A few weeks ago I started to hear murmurings about Standard reaching a state of equilibrium. The recipe for Standard was known. It was 2 parts Junk Reanimator, 1.5 parts Jund, and a light dusting of Naya Blitz and R/G aggro. Eat your greens.
Apparently, Standard had become stagnant.
Then people started to really figure out how to use a little card called Voice of Resurgence.
Voice of Resurgence, also known as Stagtusk (also known as the little harmless deer that makes a freaking enormous world-destroying token when it dies) has started to really show off just how powerful it really is in the last two weeks. First, the Standard Open on Day 2 of the StarCityGames.com Open in Dallas was won by Aaron Barich playing a Naya deck that was a lot more midrangy than the Naya Blitz decks that had been previously putting up top performances. The list featured 4 Voice of Resurgence as a selling point.
Creatures (28)
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
- 4 Dryad Militant
- 4 Loxodon Smiter
- 4 Experiment One
- 4 Ghor-Clan Rampager
- 4 Boros Reckoner
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
Lands (20)
Spells (12)
Sideboard
Last weekend, the Standard Open was won by none other than our own Bardley Narson piloting the Junk Aristocrats list that has started to pick up steam lately. Junk Aristocrats also features the full 4 Voice of Resurgence and makes exceptional use of them by virtue of being able to flood the board and then sacrifice the Voice of Resurgence at will to create an angry Elemental on demand.
Bard and I both played essentially the same deck, with only a few minor differences. I opted to play an Orzhov Charm over his 25th land, as well as 3 Appetite for Brains in the sideboard, whereas he played just one.
I ended up losing my “lose and out” match in round 9 on camera to Naya. Bard managed to win his and ended up taking down the entire tournament as he outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted his opponents in the top 8. Cartel Aristocrat is a survivor.
Syndicate Enforced
I have no clue how Bard Narson ended up on the deck. As for myself, it began with the Junk Reanimator list I was working on. The more I played with the deck, the more I found myself just wanting to play with as many Voice of Resurgences, Lingering Souls, Garruks, Gavony Townships, and Obzedats as I could. All I could think about was that maybe, just maybe, my highschool sweetheart Junk Midrange was available and back in town. Maybe, just maybe, Junk Midrange could finally make… a resurgence.
I began to search and brew to build the best shell for Obzedat, Ghost Council and Voice of Resurgence that I could.
Looking for inspiration, I decided to scour some of the winning Daily Event and Premier Event decklists from Magic Online. It didn’t take long before I came across this gem:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Doomed Traveler
- 4 Young Wolf
- 4 Blood Artist
- 4 Cartel Aristocrat
- 3 Varolz, the Scar-Striped
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
- 2 Maw of the Obzedat
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (8)
It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it was close.
For one, I wanted a more straightforward approach to my Obzedating. I want a no-frills “drain and brain” experience [Editor’s Note: I WARNED YOU BRIAN!]. I wanted the original. I wanted the “Five badass dead guys come back over and over again to beat the sh*t out of the people that owed them money” kind of a deal. I was looking for the actual Obzedat, Ghost Council in my deck.
This list opted to go for the more circus freak approach. It wanted to play the more, “There’s an enormous conveyor belt lined up with people trying to jump down the gaping Star Wars sand pit-style mouth I’ve got going on in my house-sized stomach,” kind of Obzedat. That kind of Obzedating isn’t really my thing. I’m not really a Maw of the Obzedat kind of guy.
It’s a little known fact, but that enormous stomach-mouth Thrull-thing from Maw of the Obzedat actually had a brief acting career that was unfortunately cut too short. It auditioned for the starring role in a new feature film with Jennifer Lopez and actually got the part. The movie was about an up and coming Thrull trying to make it in the harsh world of big city life. Unfortunately, Maw’d in Manhattan was not a box-office success. Reviewers found they couldn’t stomach the plot holes.
A lot of people lined up to go see it, but the film’s rating took a huge dive. Maud’s acting career never found teeth and it was forced to go back to its old job of… that thing that it does.
