Last Standard season, we saw several weeks of dominance from Collected Company decks featuring Cryptolith Rite. This card, in conjunction with Duskwatch Recruiter and Eldrazi Displacer, gave you lots of ways of converting mana into extra cards and a means to lock down the board in a way that overpowered even the slowest control decks in the format. Collected Company may have rotated, but the Cryptolith Rite engine is still available in Standard, and Eric Hawkins may have figured out how to make it happen:

Four Color Rites - Kaladesh Standard | Eric Hawkins

• Creatures (29)
• 1 Brood Monitor
• 1 Cloudblazer
• 1 Eyeless Watcher
• 1 Linvala, the Preserver
• 1 Noxious Gearhulk
• 1 Restoration Gearsmith
• 1 Thought-Knot Seer
• 1 Voldaren Pariah
• 1 Zulaport Cutthroat
• 2 Duskwatch Recruiter
• 3 Loam Dryad
• 3 Servant of the Conduit
• 4 Catacomb Sifter
• 4 Eldrazi Displacer
• 4 Reflector Mage

• Sorceries (4)
• 4 Eldritch Evolution

• Enchantments (3)
• 3 Cryptolith Rite

• Lands (24)
• 2 Forest
• 1 Island
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Wastes
• 1 Botanical Sanctum
• 1 Canopy Vista
• 2 Concealed Courtyard
• 2 Westvale Abbey
• 4 Aether Hub
• 4 Blooming Marsh
• 4 Evolving Wilds

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Noxious Gearhulk
• 1 Verdurous Gearhulk
• 1 Reality Smasher
• 4 Spell Queller
• 3 Thought-Knot Seer
• 1 Voldaren Pariah
• 2 Natural State
• 2 Painful Truths

Buy This Deck

At its core, this deck is very similar to the Collected Company decks of last year. The goal is to overwhelm your opponent with a pile of value creatures, with the end game prominently featuring Duskwatch Recruiter and Eldrazi Displacer. You even get the ability of Collected Company decks to play a small suite of toolbox creatures since you have a means of trying to find them when you need them. Eldritch Evolution is certainly no Collected Company, but it does a pretty good impression and has a few upsides.

The idea here is that Catacomb Sifter and Reflector Mage will buy you time against other midrangey creature decks. Your goal is just to gum up the ground with 2/2s and 2/3s early on. Servant of the Conduit and Loam Dryad help to make sure your mana is as smooth as possible while you dig for Cryptolith Rite. One the ground is relatively stable, your goal is to find Eldritch Evolution, Eldrazi Displacer, or Duskwatch Recruiter.

Eldrazi Displacer lets you do silly tricks with Reflector Mage, Cloudblazer, Restoration Gearsmith, and Noxious Gearhulk to just dominate midrange mirrors. It also has the added upside of going infinite with the singleton Brood Monitor and Zulaport Cutthroat. You even can control your opponent’s draw steps with Thought-Knot Seer or sweep their board repeatedly with Voldaren Pariah. Eldritch Evolution helps you find the missing piece to generate the particular flavor of value you need in the matchup and Duskwatch Recruiter lets you just overwhelm your opponent with card advantage.

This is a deck full of powerful cards and interactions, and may just be exactly the way to beat up on the top tier trio of Standard: Blue-White Flash, Black-Green Delirium, and Aetherworks Marvel variants.