes is Galerider Sliver into Manaweft Sliver and lands that can produce three different colors to stick a Hivelord on turn three. What exactly are decks like Mono-Black going to do against that?

Things start to get interesting when you take Yisan, the Wanderer Bard into account though. There is no end to the kind of unfair nonsense this Rogue enables you to pull off. Just imagine tutoring up Striking Sliver in combat. On the following turn you can either find Predatory Sliver or Venom Sliver as appropriate, and then proceed even further up the chain with Constricting Sliver, Bonescythe Sliver, the Hivelord himself, and even Megantic Sliver if you haven't put the game out of reach yet.

If you want to try to make Slivers a thing, this seems like a great place to start. You have the powerful, proactive gameplan of just curving out with aggressive slivers or ramping up with Manaweft Sliver. Perhaps more importantly, you have the ability to grind out games with Yisan and tutor up powerful singletons. There are plenty of slivers in this deck that you'll love having access to, but would hate having to play multiples of. Yisan eliminates that problem and provides a mechanism of generating free cards and board presence.

Do Slivers have what it takes to compete in this Standard environment? It's hard to say at this point, but I certainly hope to see them at the top tables sometime soon.

What if you're not into grindy creature decks? What if you'd rather do something brutally unfair? Patrick Chapin has already explored some of the fairer decks enabled by Magic 2015, so his newest brews are a little more ambitious. If you're looking to do something positively enormous, Patrick's latest article may just have the deck for you: an awesome Blue deck featuring Jalira, Master Polymorphist.

U/G Polymorph ? Magic 2015 Standard| Patrick Chapin

What's the biggest thing we can Polymorph into play? The days of turning Khalni Garden tokens into Emrakul, the Aeons Torn may be long gone, but we've still got Worldspine Wurm, which is more than up to the task of demolishing a few opponents.

The question is, what are we going to Polymorph away? Patrick's plan involves Mutavault, Raise the Alarm, or Brimaz, King of Oreskos. I guess Elspeth helps too, but you're probably hoping to Polymorph sometime before turn seven. It's important to note that Jalira only puts non-Legendary creatures into play, which means that you don't have to worry about your eight small Legends when you're activating her. You will hit one of your two Worldspine Wurms every single time. Add a few counterspells to the mix to protect Jalira, a few Sphinx's Revelations as a strong backup plan, and you've got the backbone of a really fun, powerful deck.

It seems unikely to me that this deck is a real contender in a format where one of the best decks is a Black-based deck comprised primarily of discard spells and removal. However, in more midrangey or control-based metagames, this could be a perfectly reasonable choice. It's not too hard to imagine opponents tapping out for Jace and Divination when they shouldn't, or misevaluating how threatening Jalira actually is. In those cases, you get to cheat in the biggest creature in Standard and smash in for truly absurd amounts of damage.

What about Modern? It may take a little longer for cards like Hushwing Gryff to find their homes in the streamlined lists in Modern. Instead, let's take a look at an interesting take on Scapeshift built by none other than Jarvis Yu, just in time for Grand Prix Boston-Worcester. Cryptic Command? Snapcaster Mage? Who needs them. Why not just be more proactive and get Valakut active the hard way?

Brute-Force Scapeshift ? Modern | Jarvis Yu

This deck is much more reminiscent of the Valakut decks of Standard past. It's hard to understate how powerful Prismatic Omen is in this deck. Suddenly, Primeval Titan and Scapeshift serve as eight must-counter threats that end the game on the spot almost regardless of the board state. The ramp spells and fetch lands in this deck are infinitely more threatening because you can naturally draw more Valakuts and Prismatic Omen makes it realistic for you to turn random land drops into Lightning Bolts and Searing Winds.

Many Scapeshift lists can run into trouble where they cannot deal more than a certain amount of damage without a jumping through fairly significant hoops such as getting up to eight or even nine lands. This deck has no such problem. With Prismatic Omen making your Valakuts are Mountains, it's easy to deal upwards of 100 points of damage as long as you are't under significant pressure.

