fbpx

The Evolution Of Green Midrange In Pioneer

Green midrange decks are poised for success in the Pioneer rounds at the Season Two Invitational. Which ones, though? Ari Lax traces their evolution in the new format and offers lists for the weekend!

This article was originally going to be about a bunch of different decks that caught my eye for Pioneer leading into SCG CON. Then I realized it was the Ensoul Artifact deck Ross Merriam covered and a million green midrange decks.

There’s a ton of ground to cover on this archetype in a fresh format, and I want to approach all the variants from the ground up. Why are these decks good, how did we get here, and what are the promising branches for the archetype?


This is where we started. Sultai Oko won the first Pioneer Magic Online Challenge, and it felt like a pure port from Modern decks. It was largely answers and planeswalkers, with the idea that you need to cripple anything with a surgical answer and then one good threat will finish things.

But that strategy is good for fighting against decks with key cards, where cutting off a specific piece with Thoughtseize and Abrupt Decay significantly deteriorates the quality of their deck.

Pioneer has a lot more midrange layering. Thoughtseize and Abrupt Decay are good cards, but they pick off a piece of the puzzle that gives you an opening to get ahead. This is Thoughtseize as the best card in Standard Abzan, not Thoughtseize as the best card in Modern Jund.

That also means games are contested for longer than in Modern, and that means you start having card selection issues. The dead Turn 6 Thoughtseize is a real fear. So is having Abrupt Decay and not something larger for an expensive planeswalker.

One of the contenders for current best cards in Pioneer is Smuggler’s Copter, and that’s exactly what can fix this issue. There’s just the problem of activating it. That Sultai Midrange list from a couple of weeks back doesn’t have many creatures with power.

That’s where Lovestruck Beast comes in, or really the entire package around the card.

Another one of the best cards in Pioneer is Llanowar Elves, and building to cast a Turn 2 Oko, Thief of Crowns when the card is in your deck is leaving value on the table. A Turn 2 Lovestruck Beast isn’t bad either, and Llanowar Elves gives you the 1/1 density required to enable the card if your Human tokens get picked off.

This all loops us back to Smuggler’s Copter. You now have random things with power that will gladly crew for one, and Smuggler’s Copter filters your extra Llanowar Elves away. That’s the chocolate on your peanut butter of Pioneer here.

This also gives you an opening to exploit Thoughtseize as a preemptive answer to removal. While they were likely skewed towards Felidar Guardian decks that no longer exist, a lot of the control decks floating around had no good answers to Smuggler’s Copter. There aren’t many around, and Kolaghan’s Command is super-restrictive.


This is the step to the next level of Sultai Midrange. Ignore the numbers, especially only playing three of all your best cards. This is a much more proactive version of the same deck we saw, and that’s extremely high value in an open format.

There is a cost to moving away from Gilded Goose, and that comes in access to blue mana. I think you can get away with a counterspell, but you aren’t going to play Dig Through Time. For comparison, Standard Sultai Food plays thirteen blue lands, eight creatures that can produce blue mana, and Once Upon a Time for Hydroid Krasis and Oko, Thief of Crowns plus sideboard counterspells, and this last list only has twelve land and four creatures that make blue mana. Smuggler’s Copter is somewhat of a fixer, but I would consider playing a Yavimaya Coast or that last Watery Grave here.

I also can’t help but wonder if Tireless Tracker is being wrongly edged out of these decks. With Elvish Mystic on top of Llanowar Elves, you can’t play a ton of lands, and Teferi, Time Raveler is fairly good against Tireless Tracker, but Tireless Tracker has proven over and over to be a dominant engine-finisher hybrid in every format it has been legal in. It even gets +1/+1 counters so it out-Elks all the other Elks in the format.

One thing on the backburner here is how absurd Languish is in Sultai Midrange. The key anti-sweeper card in this format is Selfless Spirit. That lineup isn’t working out for them. Or maybe the real anti-sweeper is Smuggler’s Copter, but you have no shortage of answers for that one. Also, take a close look at the creature selection here. Smuggler’s Copter; Lovestruck Beast; Tasigur, the Golden Fang; and The Scarab God all survive Languish. That’s not Damnation, that’s Plague Wind.

