Is Esper Pixie the Best Deck in Standard?
Welcome Magic lovers!
As the Standard Regional Championship Qualifier season hurtles on, racing through Aetherdrift and setting its sights on the gathering storm on Tarkir, one may think the format has started to become stale. After all, tired, old Domain won the Pro Tour again, a Standard deck that's existed in one form or another for a full two years now, while Dimir Midrange and Gruul Aggro have been around since before last year's rotation, yet combined, they still manage to make up almost 50% of the metagame.
However, as this past weekend's Standard Showcase Challenge on Magic Online has shown us, the metagame changes as often as the weather, with innovations and tweaks being made to several new archetypes, in particular Esper Pixie. A dominant performance by the Esper players put three copies of the deck into the top four of the tournament, with another copy just missing top eight, in no small part due to the work that incredible deck-builders, like the infamous 'cftsoc' on Magic Online (who ended up taking down the whole tournament), are putting into the deck.