Standard is extremely diverse at the moment. It remains to be seen if that’s just because not enough people know what the best deck is or if it’s because the metagame is complex enough that no single deck, or even few decks, can stay on top. Despite the diversity, I think there are a few decks, cards, and interactions that are primarily responsible for controlling the shape of Standard.
Creatures (26)
- 2 Acidic Slime
- 4 Arbor Elf
- 3 Fiend Hunter
- 4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 4 Restoration Angel
- 4 Thragtusk
- 3 Angel of Serenity
- 2 Sin Collector
Lands (19)
Spells (15)
Junk Reanimator is the old top dog and still a real contender. Dragon’s Maze didn’t hate it and did offer it new tools, but its contributions to other decks may be more significant than its contributions to Junk Reanimator.
Junk Reanimator is a deck with strong inevitability and resiliency. It can generally go toe-to-toe with Sphinx’s Revelation decks in the late game, and will generally walk all over everyone else going long. This deck punishes people for playing all but the most dedicated answers rather than just playing threats, and it’s very good at stopping some kinds of aggression.
What it lacks is much in the way of disruption, though that’s not entirely absent. As a result, the aggressive combo decks in the format (like The Aristocrats and Bant Hexproof) are the best decks against it. A very dedicated B,it’s strategy can also pose a real threat, but I think I’d rather play against that than one of the other decks.v
Fundamentally, it’s important to think of this deck as having more in common with Primeval Titan decks than Dredge or old Extended Reanimator decks.
Creatures (27)
- 4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 3 Restoration Angel
- 4 Thundermaw Hellkite
- 2 Flinthoof Boar
- 3 Loxodon Smiter
- 2 Experiment One
- 4 Boros Reckoner
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (24)
Spells (5)
Naya is the new most played deck, but that’s slightly misleading, because there are so many different Naya colored creature decks. They all have the same basic game plan (attack), but may have very few actual cards in common. There are so many good creatures in these colors that the curve can look however the builder wants, and it’s worth noting that if your opponent plays Temple Garden and Experiment One on the first turn, you don’t really know many other cards in the deck for sure yet, and Naya Blitz is a very different deck than Willy Edel’s Naya with four Thundermaw Hellkite.
Naya Blitz is playing a game similar to Bant Hexproof. It’s just trying to kill you before you can cast relevant spells. Bigger Naya decks are largely trying to prey on Naya Blitz by trumping them in combat while playing something of a Jund “all good cards” strategy.
Voice of Resurgence, Loxodon Smiter, Advent of the Wurm, and Thundermaw Hellkite are all well above the average power level of creatures at their costs, but each has competition:
You can build a curve first, just by deciding exactly how many creatures of each cost you want, and then come back and fill it in with spells after, and fit any distribution of costs because you have so many options.
In a way, this makes discussing Naya as a single deck misleading. On the other hand, all the cards are so interchangeable that in some sense the exact details aren’t too important. The exact card choices allow them to adjust how strong they want to be against other creatures or against controlling strategies, but if you’re playing a different deck and looking to beat Naya, you’ll approach doing so similarly regardless of their actual choices.
Speaking of approaching beating Naya, let’s talk about how to do that. Like Junk Reanimator, Naya is a difficult strategy to directly hate through sideboarding, rather than constructing a strategy from the ground up that lines up favorably against them. As a “good cards” strategy, it’s difficult to beat Naya on raw power level. What this means is that it’s best to beat them by having a more cohesive strategic plan or through synergy. Synergistic decks often struggle with Jund as a “good stuff” deck because so much of Jund’s good stuff is disruption that the synergistic decks get taken apart. With Naya, it’s mostly just good creatures and a few removal spells or tricks, so a deck that can execute an overwhelmingly powerful play will do well against them.
Examples of this include: making Demons with Skirsdag High Priest, killing with Boros Reckoner plus Blasphemous Act, putting Spectral Flight on Geist of Saint Traft, putting Angel of Serenity into play by turn five, preventing all combat damage every turn, or putting Omniscience into play.
It’s possible to grind them out with sweepers and card draw but you risk falling behind a Domri Rade, or losing to flash and haste creatures, or playing too many one for ones and having their last topdeck be a five mana creature while you draw a land. In other words, big plays aren’t they only way to beat them, but they are the best way to beat them.
