Hello everyone! Another month is gone and it’s time for me to write an article again and as you might have guessed, it’s going to be about what is on everyone’s mind right now – standard. The current standard is in very weird spot and many people are lost in it and that’s what is this article for – I will explain, how things progressed, where are we right now and what to expect going forward.

My first testing of the new standard format started with testing for the PT with my team Cabin Crew. Me and my teammates always gather in the mountains in the southern part of Czech Republic in cabin owned by Martin Juza and we test for couple weeks. It didn’t take us long to figure out that 《Smuggler's Copter》 is busted and we realized that the aggro decks are just super strong and propably a deck to beat, which was confirmed by the Starcitygames Open tournament.

Of course you can’t realistically rely on SCG results, because of the player quality – some decks are harder to play and more importantly harder to build correctly so you often get warped results, but it gives you an idea. We also worked on a 《Aetherworks Marvel》 deck for a long time, but in the end dismissed it because we thought that the aggro matchup in unfavorable. Obviously it looks great when everything goes your way and you just kill them on turn 4, but that doesn’t happen that often and current aggro decks are so fast, that you just die before you assemble your pieces too often.

We thought that aggro is so good, that we immediately discarded any deck, that was bad against it, which was a crucial mistake – we just gave the other people too much credit. What we should have realized is, that not all the competitors in the PT have great teams like ours, or time to test for 2 weeks before the PT, which means that people didn’t realize how good the aggro actually is and they just played decks that had a bad match-up against it. Also players at the PT usually think that they are too good to play an aggro deck and are trying to outplay their opponents with some kind of a midrange deck or control deck.

What am I describing here can be certified with what happened at the PT. The big teams like Face to Face, Pantheon or us, played decks that either beat aggro or played aggro themselves. Face to Face even went that far, that they splashed red just for 《Radiant Flames》 to go with 3 (!) 《Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet》.

That kind of a deck logically can’t be great against people packing bunch of 《Glimmer of Genius》s, 《Summary Dismissal》s and 《Painful Truths》s, so BG got crushed and PT changed into grindy fest, where whoever had a better lategame engine going came on top. I am pretty sure that most of those people just played 《Aetherworks Marvel》 and grindy matchups the entire tournament.

What to learn from that? It’s important to realize, that despite certain strategy seems to be really powerful, it doesn’t necessearly means that other people work with the same information, or that that strategy is going to be overrepresented at the PT – people just like certain strategies and they usually stick to those no matter what.

What happened at the PT made an interesting shift in the metagame – it’s crucial to be aware that most of the competitive people just copy decklists, so people just started testing with the decks, that were visible at the PT, most notably Shota Yasooka’s Grixis Control. People were also afraid of 《Aetherworks Marvel》, so they were trying to find a deck that is strong against both control and 《Aetherworks Marvel》 and that is where U/W dominance started.

I am assuming that everyone saw Shota’s winning decklist but not everyone has to be familiar with the U/W deck so I am posting it for the record.

I don’t even think that this deck should be good with the cards legal in standard right now! Why is it winning so much then? Why did it put 6 copies in top 8 of GP Kuala Lumpur? Well the answer is simple and there are couple reasons for that:

1. A lot of people didn’t know what was going on and this deck is very very punishing if you don’t know what is going on – the fact that it plays at instant speed a lot of the time, means that you just blow out opponents, who sequence their cards incorrectly – cards like 《Archangel Avacyn》, 《Gideon, Ally of Zendikar》 or 《Spell Queller》 can just dominate the game, if your opponent isn’t careful.

2. The deck has very strong cards and very real nuts draw – no matter, what deck are you playing, there are draws in this deck, that are just almost impossible to beat.

3. People played the decks from the PT as I mentioned above and this deck is designed to prey on those and believe me, the good matchups with this deck are really good.

So why am I saying that I think this deck isn’t that great?

1. If you know your enemy and the cards to expect it’s actually not that hard to play around a lot of cards and make them significantly weaker.

