Welcome Magic lovers!
Finally! Competitive Standard has returned at last, as the cream of the professional-Magic-playing crop descended on glittering Las Vegas last weekend, for Magiccon, featuring the World Championships and a substantial $1,000,000 prize pool.
This year, Magic's highest competitive-level event consisted of six rounds of Duskmourn: House of Horror draft, interspersed with eight swiss rounds of Standard constructed, before the cut to a constructed top 8 on day three.
With eight full rounds of high-level Standard in the books, its time to dissect and analyze the competitive meta game, as several of these spicy, new deck lists are sure to make their way onto Magic Arena, Magic Online and a local game store near you. Today, let's give a brief overview of some of the new decks that came out of the World Championships which may shape the Standard landscape going forward.
Dimir Demons
The eventual World Champion, Javier Dominguez, alongside several of his high-profile teammates, chose to pilot this unorthodox Dimir control deck in the tournament and it eventually got him the trophy.
Starting with a classic control shell, featuring removal spell staple Go for the Throat, Shoot the Sheriff and Anoint with Affliction to hit those pesky Unstoppable Slashers that seem to be running around everywhere.
Backed up by disruption in the form of a full playset of Duress, plus a cheeky little countermagic package in the form of Faerie Mastermind plus Spell Stutter, the deck can try to snag any opposing non-creature permanents before they hit the board and start causing trouble for the Dimir player. This allows the deck to still contend with problematic permanents like Caretaker's Talent or Urabrask's Forge.
The core of the deck, however, is the card draw engine, Unholy Annex. This Duskmourn: House of Horror rare has been extremely impressive in several shells, from midrange to control, as it provides card advantage plus a win condition all wrapped up in one. The key is to support it with the right demons, and in this case, that means Archfiend of the Dross. Despite being legal in Standard for quite some time, this beefy phyrexian demon hasn't seen much play, until now. It creates a terrifyingly-fast clock when combined with Unholy Annex plus removal, as the Archfiend's static ability can be easily triggered to do the last four or six points of damage. Add to that its size, dwarfing nearly every other creature in the format on turn four, and it becomes an excellent creature to stabilize and hide behind as one buys time to enact the deck's second win condition.
This is where the deck takes a fascinating turn. The only other demon in the deck is a pair of Doomsday Excruciator, the six-black-mana demon from Duskmourn that essentially casts the spell Doomsday when it enters the battlefield, exiling both players libraries, except for the bottom six cards, and drastically shrinking the game down to a few meager turns remaining before one player decks themselves. This game-state makes either of the two Jace, the Perfected Mind instantly lethal, as it will mill the remaining cards in the opponent's library in one shot. Any one of the playset of Restless Reef can also end things in a pinch. This leads to scenarios where the deck can come out of nowhere to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or simply break a stalemate wide open, and it gives it's pilot a scary angle of attack which many opponents will simply be unprepared for.
The mana base is fairly straightforward, with the obligatory set of Restless Reef, plus a couple of Fountainport. The new Gloomlake Verge makes an appearance here as a four-of to flesh out the blue sources, but only one Undercity Sewers truly underscores the deck's preference for having its lands come into play untapped whenever possible.
The sideboard is stocked with more removal against the aggressive decks, additional disruption for the midrange and late-game decks as well as an alternate win con in Outrageous Robbery.
Despite its lofty finish at Worlds, will this deck have what it takes to remain relevant going forward? There are a lot of things that seem very suboptimal with the list, like the Caustic Bronco, which is capable of flipping an eight-mana Unholy Annex and dealing eight damage to its controller. With forty-eight matches played and only a 43.8%-win rate, its not clear whether Dimir Control is an archetype worth exploring further.
Temur Prowess
Everyone who's been following competitive Standard over the last year or two has certainly heard of the infamous cftsoc, a.k.a. Rei Zhang, and their crazy combo decks that consistently turn into format all-stars. This time was no different as many of the members of Rei's team chose to follow them and sleeve up a Temur Prowess combo deck to attack the World Championship metagame.
A creature-based combo deck, which revolves around the new enchantment-creature, Enduring Vitality, and the slippery Bloomburrow otter wizard, Valley Floodcaller. The deck is attempting to get those two creatures into play together in order to start tapping them for mana with the elk's ability, then untapping all creatures with the otter's ability whenever a non-creature spell hits the stack. Combine that with a few otter tokens produced by Stormchaser's Talent, or any other creatures that happen to be lying around, and suddenly the deck is capable of generating large amounts of mana and growing its creatures to horrifying sizes.
The loop which can be performed in order to create infinite spell triggers is by tapping one's creatures to generate mana and casting This Town Ain't Big Enough for two by targeting one's own Stormchaser's Talent along with up to one of the opponent's permanents. This untaps all the creatures in order to create more mana which allows one to play the talent again, level it up to buy back This Town Ain't Big Enough, then rinse, repeat, and voila: infinite mana plus infinite +1/+1 prowess triggers.
Torch the Tower does all the heavy lifting when it becomes necessary for the deck to interact with the opponent's board, backed up to a lesser extent by Roaring Furnace and This Town Ain't Big Enough. However, interacting isn't what combo decks do. They simply try to execute their plan, because if successful, the opponent won't get another turn.
To that end, the deck plays a full set of Thundertrap Trainer to find the pieces it needs, alongside a pair of Bitter Reunion and Up the Beanstalk, which may seem odd in a deck with such a low curve, but it can instantly draw the whole library when looping with This Town Ain't Big Enough and Stormchaser's Talent.
In order to remain as spell-dense as possible, the deck runs a lean twenty lands, supplemented by a trio of both Analyze the Pollen and Bushwhack. The former can also be used to find any of the combo pieces, or an alternate win condition in a pinch.
Speaking of alternate win conditions, the deck also packs a pair of Song of Totentanz for an easily kill once it's generated a sufficiently large amount of mana.
The sideboard is kitted out with a range of singletons, as the deck can generate enough velocity to draw through itself quickly and find whichever silver bullet it deems necessary in the moment. Graveyard-hate in the form of Ghost Vacuum, interaction like Into the Flood Maw, Abrade, Volcanic Spite and Negate. Pyroclasm for the aggro decks and Screaming Nemesis for the late-game decks. This is one aspect of the deck that I think needs a bit more focus, and as Standard takes shape, I expect it will be honed down to fewer different cards.
Despite its flashy nature, and potentially game-ending combo loop, the deck finished with a mediocre 48.9%-win rate across forty-five matches, which again begs the question of: will this be good enough to tune going forward? Only time will tell, though I expect a deck like this to eventually be one of the scarier boogeymen in Standard.
Seeing fresh, new lists being piloted by the best players in the world was a treat, though determining whether or not these lists will make an impact in Standard as we wade into the Regional Championship Qualifier season is another matter. The best performing decks in the tournament were the previously established Dimir Midrange (56.6%), Azorius Oculus (58%) and Gruul Prowess (55.4%), so perhaps these new contenders were just flashes in the pan. Only time will tell!