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 (25)
Spells (8)
Junk Aristocrats, a deck I’d been championing early, has, surprisingly to me, become something of a hot new item. I believe it won the PTQ at the WMCQ in Chicago, as well as winning the StarCityGames.com Open in Baltimore in the hands of Brad Nelson. I say this is surprising to me because I’d basically been willing to set the deck aside after my own performance in the WMCQ, where I found the deck to be entirely adequate but not overwhelmingly powerful.
I think Brad’s list isn’t exactly right (I don’t think there is any possibility whatsoever that anything less than four Skirsdag High Priests is correct unless you know the metagame has dramatically more sweepers than Standard does at the moment), and I think 25 is too many lands, but I begrudgingly acknowledge that it is possible that the deck wants fewer than eight one mana 1/1s. I’d also like four Varolz, the Scar-Striped, though I myself had been playing three.
I like what the deck is doing. It’s combo/aggro like old Affinity with Disciple of the Vault, but, problematically, it’s much less over-powered. The good part is that you can play a reasonable beatdown game when you have to, and if your opponent is playing removal rather than creatures the fact that your creatures don’t attack for as much as other creatures is mitigated by the fact that they’re a little harder to kill. Against other creatures, you’re more of a combo deck (winning with Blood Artist or Skirsdag High Priest) because they have less disruption to defend against that.
The problem is that a lot of the cards are individually weak and, unless you draw one of a few cards, you can have problems doing something that is sufficiently powerful. The fact that this is the main weakness of the deck is the compelling case that convinces me that it’s likely right to come down on Young Wolf, even though drawing a one drop is a lot better than not.
This archetype can struggle with decks that have a lot of answers when those decks have the right answers. Jund with Pillar of Flame and U/W/R with Terminus are much bigger problems than those decks would be if they can only kill creatures, rather than exiling them or putting them on the bottom of libraries. If the opponent can actually one-for-one, rather than getting two-for-one’d by their own one-for-ones, then it’s easy to overpower this deck with high impact spells like Huntmaster of the Fells, Olivia Voldaren, Angel of Serenity, and Sphinx’s Revelation.
The other way to beat this deck is to operate on a similar axis better than they do. Examples of this would be Bant Hexproof, where Invisible Stalker is almost impossible to race without the life gain from a Blood Artist, and potentially The Aristocrats, though I don’t have a lot of experience with the dynamics of that matchup.
The worst thing you can be doing is attacking with 2/2s, which line up terribly against Cartel Aristocrat and Voice of Resurgence, and generally trying to win with higher creature quality isn’t a great plan, because your creatures are probably worse than Elemental tokens and Demon tokens–and those few that are can usually just get chump blocked for days. That or playing a lot of edicts. Edicts don’t really do anything.
Creatures (18)
Lands (23)
Spells (19)
Sideboard
The deck that I think is most significant at this particular moment, even if the data doesn’t quite back me up on this yet, is Bant Hexproof (though I’m open to the idea that that could become U/W/R Hexproof. It doesn’t change anything fundamental about what’s going on with the deck). This is the deck that’s trying hardest to play the least fair game of Magic, because it wins faster and cuts off the most interaction. It has to mulligan somewhat often, but it’s consistent despite that because it doesn’t need very many of the right cards to win. If your opening hand has two lands, an Invisible Stalker, and two enchantments, you’re a huge favorite against an unknown opponent, and that’s not that unlikely of a five card hard.
If people don’t change their decks to fight it, Bant Hexproof will take over. It’s just too powerful not to. However, with the decks I discussed above, the way to fight them was to position yourself properly in the metagame by playing a deck that does the right kind of thing. With Bant Hexproof, the best way to beat it is to play some cards that are good against it. This deck is too dedicated to what it’s doing to shift out of caring that much the way that Junk Reanimator can, cards like Rolling Temblor, Gaze of Granite, Ray of Revelation, Devour Flesh, and Liliana of the Veil really make it a lot harder for this deck to win no matter what other cards are in your deck (though Ray of Revelation is much more effective if you have other creatures, and Devour Flesh is much more effective if you have other removal, because Ray of Revelation plus creature lets you shrink their creature in combat and kill it by blocking, and Devour Flesh and removal lets you actually make them sacrifice their important creature rather than their mana elf).