2. People didn’t know how to sideaboard against the deck, which means that lot of their cards were ineffective and they just died to random 《Smuggler's Copter》, 《Gideon, Ally of Zendikar》 or 《Negate》 postboard. I have been playing mostly BG delirium lately and I had been loosing at the beginning too, before I learned what to do – the key is to play 4 《Vessel of Nascency》 post board, have 4 《Ishkanah, Grafwidow》 and enough answers to 《Gideon, Ally of Zendikar》 (by far the best card against you). Sounds really weird right? Well the thing is, that you have enough cheap ways to interact early to not die to random rush in the beginning, so all you have to do is to not die to 《Gideon, Ally of Zendikar》 and have something that just goes over the top of them, which helps you stabilize (spider). For this to happen, you need to play 4 《Vessel of Nascency》, because you really want your 《Ishkanah, Grafwidow》 to be active (it’s your MVP in the MU), because Grapple is just too bad of a card in the matchup to have it in your deck – think about it, you will just never ever have a creature in your graveyard – the way they are dealing with creatures is 《Reflector Mage》, 《Declaration in Stone》 and 《Stasis Snare》, which means that you have to mill a good creature in 3 cards and even if you do, you have to decide if you even want to take it, because if you do, you often don’t have enough card for delirium. Add a fact, that the matchup is very tempo oriented and you can’t really afford to spend 2 mana for such an unreliable engine card and it starts to become more clear.

3. The most important factor though is that people played decks, that are just bad against it, I don’t understand why people don’t play aggro decks more – in my opinion aggro is propably the best deck in the format and it’s hugely underrepresented.

Players are just not realizing how good the aggro deck actually is. If you want to have a good matchup against U/W, then just pick an aggro deck playing Disintegrations and you are fine. Both decks are doing very similar things, but the red decks are way faster, so the games usually play out in the way, where the U/W deck is behind at the beginning of the game, trying to survive with cards like 《Reflector Mage》 and then tries to go over the top with the big cards like 《Archangel Avacyn》 and sometimes 《Gideon, Ally of Zendikar》 or the big Angels postboard. Disintegration just completely wrecks them – it kills their stabilizing card and helps you kill them faster and it’s instant speed so it laughs at 《Spell Queller》. Of course you can’t just put Disintegration in the mardu vehicles deck, because you won’t have enough sources of black mana, but you can play the version with 《Cultivator's Caravan》 (which you should) or just play R/b which I like less, because it’s less explosive and it has lower threats density, so you can easily lose to control, with bunch of burn spells in your hand, after they killed your first couple creatures.

The other option is to play BG delirium, which I think has a positive matchup against the deck, but it takes a lot of practice as both the deck itself and the matchup specifically are very complicated.

This is my current list of BG:

Out

(it’s also possible that you want to cut 《Emrakul, the Promised End》, but I am not confident in that, and if you are not sure, then it’s usually better to just keep it in your deck, because there are many situations, where 《Traverse the Ulvenwald》 for 《Emrakul, the Promised End》 wins you games that you wouldn’t if the card wasn’t in your deck).

You can also keep in 《Liliana, the Last Hope》 on the play, if you think they keep in the x/1 creatures or board in 《Ob Nixilis Reignited》, if you think that they will go with the angels plan. (they shouldn’t do either, but that doesn’t mean that they will not).

I am also posting a decklist of aggro that I like; I didn’t play it, but it has a lot of things going for it that I like:

If my prediction of the future metagame is correct, then we will see a lot more of aggro and BG decks + people will always play control, because the blue Gearhulk is just too sweet to not be played, which means that a deck that I was working on and some of my teammates played at the PT might be good positioned in couple of weeks. I wouldn’t advise you to play it now, as the U/W matchup is just terrible, but it’s something to be aware of for sure.

The list is outdated, but the basic idea is that you just play a regular game of magic, but you have 4 free-wins in your deck in Marvel, which is super strong against strategies like BG or even control.

I hope the article was useful to you and you are no longer as lost in standard as I was just a few days ago. Also if you want to ask about something, I will be happy to provide you with an answer on facebook or twitter so don’t be afraid and add me.

As always thanks for reading, Petr Sochurek

Petr Sochurek
His prowess in reading the meta and taking advantage of it with flawless plays is among the reasons he is considered to be one of top European players right now.
Having played Grixis Control to a magnificent victory at GP Paris 2016.

He is most assuredly one of the top players to keep an eye on right now!

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