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Brewing For Pro Tour Gatecrash

Get ideas for what to play in Standard as GerryT goes over the decks besides U/W/R Flash that he tested leading up to Pro Tour Gatecrash.

Earlier this week, I detailed my choice to play U/W/R Flash at Pro Tour Gatecrash. While that may have not surprised many people, I actually explored several decks leading up to the Pro Tour. In fact, many of them were aggressive decks!

Tomoharu Saito’s Twitter posts with new brews influenced the Pro Tour a lot. Without him posting various R/G decks, it’s possible that I would have ended up playing a similar deck. When Josh Utter-Leyton showed up, he had a deck similar to Saito’s already built, except with some Ghor-Clan Rampagers to beat Loxodon Smiter and Restoration Angel and more lands to balance out the higher curve.

The deck was very impressive in testing and got even better when I realized playing basic Forest was just worse than playing Temple Garden. While there weren’t any non-Boros Reckoner white cards in the deck, Temple Garden is a green source that can also cast Boros Reckoner.

As you may have seen at the Pro Tour, decks that play Boros Reckoner often play a land or two that can’t cast it, but only when it’s absolutely necessary. For my Flash deck, I needed another blue source to cast Thought Scour early, so I couldn’t cut my Island. For a Saito-style R/G deck, playing Forest on turn 3 with Boros Reckoner in hand was often game defining. With Flash, I could usually wait a turn to cast Reckoner, but the Saito deck had no such luxury. It either curved out and put pressure on the opponent or died.

Even as simple as it was, the Temple Garden technology was enough to put the deck firmly in first place, at least for the first week of testing. Even decks like Naya and Reanimator with Thragtusk were not winning over 40% against the R/G deck.

This is the last version I had:


We had Lightning Mauler over Ash Zealot for nearly 100% of the time during testing. It produced better nut draws and made Burning-Tree Emissary even better. The Rampagers were great in matchups where there was creature combat, but it was frequently a frustrating draw when playing against control decks. I didn’t know if I’d play them maindeck for sure, but they are certainly a good option for fighting decks that are trying to beat you.

One thing we all agreed on was that Skullcrack was not what you wanted. The current red decks are all about building a board position, and if that isn’t good enough, they start dropping Hellriders. With Skullcrack, you often want to keep mana open the turn you would cast Hellrider. If you Skullcrack in response to their Thragtusk, they’re not gaining five life, but you’re not developing your board while they are.

The sideboard was tricky. From my experience, Volcanic Strength wasn’t even very good. They could Mortars most of your targets, and sometimes they’d just race you with Hellriders. That card was another question mark.

Other than that, the deck was fast, reasonably resilient, but widely known because of Saito. It seemed like the deck to beat going into the tournament. If it had a target on its head, playing it was probably a bad choice, but perhaps there was a version that would be more resilient.

Enter Jimmy Wild.


I liked the look of this deck a lot, plus there were a lot of other things you could do to it. By the time we started playing Boros Reckoner in decks like U/W/R, the R/G deck stopped winning as much. Jund was also a close matchup. Changing the splash from green to both white and blue opened up so many doors.

Pacifism was good against Boros Reckoner (and Volcanic Strength), but only against decks without Restoration Angel. Rapid Hybridization was another card that seemed ok but not great.

Geist of Saint Traft was a card like Boros Reckoner or Hellrider that could deal lots of damage on its own. Playing Geists made the card quality a lot higher and gave you several powerful things to topdeck.

Boros Charm was obviously very good. Paraselene could do wonders if people were still playing Bant Hexproof (or Pillowfort!). Thalia, Guardian of Thraben was another card I wanted to try in order to slow down Azorius Charm and Supreme Verdict. You could even play Nearheath Pilgrim and Rhox Faithmender for the mirror if you wanted.

Trying R/W/U inspired me to look at another three-color version: Jund.

I liked Experiment One in a deck with a bunch of undercosted beaters. Some of our Experiment One decks had things like Silverblade Paladin because they attempted to use Cavern of Souls, but that made Experiment One unlikely to be bigger than a 2/2. I wanted a deck that would maximize its effectiveness. Things like Dreg Mangler and Falkenrath Aristocrat did that.

