Ranting about Standard Magic

[Ice9]

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/ ... eid=426850

It appears to say the opposite on that very page.

If multiple prevention and/or replacement effects are trying to apply to the same damage, the controller of the creature that would be dealt damage chooses the order in which to apply them. As examples, an opponent could choose to apply the effect of Djeru’s Resolve and prevent the damage rather than put -1/-1 counters on it; or an opponent could choose to convert the damage to -1/-1 counters before Insult could double it, and then Insult’s effect won’t apply anymore.

[Prak]

Oh, ok, then I read it wrong. Thank you.

[OgreBattle]

So with Amonkhet are there any cards with very sexy or grotesque artwork?

[Username17]

So with Amonkhet are there any cards with very sexy or grotesque artwork?

Amonkhet has a very classic Hollywood vibe to it, so the women are more "glamorous" than "sexy" by modern standards.


Liliana does her Elizabeth Taylor impersonation.

Amonkhet has a heavy zombie theme, but those Zombies are mostly mummies, who are all new and well cared-for. The Zombies in Amonkhet are mostly very clean.


Zombies in Amonkhet do domestic work and are mostly embalmed and perfumed and don't stink..

There is plenty of man-candy, because men apparently run around shirtless in Amonkhet pretty often:



And there are plenty of horrifying situations in Amonkhet.




But it's all stuff from classic Hollywood horror rather than gore fests. Crawling bugs, buried alive, and so on and so on.

-Username17

[Prak]

So, this is the decklist I took to Game Day (more or less, there was a slight difference in the specific non-basic lands)
2 Canyon Slough
3 Evolving Wilds
5 Forest
2 Foul Orchard
4 Mountain
5 Swamp
2 Timber Gorge
4 Attune with Aether
4 Channeler Initiate
3 Consuming Fervor
3 Decimator Beetle
3 Exemplar of Strength
1 Glorybringer
2 Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons
3 Harnessed Lightning
2 Heaven // Earth
3 Nest of Scarabs
3 Plague Belcher
2 Radiant Flames
4 Soul-Scar Mage

I went 0-4. I did get a couple of game wins, but the deck overall was very inconsistent. It sort of seems like this may be due to shuffling. On the other hand, honestly, Sweltering Suns seems better than Radiant Flames, since it does 3 regardless of how many colors of mana you have. The cycling is nice to have, but as it costs the same, you'd, like, only ever use it if you have no red, and if that happens, you're flailing anyway. Harnessed Lightning is nice, and can conceivably take out Ulamog if you have your engine set up and have cast several Attunes already, but... if Ulamog hits, it seems like this deck just scoops and sides in some artifact destruction to take out the Marvel that cheaps Ulamog in (in my experience).

As ridiculous as it seems, siding in Shock is actually pretty helpful. That early game removal can really extend your life until you get your engine set up.

[Username17]

Speaking of Ulamog, I can't wait until BFZ is out of standard.

BFZ is a surprisingly terribly designed set. The average power level of the cards is basement tier, none of the core mechanics see constructed play, and the stand-out Mythics are pushed to the point of ridiculousness. Gideon has literally never been absent from the top eight of a pro tour since he was printed. The closest we ever got was Amonkhet where he was a sideboard card for the only white deck that made the top eight (WB Zombies).

And the other cards people actually use are backbreaking shit like Ulamog, Chandra Flamecaller, Kalitas, and 3-cost Nissa. The midrange shit people use is 100% cancer cards like Reality Smasher and Thought Knot Seer.

But think about how terrible the design is on, for example, Allies. Gideon has been in 99% of tournament grade white decks in every tournament since he was printed. His +1 ability is that he becomes a creature with the Ally type. His +0 ability is that he puts a 2/2 token with the Ally type into play. Any Ally synergies you have would trigger on one or both of those abilities, and almost every white deck is already playing him (some control or reanimator decks with Red and White would rather play Nahiri). All of the Ally synergy cards are so bad that no one plays them even in white decks that are running the leader of the Ally faction for pure value purposes!

When was the last time someone used an Awaken effect? Or a Processor? When was the last time anyone did anything good with Landfall in Standard? The best fucking Landfall card is Tireless Tracker, and she isn't from Zendikar and doesn't even say Landfall on the card. That block is trash and doesn't support its core mechanics or its core tribes. Even the game breaking Eldrazi decks that created Eldrazi Winter did so in Modern because of cards from the previous Zendikar.

I won my local Gamesday and got the Worthy Champion mat with a Mono-Red Hazoret's Vampires deck. I used the Red Heckbent stuff from Amonkhet with the Red Madness Vampires stuff from Innistrad because those are two supported mechanics that support each other. Chaining Bloodmad Vampires with Hazoret's Monument in play is amazing. But that's only possible because Amonkhet and Innistrad have actual supported mechanics instead of just a couple overpowered chase mythics and a huge pile of unplayable garbage like Zendikar.