Before you tell me Llanowar Elves is a nonbo with Languish, when you need to Turn 3 Languish on the draw, you really need to fire it off then. You can also use Llanowar Elves as a defensive speed boost to force your opponent to overcommit into a Languish. If Lovestruck Beast bricks their attacks a turn earlier and keeps you closer to twenty life, they might just need to drop everything on the table and hope you don’t have it.

Borrowing some notes from Standard Once Upon a Time decks with Arboreal Grazer and skewing to kill Teferi, Hero of Dominaria or Nissa, Who Shakes the World, I want to play the following.


But let’s take this back a step. What if we are shorting the wrong color in this Llanowar Elves manabase?



Are these decks really that different from the previous one? I don’t really buy the Heart of Kiran stuff with one planeswalker, but Stubborn Denial and Thoughtseize do really similar things. The second deck easily wants Lovestruck Beast in the mix.

It’s probably time to discuss one big elephant in the room: Simic Nexus. If your deck’s goal is to attack with green creatures, you probably need a plan for the card Fog. Thought-Knot Seer and Stubborn Denial are the kind of plans you realize fail the first time they have yet another Fog and yet another green source, or when they just Fog to set up Dig Through Time to find a new Wilderness Reclamation. As weird as it is to beat the end-step untap effect by tapping their lands, Elder Deep-Fiend beats all the Fogs. Let all the lands untap, and then tap their green sources. It doesn’t line up well with Nexus of Fate, but if they untap with Wilderness Reclamation, the main plan went poorly and we are well onto to the “swing and hope to hit” plan.

I think it is still up in the air whether Elder Deep-Fiend is in the starting 60 or the sideboard, but it seems powerful enough to make one of the two.


Alternatively, you could utilize the fact that the go-to red answer in the format has anti-Fog text built in. Or rather answers and threats, because Stomp on Bonecrusher Giant also does that. Oko, Thief of Crowns feels like an almost-free splash in that it means adding painlands that make “three” of your “four” colors. You are literally fixing your mana by adding a color! Why and how is this even happening?


There’s some weird push and pull going on with the early mana. Unclaimed Territory as a one-shot fixer would be nice, but it doesn’t play well with Gilded Goose and Llanowar Elves splits. Gilded Goose also doesn’t play nearly as well in a deck loaded with four- and five-drops without Noxious Grasp-level flex plays, or with Smuggler’s Copter, but once you go down that road and line up Elves you run into issues with Unclaimed Territory not casting Oko or Bonecrusher Giant. Karplusan Forest would make this all a breeze, but right now you have to actually think about stuff.

The card I’m missing here is some way to effectively combat a large creature. Not that this isn’t always Temur’s issue in every iteration of every format. Domri’s Ambush might come close, but that’s the best spell I’ve got. Eldrazi Obligator is the best creature I ended up on, and it at least isn’t terrible.

Something that does line up between Modern and Pioneer is sideboard construction. It’s super-easy to have a spread of one-ofs serving dual purposes to add up to good configurations against a broad field. Pioneer might even be more welcoming to this than Modern. I have one Grafdigger’s Cage as a concession to Kethis Combo, but there aren’t that many linear decks you need the specific best answer for.


There’s also a chance I’m trying to shoehorn in Eldrazi when Collected Company is a more reliably castable, higher-impact card than Thought-Knot Seer. Brazen Borrower isn’t Reflector Mage, but it does line up well against Wilderness Reclamation. The oddball creatures don’t seem great here, but the core definitely hits hard at the cost of having to choose Smugger’s Copter or Oko as your non-Collected Company spell.


I haven’t even gone all the way down the rabbit hole. If you can think of a way to put a drawn Enter the Infinite back into your deck, let me know.

We’re far off the Modern baseline we are used to, and that is what excites me the most about green midrange in Pioneer. While a lot of the same decks will be good because the same cards are good, this format isn’t Modern and isn’t Standard. The people who find the niches that exploit this the quickest are the ones who will see real success at SCG CON this weekend.