The problem is that all of the best hate cards for this deck are extremely narrow, and even if you believe that Bant Hexproof is the best deck, it’s hard to look at Patrick Chapin metagame analysis that puts Bant Hexproof at 3.64% and decide you need to devote several sideboard slots to it. I’d like to think that by calling attention to the deck in my recent video I was doing the community a service by increasing Bant Hexproof’s representation enough to let people actually bother to beat it, rather than just having a 3.64% chance at a whammy where you get paired against a deck you knew you needed to hate, but couldn’t justify actually doing so.
The problem is, until people actually start playing Bant Hexproof and we see what deck they move away from to do it, it’s hard to give up sideboard slots against other decks, which we believe to be heavily represented. Still, if you find yourself playing with a sideboard card that you’re not sure exactly when you’d want to use, you’d probably do well to cut it for something good in this matchup, because it will be very high impact when it comes up.
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (25)
Spells (20)
Jund is still a major player. Patrick has it as the most played deck after Naya, and players like Owen Turtenwald have shown no signs that they have any interest in moving away from the deck or losing much with it. Owen believes that the presumed weakness against Junk Reanimator is entirely overstated, to the point where he wants to play against Junk Reanimator. I believe the matchup he’s most concerned with is actually Naya, which will be a card quality battle where some of his cards might not matter enough.
Jund is as it’s always been: a powerful deck that plays a fair game and has a lot of pretty even matchups. It’s very good against the synergy driven decks if it’s chosen the right cards to attack those plans, and generally pretty good against control decks if it plays a lot of the cards it has access to that are good there, like Sire of Insanity and Rakdos’s Return. It can fine tune a lot, and it really can choose to beat anything. For the most part, I think the best approach to beating Jund is just to know what you need to try to do, and do hope the build you’re playing against had someone else in mind. That said, no matter what you’re playing you’d probably do well to be able to kill Huntmaster of the Fells, Olivia Voldaren, and Sire of Insanity, because at least one of them is likely to be a problem for you if you don’t (though there are certainly exceptions; It’s easy to imagine Bant Hexproof ignoring all of those creatures for example).
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (26)
Spells (29)
- 2 Dissipate
- 1 Syncopate
- 3 Think Twice
- 1 Essence Scatter
- 1 Terminus
- 2 Pillar of Flame
- 2 Searing Spear
- 1 Mizzium Mortars
- 3 Azorius Charm
- 3 Supreme Verdict
- 1 Detention Sphere
- 4 Sphinx's Revelation
- 1 Assemble the Legion
- 2 Turn
- 2 Warleader's Helix
Sideboard
Finally, Sphinx’s Revelation is still a card, which is basically enough to mean that a significant portion of the field will be playing it. As always, any color could be the third color in a U/W Sphinx’s Revelation deck, and they will usually have exactly one other color. I think most of them have incorporated Aetherling as their primary victory condition, which I believe is probably correct. Against most decks, it doesn’t matter what you kill them with, since Sphinx’s Revelation is the card that actually won the game, but against other control decks, where they have their own Sphinx’s Revelation and answers to various threats, Aetherling is the best option so you might as well just start with that.
My perspective on which other color is best is somewhat narrow. I know that if I’m playing Junk Aristocrats, I don’t want to play against U/W/R because they’ll likely have access to a lot of Pillar of Flames, but if I’m playing Bant Hexproof I’m more worried about Esper because I’m expecting some edict effects, like Devour Flesh or Far/Away. It used to be the case that Esper was significantly better in the mirror because of Nephalia Drownyard, but I’d assume Aetherling weakens (without entirely removing) that edge.
As for attacking these decks, I’ve been looking for pressure and targeted discard like Sin Collector or Duress, planeswalkers, Rootborn Defenses/Boros Charm effects, or big trumps like Sire of Insanity or Obzedat, Ghost Council.
What these decks are good against is a question similar to the Jund question: they’re good against people they prepare for, provided those people don’t prepare even for them. Most of it is going to come down to particular card choices more than overall strategy.
And those are the key players in Standard as I see them. My short term recommendation is still to play Bant Hexproof, but I expect that to change. If that gets hated out I like Naya and Junk Reanimator’s positions, which makes me like Junk Reanimator as a foil to Naya… but that opens the door for Jund and U/W/R as foils to Junk. But the problem with going to that level is that I think both are weak to Naya, so I may actually find myself back to the comfortable place of playing with Cartel Aristocrat before too long.
Thanks for reading,
Sam
@samuelhblack on twitter
twitch.tv/samuelhblack