-Username17

[Prak]

I'm thinking about a Fling/Metalwork Colossus deck next time I get a chance to play standard.

Cheap in the colossus, fling it, recur it, fling it again.

It seems to me that you run four each M.Colossus, Fling, and Heart-piercer Manticore. And then the rest of the deck is basic land and cheap artifacts, though Hedron Archive, Hedron Crawler and Foundry Inspector are more useful to getting the colossus in play than other artifacts of their CMC, and artifacts that let you draw like the eggs or Merchant's Dockhand aren't bad ideas.

This might be more reliable than my Jund Insects deck just because there are less moving parts and there's a good deal of redundancy for the specific parts.

Edit: of course, Aetherworks Marvel would be nice in this deck, and you could do the same tactic in a Ulamog Marvel deck if you wanted to.

[Username17]

If you want to fling to victory, you want to win immediately when you fling. There's a maximum of four Flings in your deck, and you're not going to dig deep enough to get 2 of them.

That means you're going to have to find a way to count to 20 with a Metalwork Colossus + Fling. My suggestion would be to include Key to the City and Insult to Injury. Other than that you're playing a Red/X Artifact deck, which screams Red/Black Vehicles to be honest. Unlicensed Disintegration is still good, and Scrapheap Scrounger is still the best pilot for Crew 3 Vehicles and Crew 3 Vehicles are still the most efficient way to cheat Colossus into play (Cultivator's Caravan costs 3 and is a mana rock so it gets you 4 mana closer to Colossus if you need it to or Colossus can crew it on the turn it comes out if you need it to).

But yes, turn 5 Insult, Key to make Caravan unblockable, face for 10, fling for 10 is a perfectly reasonable way to win the game. It's not a Turn 4 Ulamog, but it doesn't ask that you run bad cards with a weird mana base either.

-Username17

[Prak]

Well, I mean, that's why Fling-Cat (Heart-Piercer Manticore) is in there, so that there are four flings and 48 more-expensive-Flings. And of course that turn 5 could also plausibly be Insult, Fling the colossus for 20. At least theoretically. I've tried to figure the magical christmas Colossus-Fling play turn by turn but my head goes wonky.

[Username17]

Well, I mean, that's why Fling-Cat (Heart-Piercer Manticore) is in there, so that there are four flings and 48 more-expensive-Flings. And of course that turn 5 could also plausibly be Insult, Fling the colossus for 20. At least theoretically. I've tried to figure the magical christmas Colossus-Fling play turn by turn but my head goes wonky.

Magical Christmas Land is:

T1: 1 cost artifact (Terrarion, Implement of Combustion, or Pyramid of the Pantheon)
T2: Key to the City
T3: Cultivator's Caravan
T4: Tap Cultivator's Caravan for mana, play fourth land, play Colossus for 5.
T5: Discard a card to make Colossus unblockable, face for 10. Post combat Fling or Manticore for 10.

Thus your most important artifacts are the 1 costers, Cultivator's Caravan, and Key to the City. Every other artifact is just there for curve filling purposes.

-Username17

[Lokey]

It's still fascinating that so few decks see tournament play/top placement out of a card pool of what 2k? Have something to ask first:

How will things change when the last block or two rotate out? Assuming the next release isn't crazy power creep of course. Of course it seems that the elder evil or whatever cards have been printed multiple times too

[Username17]

It's still fascinating that so few decks see tournament play/top placement out of a card pool of what 2k? Have something to ask first:

How will things change when the last block or two rotate out? Assuming the next release isn't crazy power creep of course. Of course it seems that the elder evil or whatever cards have been printed multiple times too

Well the top 8 is pretty much always made out of the most popular decks, because the difference between a tier 1 deck and a better tier 1 deck is only a few percentage points and the skill gradient between people at pro tours isn't that much. In the draft portion there were 47 3-0 records on day 1 and 6 6-0 records after day 2. That is literally exactly the result you'd get if you just had everyone flip some fucking coins.

Anyway, there's a great deal of herd mentality going on. People are mostly going to be working on established archetypes because the most likely result is that you're going to end up playing one of them and so are most of your opponents and squeezing a few percentage points out of common matchups is the best route to top 8. Still, there were 35 different decks at Pro Tour Amonkhet, and aside from a few meme decks trying to win through surprise they were mostly pretty good. Still, day 1 looked like this:



With Mardu Vehicles being the deck to beat, Mardu Vehicles did real bad, and Top 8 was four Marvel, 3 Zombies, and 1 Black Green. Which is again almost exactly what you'd expect to happen if everyone was just flipping coins. So there's no particular reason to think you shouldn't play White Black Control or Jund Gods or Cryptolith Rites or whatever, because all those decks did fine. I got my Worthy Champion playmat on Gamesday playing Mono-Red Hazoret's Monument to Vampires.

