With CawBlade in its recent incarnations gone the metagame is seemingly wide open.  Any number of archetypes can claim to be the new top dog, and the viability of many cards goes up without the fear of a Jace making them irrelevant or a turn three Batterskull attacking too quickly for them to come online.  Until some tournament results come in to fill in the gaps any talk about the new metagame will be little more than an educated guess, but we can still know questions need to be answered.

The first of two articles today in anticipation of Monday’s Banning announcement. Will Jace, the Mind Sculptor stay legal? What about Stoneforge Mystic? Brook Gardner-Durbin explores what options will be available to you if either or both of the above get the axe!

Last week I played in a standard tournament for four [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card]s. I played SparkBlade, a list very similar to the one in my last article.

With the exception of Splinter-Twin, however, the new metagame is very similar to the metagame before rotation.  Edgar Flores won the first SCG Open with NPH legal with a UW CawBlade list that looked very similar to the pre-rotation lists. In this metagame there are a number of cards that are being underplayed, in my opinion, and here are the top 5.