Rakdos Cackler seemed like the other good one-drop because it was castable off all your dual lands. Lotleth Troll was awesome against aggro mirrors and was easier to cast than Strangleroot Geist. I was still losing games to Mono-Red Aggro, but then I added Vampire Nighthawk and Mark of the Vampire to the sideboard. After that, things were good.

The other great thing about the deck was the return of Crippling Blight. I’ve been a fan of that card for a while, and it does exactly what you want it to do against cards like Boros Reckoner and Thragtusk. You just want them out of the way for a few turns while you do your thing. Restoration Angel, as always, ruins your plans. Crippling Blight isn’t good against everything, but it’s still an awesome card.

Abrupt Decay was the other removal spell, but I could see some of those becoming Searing Spears. It looks like the successful Jund Aggro decks from the Pro Tour played some Decays main, but mostly in the sideboard. The additional reach from Searing Spear appears to be important. Dreadbore is another reasonable option.

Ari Lax list from the Pro Tour had Burning-Tree Emissary and Mogg Flunkies, both of which I like.


I guess Rancor is just bad? Kill all the blockers instead of trampling through them?

Jund Aggro had one of the best win percentages at the Pro Tour, and there is far from a defining decklist out there. Going forward, this deck will only get better. Granted, it suffers from a bad Flash matchup, but that could probably be fixed.

Another deck idea I came up with was using Saito’s second Gyre Sage shell with Increasing Savagery. Shuhei Nakamura was testing the G/R version but seemed to have trouble closing on locked-up board states. Boros Reckoner was a huge problem because the deck had no way to give trample. Azorius Charm was also a huge issue.

Kessig Wolf Run and Rancor were very obvious answers, but Essence Harvest was a card that seemed good in the strategy as well. I worked on a G/B version but never finalized a decklist, plus the G/R list with some tweaks was probably better. Ranger’s Guile is another one of those underappreciated cards that would have made an excellent sideboard card.

One of the decks that we never really tried since we had no real interest in playing it was Human Reanimator. Brad Nelson unleashed his creation two weeks before the Pro Tour, so it was a known quantity, but we were mostly trying to dodge it.

Some players did reasonably well with it though.


I like Tsu’s use of the mill combo rather than relying on infinite life. He also gets more sacrifice outlets, so he ends up with more combo pieces overall. Cutting Farseek is also a good idea because the deck can’t utilize the ramp very much. Turn 3 Huntmaster of the Fells is a fine play, but it’s not really what you want to be doing.

One thing to note is that while U/W/R Flash is very weak to Human Reanimator, I did beat it at the Pro Tour because my opponent over-sideboarded. Tsu doesn’t seem interested in that. He wants some Abrupt Decays as anti-hate but is content comboing nearly everyone out, which I like.

Another sweet deck from the Pro Tour was this:


Of course I like my Flash deck better, but it’s nice to see people experimenting with different things. Cremate is cool, Obzedat is insanely powerful but forces you to play a lot of duals, and Victim of Night kills almost anything. I’m not a huge fan of the mana base, but you can’t have everything I suppose.

One thing I wondered during the Pro Tour was that with basically everyone else on Boros Reckoner, why didn’t Jund ever try to incorporate it? Some versions played Vampire Nighthawk, and surely Reckoner is better than that.

Bant Hexproof has to still be a deck. There are some Edicts, but you have more mana dorks as sacrificial fodder if you want them. Gift of Orzhova is pretty incredible, and the U/W/R decks are very weak to it. The Aristocrats doesn’t seem very good against it either.

Had I played Esper Control at the Pro Tour, my list would have looked very different from my teammates’. Some of you might remember my Esper list from Grand Prix San Antonio featuring Restoration Angel that Jody Keith played. Angel is a powerful card in that deck. People like Michael Jacob used to play Wydwen, the Biting Gale in their Five-Color Control decks to combat planeswalkers and block 2/2s, so it’s no surprise to see that technology be good again.

Clunky things like Planar Cleansing aren’t what I’d want maindeck, and the same goes for Angel of Serenity in the sideboard. I’d also be interested in playing a less painful mana base. Overall, the deck is still quite good regardless of specific card choices.

While testing for Pro Tour Gatecrash, I learned plenty of things about Standard. Unfortunately, there are very few Standard tournaments coming up for me. I’ll be tweaking and tuning Standard decks in the coming weeks in between Modern events on Magic Online though. The format is too good to not play.

GerryT

@G3RRYT on Twitter