As to what happens when Rotation happens, the most likely result is: Nothing. Currently the deck to beat is Marvel. Marvel runs a big Energy package and Energy is only available in Kaladesh. When Innistrad and Zendikar rotate out, we lose Allies, we lose Eldrazi, we lose Emerge, we lose Madness, we lose Delirium. But Energy stays put. Marvel can run Aetherwind Baskers and Whales instead of Ulamog and that is fine. The big deck of the moment doesn't actually need any of the cards that are rotating.

That being said, there's two more sets that come out and two more ban list updates for the rotation. Hour of Devastation could create a few new archetypes, as could the first set of the Ixalan block, which launches simultaneously with Innistrad and Zendikar leaving Standard. I think it's really likely that Marvel is going to end up on the banned list for Hour of Devastation.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

I doubt marvel will get banned. Partly because I don't think Wizards is excited about banning their mythics, and partly because it's not that awful. It's still crushing diversity, but other decks actually get a chance to play instead of not even having a shot.

On the other hand, the last time we had a "wait and see" response to bannings, it was BG Delirium v. Mardu Vehicles v. Saheeli Twin, and that went to a 2-deck metagame very quickly.

I hope we can get an answer to the activation of marvel. I've seen a lot of calls for pithing needle.

[Username17]

Pithing Needle wouldn't do shit because Marvel is a Temur deck that runs both Red and Blue. If they see a Pithing Needle come down they can counter it in response, activate the Marvel in response, or if they don't have a Marvel yet they can Release the Gremlins and activate the Marvel afterwards.

The core issue is that Marvel expends resources that your opponent can't interact with. You can't really stop them from getting and holding energy. They can play haymakers like a Ramp deck, but they also only need 4 mana sources in play. And their turn 3 play of Rogue Refiner isn't actually bad. He's still a 3/2 Elven Visionary for 3 even if you weren't doing something broken with the energy.

Marvel is obviously beatable. It's not putting 8 copies or even five into the top eight. GP Montreal was actually a wilderness of diversity, with five different archetypes in the Top 8: 3 Marvel, 2 Mardu Vehicles, and one-ofs Zombies, Blue/Red Control, and G/B Snek. That's only slightly less diverse than GP Kobe, a Modern tournament which had six different deck types in the Top Eight (two Blue/White/X Control decks, two Eldrazi decks, and four one-ofs). But Marvel is also obviously "the deck" and everyone has to figure out a plan to beat it. They are doing that, and Marvel is resilient enough that it's still putting copies into the Top 8 proportional to its share of the day 1 metagame. That's insane!

See, when Jeskai Copycat was the deck to beat in Pro Tour Aether Revolt, it did real bad. When Mardu Vehicles was the deck to beat in Pro Tour Amonkhet, it did real bad. But now Marvel is the deck to beat and people are running Ceremonious Rejection and Disposses, and it's not doing bad, it's doing fine. And if that continues, the metagame is going to slowly shrivel into Marvel mirrors, because people are more likely to play decks that they see lots of copies in the Top Eight, and when a deck puts proportional numbers into Top eights it's going to put more and more copies as its share of the metagame grows.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/ar ... 2017-06-13

Oh man... I can't believe they actually did it...

[Eikre]

I don't think you presented a solid perspective on the situation. They already softened expectations with two other rounds of standard banning; the additional dissatisfaction with their process that was going to result from going in for a third pass was extremely marginal.

The community consensus was split between people whose primary desire to see it unbanned was so that they would be correct in their prediction that it wouldn't be banned versus people at every level of play saying "no but really, Wizards, we're not even mad at this point, just ban this piece of shit and let's be done with this ridiculous multi-stage Artifact Block cleanup."

Yes, they're loathe to ban their mystics, which they already fucking had to do with one of their setting-defining creatures as a result of Marvel, and it was only going to continue to put an absolute ceiling on the casting constraints of whatever high-impact motherfuckers they wanted to print for the next year and a half.

The B&R doctrine at WotC has been "ban enablers, not decks" and that's why Emrakul, a card representing a primary antagonist, got nixed instead of the unmarketed slot-filler that Marvel represented. However, as they outlined in the B&R announcement, Marvel itself can be categorized as a mere enabler for the Temur* energy shell, which puts all their impulses in alignment. From both pandering and philosophical standpoints, this was not a difficult decision.

*Probably going to revert to Jund now though.

I mean, it wasn't a surefire thing that they made this decision, but that's just the statistical noise of inconsistent institutional competence.

I'm interested to see that they considered pair-banning, which would be a great B&R tech to add (it would have been the correct call for Felidar Guardian, for example). Some people were hoping to see Emrenkul unbanned but I didn't think they had the stones to fuck around with both those knobs at once, particularly given that the main systematic problem with this standard is a lack of answers and adding another win condition back to the card pool was not going to be any fucking help.

