4C 《Kethis, the Hidden Hand》

Deck 4 Kethis, the Hidden Hand 4 Emry, Lurker of the Loch 4 Diligent Excavator 4 Teferi, Time Raveler 4 Lazav, the Multifarious 4 Fblthp, the Lost 3 Tamiyo, Collector of Tales 2 Oath of Kaya 2 Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath 4 Mox Amber 1 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries 4 Indatha Triome 1 Island 1 Glacial Fortress 3 Hallowed Fountain 3 Temple Garden 1 Godless Shrine 1 Drowned Catacomb 4 Watery Grave 2 Breeding Pool 2 Hinterland Harbor 2 Zagoth Triome

How to Use It?

　1. Copy the whole text.

　2. Open the Deck menu on MTG Arena and click “Import”.

　3. If you succeeded, your deck will be there as an “Imported Deck”.

Gruul Aggro

Deck 4 Bonecrusher Giant 4 Pelt Collector 3 Embercleave 10 Forest 4 Gruul Spellbreaker 4 Llanowar Elves 7 Mountain 4 Lovestruck Beast 4 Questing Beast 4 Rootbound Crag 4 Stomping Ground 3 Scavenging Ooze 2 Elder Gargaroth 3 Primal Might Sideboard 3 Redcap Melee 4 Robber of the Rich 2 Heroic Intervention 2 Soul Sear 2 Storm’s Wrath 2 Lava Coil

How to Use It?

　1. Copy the whole text.

　2. Open the Deck menu on MTG Arena and click “Import”.

　3. If you succeeded, your deck will be there as an “Imported Deck”.

A consequence of those mana requirements is that two-color decks tend to be heavier on the overall number of lands, which leads to them being more midrangey and less all-in, like the list above.

The true hyper aggro decks of the format lean towards being mono color, with Red, White, and Green being viable due to the number of 1-drops available. Mono blue is also heavily played.

Tempered Steel

Deck 4 All That Glitters 4 Gingerbrute 4 Inquisitive Puppet 4 Locthwain Gargoyle 4 Ornithopter 16 Plains 4 Sparring Construct 4 Steel Overseer 4 Stonecoil Serpent 4 Tempered Steel 2 Unbreakable Formation 2 Voltaic Servant 4 Zhalfirin Void Sideboard 4 Glass Casket 4 Grafdigger’s Cage 2 Sorcerous Spyglass 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben 2 Unbreakable Formation

How to Use It?

　1. Copy the whole text.

　2. Open the Deck menu on MTG Arena and click “Import”.

　3. If you succeeded, your deck will be there as an “Imported Deck”.

Scapeshift

Deck 1 Arboreal Grazer 1 Blast Zone 2 Breeding Pool 4 Elvish Rejuvenator 3 Fabled Passage 1 Field of Ruin 4 Field of the Dead 2 Forest 1 Ghost Quarter 1 Glacial Fortress 4 Golos, Tireless Pilgrim 4 Growth Spiral 1 Hallowed Fountain 1 Hinterland Harbor 1 Indatha Triome 2 Island 2 Kenrith, the Returned King 1 Ketria Triome 2 Migration Path 1 Mountain 1 Plains 1 Raugrin Triome 3 Scapeshift 1 Sunpetal Grove 1 Swamp 4 Teferi, Time Raveler 1 Temple Garden 1 Temple of Enlightenment 1 Temple of Mystery 1 Temple of Plenty 3 Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath 3 Shatter the Sky

How to Use It?

　1. Copy the whole text.

　2. Open the Deck menu on MTG Arena and click “Import”.

　3. If you succeeded, your deck will be there as an “Imported Deck”.

1.Have Some Outs in Your Deck That You Can Find With Strategic Mulligans

The first scenario that I want to cover is that aggro decks kind of suck. I noticed this last year. During practice, I could often build a midrange or control deck that had 30 cards dedicated to beating other slow decks, and also 4 sweeper effects. If I got paired against aggro, I had a decent chance of winning game 1 by mulliganing towards that sweeper, despite minimal attention to the matchup.

The example holds true to any narrow strategy that folds to some maindeckable card. Aggro is just the most common one and if you are an aggro player you need to be aware of this when constructing your deck.

In order for aggro decks to remain competitive under those constraints, they need different angles of attack in their maindeck. Mardu Vehicles, a deck sadly too old for Historic, would be a good example here: vehicles, planeswalkers, and creature lands meant that the deck could play a long game that was good at beating sweepers. Resilience over pure speed.

However, in current Historic format, I am afraid that the pressure being put by 《Growth Spiral》 into 《Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath》 forces aggro decks to a very different direction of having to play their fastest configurations. This already happened when 《Nexus of Fate》 was legal, it is just a matter of figuring out if the other bombs that players will be accelerating into will also have the same effect.

