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Main » Articles » Unifying Standard

Unifying Standard

Russell Tassicker
Posted on May 30, 2011
 Reddit

Howdy, folks! Apologies for my absence last week. It was exams week for me, and though I wrote over six thousand words in a bit over a week, they were on various periods of ancient history rather than Magic: The Gathering. Thank you to everyone who commented on my Slang Lexicon; I will be sure to do an update at some stage, as there were plenty of great suggestions! For today, though, I’m going to try and help out our team for the upcoming Community Cup and force some diversity on Standard in the process.

Unifying Standard

The details of the 2011 MTGO Community Cup have been announced over on the mothership. Now named in memory of Erik “Hamtastic” Friborg, a previous competitor and pillar of the MTGO community who is sadly no longer with us; the friendly tournament between Wizards employees and nominated representatives of the community will feature several unusual formats. The one that has been getting the most press is the new Modern, which is clearly a candidate to take over from Extended as the official third constructed format. What I find most interesting, however, is the fact that both the Modern and Standard portions of the event are run as “unified” tournaments, meaning that the eight decks on each team can only contain four of any one card (barring basic lands). Not four Lightning Bolts per deck, but four Lightning Bolts per eight decks!

The reason this makes me so happy is that it means we won’t just see a Standard tournament played out between Caw-Blade and various hues of Splinter Twin decks, as there are only four of each of the best cards to stretch over the whole team—you can have a deck with four Jaces, or two decks with two, or any way you want to spread them out, but no more than four! This format was also played at the Community Cup last year, so for plenty of examples, take a look at the deck lists here—the first half with CC usernames are the community with decks designed by Gavin Verhey, the second half are the Wizards staff team with decks designed by Erik Lauer. From the event coverage, a summary of the decks:

The deck roster for the two teams was fairly similar. Both teams featured the traditional Jund and Blue-white Tapout decks. They also featured a version of the Bant deck, albeit different builds. The Community opted to run a Next Level Bant deck similar to the one Brian Kibler used to win Grand Prix–Sendai last weekend. Wizards chose to run the Eldrazi Conscription deck since it ran fewer overlaps with their other decks. Both teams also had Naya Allies decks and Eldrazi Green decks. The two red decks used by the teams differed primarily due to the lack of Plated Geopedes and fetch lands in the Wizards deck. Both teams had a mono-color aggro deck, the Community running Vampires to the Wizards’ White Weenie deck. The final decks were Time Warp-based combo decks. The Wizards team chose to run Open the Vaults as opposed to the Blue-green Turboland deck sported by the Community team.

Standard in 2011

The first thing to do when approaching the unified Standard format is to look at Standard itself, and see what the cards shared by the top decks are. The format since Mirrodin Besieged was released has been very well defined. While Mike Flores and others insist there is a lot of room for innovation, that hasn’t been what has played out at the SCG Open series week after week, and instead we’ve seen Caw-Blade, R/U/G control, and now Exarch/Twin combo as the top decks. As the decks that have been putting up the best results, we know that we want to have all three on our team for the Community Cup, but unfortunately there are more than a few cards in common between the decks. This is what I’ll call the Blue Control package. It’s also used by Tezzeret decks, U/B control, Venser control, and basically anyone playing Blue in this format:

Blue Control package

4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

4 Preordain

4 Mana Leak

This is the foundation of all the most powerful strategies in the format—GP: Dallas saw a Top 8 with thirty-two of both Jace and Preordain, with Mana Leak only a few behind. The question for the unified format is, do you want to split these fours up or sink them all into one “most powerful” deck? I can’t say anything definitive yet, but I’m tempted to keep them together, and probably in Mike Flores’s R/U Exarch/Twin deck, due to its smaller overlap in other areas. Whichever deck gets this package would be carrying the expectations of the team.

The Blue Control package is not the only package to feature across multiple top decks. Here are some more:

Red Aggro package (RDW, Goblins, Boros):

4 Goblin Guide

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Koth of the Hammer

White Aggro package (Boros, GW/WW Quest, Caw-Blade, GW Fauna Shaman):

4 Stoneforge Mystic

4 Squadron Hawk

Green Ramp package (R/U/G, Valakut, Genesis Wave):

4 Lotus Cobra

4 Explore

X Titans

While we certainly want a deck utilizing each of these packages, any deck that utilizes multiple packages is a questionable choice—we have to make eight decks, and they will only play three games each, so even if our full-strength R/U/G deck wins every game, if we have to make our eighth deck from the leftovers and it goes 0–3, it’s basically a wash.

So we definitely want a Blue control deck, a Red aggro deck, a White aggro deck, and a Green ramp deck. These strategies have proven strong enough to compete in Standard over many weeks of high-level play. A great boon when designing for the unified format is strong strategies that lie outside the mainstream card choices—the outliers.

Outliers

There is one deck that has always been there in Standard—while rarely winning events, it has pretty consistently Top 16’ed the Opens each week. It also uses nearly none of the “best” cards in the format. I’m talking about B/r Vampires, which dips its toes into Red for a smattering of burn to complement its otherwise mono-Black tribal strategy. There’s no other decks on our radar that want Kalastria Highborn, Gatekeeper of Malakir, Bloodghast, and so forth. While there may be a bit of wrestling over the removal cards, there are enough redundancies that this shouldn’t be an issue. Vampires is certainly on the team as well, bringing our vaguely sketched team to five.

Fauna Shaman and her constant companion Vengevine are another powerful strategy that sees a minor amount of success on MTGO. While she frequently overlaps with either the White Aggro package or the Blue Control package, these two are powerful enough to stand on their own, most likely in an Elf deck, bringing us up to six. That makes two tribal decks, but there are others we could consider here, like Allies, for example—it depends on color balance and where our common support cards are being used.