Another aspect of this list I wasn’t a huge fan of was my boy Young Wolf. 1/1’s for one that don’t produce mana aren’t exactly my cup of tea. Young Wolf is one of those “do nothing” cards that’s only good in combination with the rest of your cards. If you draw it along with a Blood Artist and Cartel Aristocrat, then it’s going to be pretty good, but if you draw a hand of 2 Young Wolves and a Doomed Traveler, you’re going to be quickly traveling to the sideboard.
My style of play is to go for cards that are simply good cards. Don’t get me wrong, I love synergy, but I want cards that can exist outside of that synergy and still have an impact on the game. As a result, I played the following list in a Daily Event and went 4-0:
Creatures (21)
- 4 Doomed Traveler
- 2 Blood Artist
- 2 Deathrite Shaman
- 2 Obzedat, Ghost Council
- 4 Cartel Aristocrat
- 3 Varolz, the Scar-Striped
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (24)
Spells (10)
I was sold.
That night I spoke with Bard Narson on the phone. I tentatively told him the deck I was playing, expecting him to tell me that I was playing a bad deck and that I should just stick to playing a real deck.
Instead, he told me that he was on the same deck. On the trip down to the event, we hammered out some of the last details of our list. For one, I didn’t want to be Young Wolfing and did want to be playing Obzedat, Ghost Council. On the other hand, Bard convinced me that I should be playing Skirsdag High Priest, and if I wanted to actually make the High Priest work, then I did need to play cards like Young Wolf. To make room, non-synergistic “good cards” like Putrefy, Garruk Relentless, and Obzedat had to get nixed.
Ultimately, I decided that High Priest was too powerful of an option to dismiss and went with what I felt was a better list rather than what I simply wanted to play on personal preference reasons. I started out on this deck because I wanted to play Obzedat, and ended up with a 75 that didn’t feature him anywhere. ‘Dat isn’t.
Creatures (24)
- 3 Skirsdag High Priest
- 4 Doomed Traveler
- 2 Young Wolf
- 4 Blood Artist
- 4 Cartel Aristocrat
- 3 Varolz, the Scar-Striped
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (9)
I spoke with _Batutinha_ about his Magic Online list to see what he thought about the deck. He said it was good but that he was worried about the Jund Matchup. That warning, coupled with my already existent fear of playing against Junk Reanimator with this deck led to me playing 3 Appetite for Brains in my sideboard.
Appetite is one of the few cards in the format that can deal with both Olivia and Angel of Serenity, which are really the primary two cards from Jund and Junk that beat you. The issue with trying to rely on a card like Tragic Slip or Putrefy to beat those cards is that the damage is already dealt as soon as they enter play. Olivia can ping a few guys in response to your removal spell and really limit your board presence, and Angel of Serenity can often completely reset your board. That’s not even considering the scenario where they have Unburial Rites to do it again.
Unfortunately, I can’t recall drawing Skirsdag High Priest a single time prior to round 6 of this tournament, but the few matches I did see it, I was able to take over the game with him. Despite my limited interaction, I felt like Skirsdag High Priest is a definite staple of the deck and I expect it to be a fixture moving forward.
In The Aristocrats, Skirsdag High Priest wasn’t really very exciting. Sometimes it was too hard to get him active and often you had to wait until turn four, when you could play a Falkenrath Aristocrat before you had a chance to start triggering Morbid on your own.
This deck is a bit different. For one, you have a second one drop in Young Wolf that replaces itself to give you the important second creature alongside Doomed Traveler that you need to activate the ability. That adds some consistency to the process. Additionally, the second sacrifice outlet in Varolz costs three mana, not four, so you have more opportunities to start churning out Demons as early as turn three.
The other card that really impressed me in the deck was Sorin, Lord of Innistrad. There were a number of times where Bard was telling me that I should sideboard out Sorin in this matchup or that matchup, but honestly, I never wanted to side him out. He was simply dominating every time I put him into play and I almost wanted a fourth Sorin, not to board him out.
He has a variety of very useful abilities in this deck, which is really the Markov a good card. The +1 generates fodder to turn on your Cartel Aristocrat, Varolz, Blood Artist, Voice of Resurgence Elementals, and Skirsdag High Priests. The Emblem is extremely synergistic with Lingering Souls, Doomed Travelers, and Cartel Aristocrats. The ultimate is just a nice thing to occasionally pull off.