[Username17]

The following deck types had a poor matchup against Marvel but had a 50/50 or better showing at the last Protour:

• Mono-Black Zombies
• Red/White Always Exerting
• Green/White Tokens
• Abzan Tokens
• Jund Gods

All of those decks should be pretty well positioned in a metagame which is basically exactly what it was minus Aetherworks Marvel.

Edit: It's also important to remember that Temur decks had a whole lot of value plays available to them that just weren't worth it because "why aren't you spinning the Marvel Machine instead?" and also that grinding out some ramping into big stuff was just specifically weak to getting Ulamogged in the face.

But Turn 3 Chandra Torch of Defiance or Bounty of the Luxa into Turn 5 Aetherwind Basker is a pretty legit way to win the game on Turn 6. And Temurging a Rogue Refiner into a Deep Fiend is a pretty good way to timewalk your opponent while you have a 5/6 and they don't.

Temur isn't close to dead just because Marvel is gone, but it's going into the pile of "weird value midrange decks" that are all a lot more attractive looking now that Marvel isn't there to cut the knees out of any deck that wants to play some sort of investment in the future on turn 4.

-Username17

[Prak]

Looking at a Mill deck for standard, just a quick look through my inventory I found these cards as stand outs for basically reducing an opponent's deck until they lose. A couple are actually useful for forcing my opponent to draw when they can't, a couple are just ways to make ingesters unblockable, etc.

Card List

Benthic Infiltrator
Compelling Argument
Culling Drone
Dispel
Dominator Drone
Engulf the Shore
Fathom Feeder
Fevered Visions
Fleeting Memories
Hekma Sentinels
Hieroglyphic Illumination
Invasive Surgery
Key to the City
Manic Scribe
Mist Intruder
Ob Nixilis Reignited
Reckless Scholar
Ruination Guide
Salvage Drone
Sludge Crawler
Startled Awake
Winds of Rebuke

Any suggestions? Including "stop trying to make fun decks, they don't work"?

[Username17]

The Eldrazi ingest mechanics don't have any place in standard mill, if standard mill is to be a thing. The core of post Hour of Devastation Mill is going to be Fraying Sanity. The comparison is Sphynx's Tutelage, another card that gave you significant amounts of repeatable mill for doing stuff you were doing anyway.

The key is that Fraying Sanity triggers when your opponent's cards hit the graveyard, so exile effects are counter productive. Smack your opponent with Startled Awake and they mill 13 and then mill another 13, but even the regular counterspells and removal effects and sweepers you use are incidentally milling your opponent - so long as they don't exile cards.

-Username17

[Prak]

Interesting. I had been looking at Ingest as just another method of dwindling their "Secondary Life Total," partially because I'd originally been planning on playing tonight, so I hadn't been looking at HoD cards.

Come to think of it, is there maybe some place in standard mill for depleted Midnight Oils and Harmless Offerings?

[...You Lost Me]

That's way too janky to be a good combo. I say stick to heavy blue.

[Username17]

The interaction between Fraying Sanity and Sweepers is pretty great. So you're going to want some Black, Red, or White for quality sweeping action.

Also note that the interaction between Fraying Sanity and a second Fraying Sanity is very favorable. Two Fraying Sanity and a Startled Awake is game because the second Fraying Sanity to resolve sees the 13 cards milled by Startled Awake and the 13 cards milled by the first resolving Fraying Sanity.

-Username17

[Eikre]

Turbofog Mill is a ~thing~ right now, so people are going to have sideboard Commit//Memory, a hard-counter that plays out of the graveyard.

But you can still win the first game and make the next one run to time.

[Username17]

Came in second on Game Day with Mono-White Monument. No match losses, but had a 1-1 draw against Temur Energy. My divergence from the stock list was:

• Avacyn went in the sideboard rather than the main.
• I ran 2 Gideons main.
• I ran a modest Displacer package.

Displacer won me two games. The first by getting rid of all of my opponent's blockers before an alpha strike. And the second by Displacing Avacyn in response to Hour of Revelation. That's a giant flavor win. The gates open, everything is about to be destroyed, and then Avacyn gets time shifted and saves all my people.


No one expects combo control out of a white weenie deck.

As for my game losses, Temur Energy was able to win a game right through Solemnity just by not drawing any of their energy stuff and crushing me with Ronas and Chandra. Those cards are real hard to deal with. And White/Blue Tokens managed to double Procession and Eternalize a cat. That's four 4/4 Doublestrikers. Even that wouldn't have done it, but he managed to wipe my monument with Hour of Revelation (hence the Avacyn coming out of the board game three).

Mainboard Gideon seems like an easy choice to be honest. He's real good against pretty much every deck in the format.

-Username17