Infect is another perfect strategy for the unified format. The poison mechanic is designed in an extremely linear way—Infect creatures are generally only good with other Infect creatures, as attacking your opponent’s life total and poison total simultaneously is inefficient. There are several ways to go with Infect—we could even have multiple Infect players, as there are enough decent cards in both Black and Green for two monocolored decks! Adding an Infect deck, likely either mono-Black or mono-Green, takes us to seven.

Finally, a great place to look for decks that may not yet have reached their full potential in Standard is in Scars block. Grand Architect Blue, White Tempered Steel, and U/B Tezzeret/Forgemaster decks have all made frequent appearances in the top daily event lists and share few of the cards we’re using elsewhere. Let’s pencil in one of these block decks in our final slot.

The Support

Another major restriction of the unified format is that we only have four of each dual land to go around. You may have noticed I tended toward diversely monocolored decks while going through the above, and this is why—we can have any number of Plains across our decks, so making mono-White deck mana bases is easy, while multiple U/W/x decks would cause a problem. We do have rather a lot of duals available at the present time:

But some are certainly better than others. Another restriction is on our sideboard cards—we have to build eight sideboards without reusing Divine Offering, Mark of Mutiny, Kor Firewalker, Flashfreeze, Duress, Combust, and so on. With luck, we can find enough redundancies for these cards that it isn’t too big of a problem. Building sideboards is going to be rather different than usual as well, as we aren’t trying to attack a Caw-Blade meta, but rather eight different possible decks, so we will want to go for versatility over specifically powerful hate cards.

The Decks!

Without further ado, let’s pick some decks. First is our Blue control deck.

"U/R Twin A Standard deck, by Mike Flores"

One of the best things to do against an unknown field is to play a fast, noninteractive combo. While this sort of deck will be expected, there’s only so much that you can do with your eight sideboards to fight it. Mike took down a $5K tournament with this brew, beating Caw-Blade master Edgar Flores in the finals, so it has certainly made a splash already.

Continuing the theme of barely interactive combo, let’s go on with the Green ramp deck. The original and still one of the best, we have R/G Valakut:

"locon99 (4–0) Standard Daily #2422415 on 05/27/2011"

We’re starting to see some possible issues, with Green Sun's Zenith and Lightning Bolt both already earmarked for later decks. Never mind; we’ll crash through for the time being and tidy up the mess once we’ve got our eight decks! Onto our Red aggro deck:

"THIAGOLUCENA (4–0) Standard Daily #2422401 on 05/27/2011"

This is a rather exciting variation on the old burn decks—cutting Plated Geopede for Shrine of Burning Rage—that has been showing up quite regularly in MTGO daily events. This particular version also sports Kiln Fiend, a nice card to pair with the massive burn suite. This deck is rather greedy in terms of the Red cards it uses up, as it leaves hardly any burn for the other decks! We may have to swap this deck for Goblins, but that will become clear in the unifying stage.

For our White aggro package, I had to go digging for a deck that didn’t pair Mystic with Jace, Goblin Guide, or Fauna Shaman, but I found one. Presenting mono-White control:

"Mono-White Control, by Michael Eisenhauer"

Kind of like a mono-White Caw-Blade that surprisingly doesn’t run any Gideons, this deck can certainly be tinkered with to bring it up to date with New Phyrexia. Tectonic Edge once again makes an appearance—it is going to be exceedingly difficult to figure out the correct home for that card. Next up, Vampires:

"R/B Vampires Featured by Brad Nelson"

A very neat and self-contained list, we should only really have to fiddle with the removal suite to get this deck ready for Unified. Boosting our tribal numbers is Elves:

"mik4 (4–0) Standard Daily #2422423 on 05/28/2011"

There’s that Tec Edge again! Green Sun's Zenith also reappears, and I think this deck could use them more than the Valakut deck, which can just max out on Summoning Traps instead. Six down, and next we have Infect. I’ve chosen Black since it gets to play one of my favorite cards, Phyrexian Crusader:

"lavande (4–0) Standard Daily #2422423 on 05/28/2011"

While this isn’t exactly an Infect deck, while trawling the dailies, it jumped out and demanded my attention—Crusader and Lashwrithe is practically a combo, and Phyrexian Obliterator is going to be really difficult to deal with for an unprepared opponent. This deck will butt heads with Vampires over the removal and discard suites, but there is enough redundancy in Black that we can accommodate both. Finally, our ambassador from New Phyrexia, Tempered Steel:

"schizoidman (4–0) SOM Block Constructed Daily #2422411 on 05/27/2011"

This deck is lower on power level than the heavy hitters of Standard, but it can certainly be amped up in the larger card pool with cards like Lodestone Golem.

Halfway There

I am pretty happy with the small areas of overlap in our decks—while I’ve skipped Caw-Blade entirely, I hope that I’ve managed to get two strong decks out of it in the Splinter/Twin combo deck and the mono-White deck. There are only a few small areas of adjustment needed here, mostly relating to Tectonic Edge, which, thank goodness, isn’t even going to upset the color balance of the decks. I love the Community Cup and especially the unified formats—it really forces some diversity on an otherwise repetitive format. As I’ve demonstrated, there are plenty of potential strategies in the card pool available in Standard; there are tons I didn’t even touch on, like Life combo, Pyromancer Ascension, and so forth. If you think I missed a particularly notable Standard deck that the community team should try and fit in, please sound off in the comments, and let’s hope LSV, Bing, Marshall, and the rest can make it three on the trot for the good guys!

TAGS articles, constructed, standard

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