So far, the best ultimate I’ve achieved is to target my own Voice of Resurgence and my opponent’s Thragtusk and Disciple of Bolas. Draw five, gain ten, make a 3/3 Beast and a big */*. All in a day’s work for the Lord of Innistrad.
Sorin is also very easy to protect in this deck. One of the downsides of Sorin in the past has been that it’s hard to keep him alive. This deck has so many ways to stifle your opponent’s combat step, from Doomed Travelers giving you a blocker for Thundermaw Hellkite to Tragic Slip on a key attacker to blocking and then sacrificing the blocking creature before damage to shut down Boros Reckoners. All of those add up to make it fairly easy to protect your Sorin from most things that aren’t Ghor-Clan Rampager.
The reason to not play the fourth Sorin is mainly because the first three just don’t actually die. It’s a hard life when you have to limit how many planeswalkers you play because they just stay in play. What a shame.
Oftentimes, Sorin can just be a Gavony Township activation and a slight Fog as well, which is perfectly fine. It can let you turn an even board into one where you’re going to easily win the race with Lingering Souls.
Junk Aristocrats Moving Forward
Now that Bard has won a tournament with the deck and it’s a known entity moving forward, I don’t think you can just play the same list again and hope to replicate success. It’s important to come up with a plan for how the deck should adapt to fight the kinds of decks and strategies that are going to rise up to beat it.
Moving forward, this is the list I want to start working with:
Creatures (24)
- 3 Skirsdag High Priest
- 4 Doomed Traveler
- 2 Young Wolf
- 4 Blood Artist
- 4 Cartel Aristocrat
- 3 Varolz, the Scar-Striped
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (9)
Sideboard
The maindeck remains the same. I was very happy with every card in the maindeck for the most part. Even Young Wolf pulled its weight from time to time.
What I want to change is the sideboard.
The first addition is Ray of Revelation. Ray of Revelation is there to do its best Gerry Thompson impression and be One Step Ahead. The two scariest cards in the format for this deck are Curse of Death’s Hold and Rest in Peace. With the almost certain surge in popularity of this archetype, I expect other decks to adapt and start playing Curse of Death’s Hold and Rest in Peace to fight it.
Our goal is to preempt that hate and play the answer to their hate cards in anticipation.
The other addition is Profit//Loss. This is a card that I have wanted to play in Standard for a long time. I finally think that the format is finally ready and willing for this card to make its mark.
Profit//Loss is extremely good in the mirror match. For three mana, you get to basically wrath their entire side of the board. For two mana, you can counter their Profit//Loss or you can pump your team to mess up their blocks or just straight up kill them. For 5 mana, you can wrath their board and kill them. Big money. Big prizes. I love it!
Profit//Loss also has a number of other applications. It’s very good against the The Aristocrats deck, and it’s also pretty good against Jeremy Sunell’s B/R Zombies deck that made Top 4 of the SCG Open in Baltimore . Blood Artist, Gravecrawler, Knight of Infamy, Blood Scrivener and Falkenrath Aristocrat may all find themselves at a Loss.
I also added a third Sin Collector to the sideboard in order to fight U/W/R. U/W/R was one of my two losses on the weekend with the deck, and although I did struggle with mulligans and poor draws the matchup still did not feel very good. Pillar of Flame, Snapcaster Mage, and Sphinx’s Revelation all generated problems for this deck and I want more cards to beat them. Sin Collector is one of the best cards in the format against U/W/R, since Appetite for Brains can’t hit Sphinx’s Revelation or Pillar of Flame and it’s important to be able to exile the problematic card so Snapcaster Mage can’t do his thing.
If U/W/R becomes a bigger presence in the metagame, then I will want to add two Obzedats back into the deck as well, since Granddaddy Karlov is a big problem for that deck. They only have a few real answers to the card and, in combination with early pressure and disruption from Sin Collectors, it can oftentimes be too hard for them to find the time they need to arrive at those answers.
Besides, I want to have the pleasure of attacking my opponent with a baby animal, a wandering Human, a blood-sucking Vampire, a Troll, and a giant collection of dead bureaucrats all at the same time. Really, what is Magic but a game where you can throw a bunch of seemingly random creatures that would normally be completely at odds with each other at your opponent’s face and just hope they somehow lose to it? Sounds pretty magical to me.
