Welcome Magic lovers!
With the release of the massive Foundations set this week, the Standard format is abuzz with new ideas, new lists, and potential new archetypes to tweak, test, and tune in preparation for the upcoming Regional Championship Qualifier season that's set to begin on November 16th.
Today, let's take a look at a couple of new, potentially powerful, deck ideas that may inject new life into the Standard format.
Raising Rabbits
This innovative Bant list has some very powerful synergies built into it, and can explode out of nowhere to put dozens of bodies on the battlefield in order to swing for lethal. The key card is the new Foundations bunny, Hare Apparent, which can be included in one's deck as many times as one likes. This list is playing a full dozen copies of the card, and while that may seem like overkill, it ensures the deck will always draw or mill multiple copies in any given game, allowing it to consistently combo off. How, exactly, does it do that? Let's break it down.
The early turns will often consist of setting up the graveyard with either Say Its Name, Picklock Prankster, or Inspiration from Beyond. Perhaps Llanowar Elves shows up early to accelerate that plan, or maybe the pilot throws out a creature or two to soak up some early damage from an aggressive opponent, but ideally, the deck will self-mill until it has a few Hare Apparent in the graveyard, along with a Burrowguard Mentor or maybe even a Valley Questcaller. With a staggering twelve copies of Hare Apparent, milling three or four should be trivially easy. Bonus points if one can mill a few additional Say Its Name alongside the singleton Altanak, the Thrice-Called.
Once the graveyard is stocked, it's time to Raise the Past, a new four-mana sorcery from Foundations that returns all creature cards with mana value two or less from one's graveyard to the battlefield. This will often immediately put a swarm of creatures on the battlefield, as each Hare Apparent that enters play will see each other Hare Apparent and produce the appropriate number of tokens. For example, just three Hare Apparent simultaneously entering play will create an additional six 1/1 rabbit tokens and a very wide board for the opponent to deal with.
Any Burrowguard Mentors that show up will be appropriately massive, and with Valley Questcaller to pump them up, the rabbit tokens can become lethal very quickly.
Inspiration From Beyond is perfect here as it not only helps fill the graveyard with Hares, but also digs into and plucks out the Raise the Past in order to go off. Bear in mind, Raise the Past not only brings back Hare Apparent, but also any other creature in the deck (except the one Altanak, the Thrice-Called), meaning any time this white sorcery resolves it will almost certainly be throwing copious amounts of creatures onto the battlefield.
With only eighteen lands, this deck is extremely spell-dense, which means that it will be able to put creatures and spells into its graveyard with alarming consistency each time it self-mills. Despite most of the deck costing a paltry two mana, Raise the Past, its crucial combo card, costs four. This makes a creature like Llanowar Elves essential in order to ensure the deck can still cast its signature spell in a timely manner.
The sideboard is still in flux at the time of this writing, as it's not clear what the larger metagame will look like once the dust settles, but most of its bases are covered here. Hinterland Sanctifier does excellent work against the red-based aggressive strategies, gaining copious amounts of life from all the creatures entering play.
Grand Abolisher and Negate come in against controlling decks in order to ensure that Raise the Past resolves.
Haywire Mite is the perfect card to deal with pesky enchantments which can really put the brakes on a deck like this, such as Temporary Lockdown. The fact that the Mite also comes back into play off of a Raise the Past is a nice little bonus.
If you're looking for something new and spicy to catch people off guard with in Standard, look no further than Raising Rabbits!
Our next list is based on a strategy that's no stranger to the top tier of Standard in years past, affectionately referred to as: Aristocrats. This nickname refers to any deck that's based around sacrificing its own creatures for value and, more specifically, to deal lethal damage to one's opponent.
Orzhov Aristocrats
The recipe one needs to follow in order to create a potent Aristocrats deck is simple, as it only requires three key ingredients: a free (or at least very cheap) sacrifice outlet, a pile of sacrifice fodder to feed to the outlet, and a payoff for sacrificing said fodder. If one can bring all the spent fodder back with a recursion spell in order to repeat the process, that takes the deck to another level. With the printing of Foundations, we've been given not only a powerful payoff card, but also a powerful recursion spell to really elevate the deck.
A healthy Aristocrats deck is only as good as the food it's eating, and in this case, we have plenty to feast on. Forsaken Miner not only attacks for two on turn two, but also comes back over and over after being sacrificed, making it the perfect choice. The new Infestation Sage is another excellent piece of fodder as it leaves an evasive body behind after it dies, to either attack or be sacrificed to something else in turn. Market Gnome is the weakest of the fodder pieces, though it's still serviceable as it blocks nicely against the red aggressive decks and also replaces itself when it dies.
The main sacrifice outlet in this list is Bartolome del Presidio, which not only activates for free at instant speed as many times per turn as one wants, but also costs a mere two mana. Additionally, Eaten Alive and Corrupted Conviction also serve as excellent ways of devouring one's creatures for only one mana each while also dealing with the opponent's board or putting more gas in the tank.
Now for the payoffs, including one in particular which is the main impetus for building the Aristocrats archetype again in Standard, Vengeful Bloodwitch. This newly minted vampire warlock is capable of generating massive life swings over the course of a game in this deck, and gives one the reach needed to easily reduce an opponent's life total to zero without even attacking. If one has two copies of the Bloodwitch on the battlefield, it gets truly terrifying for the opponent, as any future sacrifice outlet can easily become their doom. A couple of copies of Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim also do good work to help drain the opponent out.
Enduring Innocence is the perfect card advantage engine in the deck as it not only triggers off of any other creature in the list, but can also be sacrificed itself, only to become an enchantment which continues to draw its pilot additional cards.
The big haymaker in the deck is the new white sorcery, Raise the Past, which can easily win the game on almost any turn that it's cast. This is because it brings back not only all of the fodder that has been sacrificed and gone to the graveyard, but also the sacrifice outlets like Bartolome, as well as multiple copies of the payoffs like Vengeful Bloodwitch and Elas il-Kor, allowing the pilot to simply sacrifice their entire board the turn they cast Raise the Past and often win the game on the spot.
The mana base is a clean twenty-two lands with no additional utility lands, as the deck is very low-to-the-ground and can draw additional cards easily to keep up its velocity.
The sideboard has a full playset of the new Authority of the Consuls, alongside a pair of Cut Down, to combat the red aggressive decks, as well as a trio of Ghost Vacuum to stifle the Abhorrent Oculus decks. Duress and Cathar Commando can come in against controlling strategies, Overlord ramp decks, and even Unholy Annex decks in order to manage the various powerful enchantments running around. It does feel pretty good to sacrifice a Cathar Commando in order to blow up an Unholy Annex, draining the opponent for a couple of life points in the process via Bloodwitch or Elas, only to bring the Commando back again with Raise the Past a few turns later.
Cheap, powerful, and consistent, this deck is a great choice if you'd like to try something new in Standard and attack from an angle that many decks will have a tough time dealing with. The built-in life gain is also excellent against all the red decks running around the metagame right now.
That's it for today, but let me know what you think will be the breakout decks of Foundations Standard in the comments below!