Perhaps the best part about this list is that people don't know how to play against it. Most players are used to the Cryptic Command builds of Scapeshift, and so they will try to play around your counterspells by doing things when you're tapped out. The thing is that they're actually just giving you openings to jam cards like Oracle of Mul Daya and Primeval Titan without worrying about things like disruption. This list is powerful, proactive, and attacks from a slightly different angle from many Scapeshift lists that we've seen recently. It's a deck I'm excited about, and I certainly hope to see more lists like this in the future.

Lotus Cobra used to be a Standard powerhouse, letting people ramp out Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Inferno Titan before their opponents could mount a sufficient defense. Unfortunately, this car hasn't really made the jump from Standard to Modern or Legacy, so why is Drew Levin looking to play with this fragile two-drop in a format as powerful as Vintage? The combination of Gush and Fastbond turn Lotus Cobra into a potent mana engine that can threaten to end the game on its own.

[Cardlist title= Cobra Gush ? Vintage | Drew Levin]

So what's the plan? Gush filters through cards digging for more cantrips, Gushes, and tutors. Fastbond lets you turn life into additional mana, particularly with Lotus Cobra in the mix. Eventually you find a Burning Wish and grab your Yawgmoth's Will from your sideboard. This lets you recycle all of your Gushes for their alternate casting cost until you find more powerful effects to sink your excess of mana into.

Things like Jace, Tezzeret, and Notion Thief. Notion Thief turns Burning Wish for Timetwister into a Draw fourteen plus Mind Twist, which is a pretty awesome thing to be able to set up. The goal of all of this is to find the Time Vault plus Voltaic Key combo and win with Tezzeret or Jace after taking all of the turns. Or just Tinker up a Blighsteel Colossus on turn one or two. You know. Fair Magic.

Decks like this and Gush Tendrils really showcase just how degenerate and exciting the GushBond engine is in Vintage. Decks like this are powerful, flexible, and draw more cards than almost any other deck in the format. You get to play with a ton of busted restricted cards and have the potential to easily win on the first turn of the game. It's classic vintage with a Lotus Cobra twist.

Magic 2015 brought with it a number of very interesting Legends for the Commander enthusiasts among us. Perhaps the most exciting new Legend is the Birthing Pod-on-a-stick, Yisan, the Wanderer Bard. Is this card good? Is it too slow? Are there enough ways to get additional activations and cheat ahead on the Verse Counter curve? These are the questions that Mr. Buu is looking to answer as he begins exploring what Yisan has to offer:

[Cardlist title=Yisan Midrange ? Commander | Mr. Buu]

The gameplan of this deck is pretty simple. Play Yisan. Activate Yisan. Bury your opponent in enormous monsters and card advantage from Enters the Battlefield abilities. Seems appropriate when you have Birthing Pod as a Commander. The trick here is making sure that you can get up the chain fast enough to be relevant before Yisan inevitably gets killed off. To that end, there are a number of critically important things that this deck needs.

First, ways to generate excess mana. You want to be able to activate Yisan multiple times per turn and still be able to cast the cards you're drawing for your turn. Second, ways to untap Yisan or copy his effect. If you're going to be investing a ton of time into Yisan, you've got to make sure that you get enough value out of the exchange. Third, enough powerful cards at the top end to actually win the game if you get enough Yisan activations.

Notice that Mr. Buu has a ton of cards like Quirion Ranger and Wirewood Symbiote at low mana costs. This lets you get additional activations out of Yisan every turn and "cheat" his verse counters higher than normal each turn cycle. The idea is that you want to get up to things like Seedborn Muse as quickly as possible, which let Yisan kick into high gear and threaten to end the game on the spot. With enough untaps and Mana Reflection effects, you basically get to just go off and chain things like Seedborn Muse into Soul of New Phyrexia, Regal Force, and Craterhoof Behemoth if you were so inclined.

The trick is that the actual top end doesn't matter too much. Whether you're finding Woodfall Primus or Avenger of Zendikar isn't hugely important. What is important is having enough creatures that untap Yisan and enough mana to dump into his ability that you can consistently get to your sixes, sevens, and eights to overpower your opponents.

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

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