To make room for these cards I had to cut Unflinching Courage and Garruk Relentless. Unflinching Courage is a card I don’t mind cutting, since it’s really only relevant in a small handful of matchups, such as Mono Red or base red aggressive decks. Those decks are falling in popularity, and I think they are a good matchup even without Unflinching Courage. Where I will miss the card is against Bant Hexproof, where it can really help with racing, but the addition of Ray of Revelation will help assuage that loss.
Garruk Relentless, I hate to see go. Garruk was good against Junk Reanimator, Jund, and U/W/R. Against Jund and Junk he served as a removal spell that could generate additional value beyond that with his myriad of other abilities. Against U/W/R he just churned out Wolves every turn to put constant pressure on them, and occasionally he decided to eat an Augur of Bolas or Izzet Staticaster first.
The reason I felt that Garruk should be cut is because most of the time I cast him I would have rather just cast Sorin. Since there is a limited amount of space for 4-drops in this deck, I think I would rather just rely on Sorin to do the heavy lifting and fill those slots with other cards that might have a higher impact.
Before I finish up, I do want to talk about one other deck where I think Garruk has a great chance to show off his stuff.
It’s a Legacy deck.
Last weekend in Baltimore I decided I wanted to try something out besides my typical fare of Deathblade marinated with Deathblade and a double side of Deathblade.
I felt like the worst card in Deathblade was Stoneforge Mystic, and I felt like Tarmogoyf was simply a better card in the current format. Based on that observation, I decided I wanted to build a list that swapped out Stoneforge Mystic and replaced it with Tarmogoyf. This would also free up the few slots that Batterskull and Umezawa’s Jitte would normally take up. That let me play a couple copies of Abrupt Decay, which let Deathblade deal with random problematic permanents such as stuff like Thopter Foundry, or Rest in Peace.
Here’s the deck I played:
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (23)
Spells (18)
I feel like the deck can definitely be improved upon, but there were a lot of things I really liked. For one, every time I cast Garruk Relentless he was awesome. My love for Garruk Relentless in Legacy is not unknown. In fact, one of my favorite Legacy moments ever was in the December Invitational last year in Los Angeles. I played a BUG mirror match on camera in round 5 and all three games were won by Garruk Relentless. My opponent got game 2 and I won games 1 and 3, 100% off the very large and capable back of one G. Relentless.
Last weekend I got to win a game with his Overrun ability. That’s not an everyday occurrence in a format where people can kill you on turn one. My opponent even had to pick up the card and read it to see what the ultimate did when I activated it. That’s when you know you’re doing something right.
I also was very happy with Cabal Therapy. Therapy and Lingering Souls was an old favorite of Stoneblade decks last year but it has kind of fallen out of favor. Now that Lingering Souls is starting to make a comeback, I feel like it’s time for Cabal Therapy to do so as well.
While I personally didn’t do so hot in the tournament, Chris Marshall heard that I was planning on playing Tarmogoyfs instead of Stoneforge Mystics in the event, made the change himself, and ended up top 8’ing the tournament as a result. There is definitely merit to the idea.
While my deck may have just been worse than normal Deathblade, I think it’s important to keep trying new things and trying to innovate. Magic is constantly evolving as people learn new things and new cards come out and the worst thing you can do is to fall into a state of stagnation.
I have a number of new ideas and brews I want to try out in Legacy in upcoming events. Clearly, they are all fair decks based around Deathrite Shaman, as I don’t want to get too crazy brewing now. I have to draw the line somewhere. Hopefully one of them will turn out to be something worthwhile.
Although I may have scrubbed out of the Legacy tournament, I did get to do a few team drafts on Sunday that were a lot of fun.
It’s not every day that you get to Act of Treason an Aetherling, attack your opponent with it, then throw it at his only other creature with a Launch Party. Did I mention that I also had a Consuming Aberration in play that grew from a 2/2 to a 10/10 in the process? Value.
Isn’t Magic awesome?
Thanks for reading,
Brian Braun-Duin
@BBD on Magic Online
@BraunDuinIt on Twitter