Hello everyone!

This time around my article is going to be about, what’s on everyone’s mind right now – Standard and how to approach this 《Marvel》 metagame. Before I say anything I want to make clear that I think Marvel is a great deck and if you want to play it, there is definitely nothing bad about it – it is after all, the best deck.

What makes Marvel so good and why is it so hard to beat it?

Well the answer is very simple – the card itself – 《Aetherworks Marvel》 is completely busted – I am not exaggerating; the card is just absurd, but the problem is that you need to put other cards in your deck to make it work – you need high-impact hits and energy producers.

Now the reason why the Marvel deck is so good is that these other energy producing cards are all (mostly) very good on their own and the deck can function without its centerpiece. Yes you can make an argument that the rest of the deck is less powerful than the other strategies and you can draw infinite 《Ulamogs》 and 《Puzzleknots》 and do nothing, but that doesn’t matter as much as you might think.

Sometimes you are on the draw and they just go 《Servant》 into 《Glimmer》 into 《Refiner》 + 《Harnessed Lightning》 or you mulligan and you have a weak draw and you lose to the “fair” part of the deck and sometimes they just “Oops” turn 4 《Ulamog》 you which together adds up to a huge win percentage – having this powerful 4 mana card just makes it incredibly strong. It’s really easy to just say that they got lucky for spinning a 《Ulamog》 early in the game and not count that game in your head, but that is just not how it works – that is why the deck is so good.

How to beat Marvel and why is it so hard to beat it?

If you want to beat Marvel, you need to exploit it’s weaknesses and target those – you are not going to beat it with a regular deck, because as I already said above – even if your deck is good in the non-marvel games, you will still lose some of those games and the fact that you just straight up lose to Marvel is just not good enough.

It is really hard to have a favorable matchup postboard so your main goal should be to have a sizable advantage in the first game and then still have an ok matchup in g2 and g3.

Be aggressive

I think there are only 2 solutions – be extremely aggresive and kill them before they set up, Marvel also has enough cheap ways to interact that they will often be able to spin once, but if your deck is fast enough you force them to hit 《Ulamog》 on the first spin or lose, which isn’t that bad. The fastest deck you can build would propably be a R/W Humans list – the problem I have with this archetype though is that I don’t think your edge g1 makes up for their edge post board – you can’t really beat 《Radiant Flames》.

Another deck that tries to kill Marvel as soon as possible is the R/G Energy deck, but I just don’t see that deck having a fast enough clock to have a favorable Marvel matchup.

Play a control deck

Another option (and conclusion that most people initially came to) is to play a control deck – if your hand is infinite counters – it doesn’t really matter what card they play and they draw a lot of useless cards and you eventually outgrind them with card draw and 《Torrential Gearhulks》.

That seemed to have worked at first, but the deck adapted and they are playing cards like 《Trackers》 or 《Negates》 over 《Chandra, Flamecaller》 and that’s a huge upside for them – not to mention that all the versions play 《Glimmers》 now – those changes are mainly for the mirror, but it’s also incidentally very good against control decks.

The matchup is still fine and I think control is a favorite in game 1, but similarly to aggro, I think it gets bad postboard – they just have too many ways to put you in a bad spot – sometimes they just outgrind you with the value creatures while you flood out, sometimes you are mana screwed and you are forced to counter their 《Glimmer》, because otherwise they just keep playing lands and eventually they just go double threat or threat + 《Negate》 and if you do, then they untap and 《Marvel》 you.

I think that a version playing 《Baral, Chief of Compliance》 would be very good against them:

《Baral》 solves a lot of problems you have in that matchup – you don’t flood out and it makes your cards cheaper, so it’s easier to counter 《Glimmer》 – progress with your own draw spells and it’s harder for them to just win with Marvel + counter. Problem with this list is that it’s very bad against aggro decks and the upside isn’t big enough in my opinion. I think you are better of with just playing Marvel unless you expect infinite amounts of slow decks and Marvel.

As for the regular UR – this is the list that I recommend if you really want to play UR (although I don’t think it’s currently a great choice ).

My main problem with UR is that everyone packs a lot of cards in the board for it and everyone has a good plan against you even though the deck actually isn’t that big part of a metagame – the deck isn’t strong enough to justify playing it when everyone is prepared.

Being both aggressive and controlling

If you really want to beat Marvel then you have to do both – be aggresive and have counters. The card that does both is 《Spell Queller》 and it’s the best card you can be playing if you want to beat Marvel.

That is the easy part and basically everyone came to that same conclusion – the hard part is to find the right home for it. This is my first attempt at it, that I tried last week:

I really liked the combination of 《Always Watching》 and 《Glory-Bound Initiate》 as well as the matchup against Marvel, but the deck was just way too bad against other aggro strategies like B/G, R/G, Mardu or Zombies so I dismissed it.

I was starting to get desperate, but then I came across the new 《Queller》 Vehicles and I have immediately fallen in love – the deck is doing the right things, but it’s a powerful deck on it’s own, so it’s able to compete against random decks (and not just beat the deck it was designed to beat). I still need a little time to find the right configuration, but here is a sample list, that I have been playing with good results.

Conclusion

So my conclusion is: play 《Queller》 Vehicles or Marvel.

A lot of people are complaining that the mirror is random and while it often plays out that way (especially game1), there are still a lot of hard decisions and a lot of edge to gain against worse players and if you have enough practice with the deck, you should probably just play it. On the other hand there are many players, who didn’t play that much with Marvel yet and those players are better of just playing Vehicles, because they will have a “bad matchup” against more experienced Marvel players.

I think there might be a point in a future metagame, when there will be so many people playing decks that are designed specifically to beat Marvel that it might be fine to play a deck that prey’s upon those, even though it has a bad Marvel matchup, but I don’t think that should be your approach for now – you either have to play Marvel or beat it.

Thanks for reading,

Petr Sochurek