Take the Gruul Aggro or the 《Tempered Steel》 deck. They are popular and all data seems to indicate they perform extremely well on the ladder. But on tournament setting, the reactive decks have a massive strategic advantage game 1 simply by mulliganing into 《Shatter the Sky》 or mulliganing away from their slowest hands.

If I am playing a ramp deck, I would not know at the moment exactly how mana slots I need to dedicate to beating those aggro decks, but I imagine it would not be hard to figure out after playtesting. It is all matter of fitting enough sweepers in the maindeck and mulliganing aggressively.

I do not need to overwhelmingly beat aggro with my maindeck, I just need to find a reasonable compromise and then I can fix it further with sideboarding. The point is that overall, this will not take too many slots, so I can focus the rest of my deck in improving synergies and maximizing raw power over interaction.

The current aggro deck that can circumvent this would be Mono Blue and I think it is an interesting choice to work on. While it does not fold to a single card, it still gets hurt if the opponent can move mulligan away their slowest hands.

Another interesting consequence here is that any deck that has access to a nut draw or combo kill will always have a reasonable floor in how bad a matchup can be – if you don’t like your pairing, try to gamble into finding that nut draw after a mulligan or two.

Thus, those decks are much more powerful in open list rules and why I think 《Kethis, the Hidden Hand》 can make a comeback in the format. This also means that if you are playing an aggro deck, even if you want to diversify your plans, you still needed to consistently reach a fast kill against that approach.

2. Diversify Sideboard Threats and Make Them Guess

The second scenario is that it is much harder to rely on a single surprise with your sideboard choices when trying to overcome a bad matchup. Notably, it is hard to depend on a hard-to-answer threat as your main sideboard plan.

For example, in the last Standard format, our Jund Sacrifice deck was doing well on the ladder against Temur Reclamation on the strength of 《Rotting Regisaur》, a creature difficult to be killed by red damage spells.

While Temur already had the tools to deal with 《Rotting Regisaur》 in their lists (《Brazen Borrower》 and extra 《Expansion/Explosion》 to copy 《Scorching Dragonfire》), those were not cards they would necessarily have against Jund after sideboard because of the threat of 《Cindervines》. We were counting on that one game were they sideboarded wrong to be enough to tip the match over.

This would not work as well with open decklists. The ideal sideboards here should rely on having multiple plans that create mismatches and then you hope they overreact despite having perfect information. That is, if you are going to have a plan that forces your opponent into playing specific answers (like 《Brazen Borrower》 against 《Rotting Regisaur》), you need to make sure that you are also able to beat them in other ways, to at least keep them guessing.

In our past example, we would need Jund to be competitive in the games where it did not find 《Rotting Regisaur》 when they drew into their 《Brazen Borrower》. In practice, what happened that while that interaction was favorable for Jund, it was not enough to win more than 50% of games.

3. Create More Decisions for Your Opponents

The third scenario is not as critical, but it’s still good to have in mind because it costs so little: when building decks with open lists in mind, try to create as many decisions as possible for your opponents in terms of cards that they need to play around.

Having a single 《Shark Typhoon》 in your list instead of none is what will stop your opponent from freely minusing their 《Teferi, Time Raveler》. A perfect opponent would account for the exact probabilities of you having that 1 《Shark Typhoon》 and weight all the risk precisely, but in the real-world opponents will mess up this calculation quite often.

Basically, any card that would require a different play pattern from your opponent to be played around is great to have in small numbers in your list, because they can stop them from being too greedy and even force mistakes.

4. You Know Their Cards

Ah, there is a fourth bonus scenario, one that you probably knew – 《Meddling Mage》 gets better with open decklists, so things like this will never happen, sadly:

I really want 《Meddling Mage》 to be playable in this format, as it is an elegant roadblock against the ramp decks. The synergistic interaction between 《Meddling Mage》, 《Hero of Precinct One》, 《Thought Erasure》 (gives you extra info for 《Meddling Mage》) and 《Tyrant’s Scorn》 (flex card that can slow aggro while also protecting your mage against sorcery speed interaction) is what makes me optimistic that Esper Hero can be good again, which would do wonders to make the format more diverse.

Esper Hero

Deck 3 Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths 3 Deputy of Detention 2 Dream Trawler 4 Drowned Catacomb 4 Glacial Fortress 4 Godless Shrine 4 Hallowed Fountain 4 Hero of Precinct One 1 Hostage Taker 1 Island 4 Isolated Chapel 4 Meddling Mage 3 Oath of Kaya 1 Plains 3 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria 4 Teferi, Time Raveler 4 Thought Erasure 3 Tyrant’s Scorn 4 Watery Grave

How to Use It?

　1. Copy the whole text.

　2. Open the Deck menu on MTG Arena and click “Import”.

　3. If you succeeded, your deck will be there as an “Imported Deck”.