Seth Manfield is on a serious heater. I suppose you would have to be to be the number one ranked player in the world. Coming off a Top 8 at Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad, he won Grand Prix New York this weekend. His deck for the PT was somewhat suspect given the inclusion of three Narset, Transcendent, and given his list from New York it looks like he feels similarly.

Despite the absence of Narset, the strategy is still to play a planeswalker heavy control deck with sweepers. At the onset of this Standard format we saw Orzhov Eldrazi builds outperforming the control decks, though now with the majority of the format being dedicated to casting a lot of small creatures, Languish is looking very powerful.

Manfield ran three Anguished Unmaking, which is one more copy than many mages previously had courage for. Sorin helps to recover the life loss, though more than anything this is likely because the alternative to being heavy on Unmakings is to be dead to Ormandahls. Anguished Unmaking seems like a solid card to trade for right now, though at $3 the upside is rather low.

On the topic of Ormandahl, Manfield was running three Westvale Abbey of his own. Secure the Wastes and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar help enable this creature-less deck to summon demons, which is another way to gain life/win games and to ease the pain of playing so many spells that cost life to cast.

More than anything, this weekend solidifies to me the fact that white decks should just all be jamming a bunch of Gideons. Gideon has been right around $20 for a very long time, and I expect that it won't be terribly long before we see that price increase significantly. Gideon is just fantasic on his own, and "comboing" with Secure the Wastes is no joke. This combination was featured both in the PT winning Selesnya Tokens deck as well as this one. Selesnya Tokens also went 15-0 in the hands of Mike Sigrist at GPNY, which is just another data point suggesting that Gideon is just the truth.