Jason Schousboe reacquaints himself with an old friend by taking Lands for a spin around the block, with the value-added Scapeshift and Valakut. See how he fared in this quixotic quest below.

Carlos loves to build decks, including those of five colors. Join him this week, defending the multicolor player in us all, and aiming for spot between casual and competitive with a Polymorph deck. Check it out!

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.

Mike Lanigan discusses the impact of the cards of New Phyrexia on Standard’s Vampire archetype.

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.

What’s resilient to hate, eats multiplayer tables alive, and locks down the game on a dime? A five-color, Child of Alara led land deck of course!

We’ve had 2 weeks of Opens to see the impact New Phyrexia has had on the Standard and Legacy tournament scenes. I’m going to focus on Standard, since the Grand Prix this weekend is Legacy, and will almost certainly have more players than the SCG Open series gets. Waiting on that will give us a bit of a better view on the format. However, for Standard, there’s no reason to wait, especially since the format hasn’t really undergone much of a change.

We get back to the Hunt with a all new GR aggro list developed by Kellen’s new mtg team. Fast kills are the name of the game in this deck feature.

Take one part ‘awesome customization’ and add two parts ‘hopes and dreams’ to make… what Jules has for you today! Can you guess what’s inside?

With a new format becoming available for the first time Friday, it’s time to take a quick look at what’s available. For the most part, these will be aggro or combo decks, since control decks need to be built towards the metagame. As it stands, Caw-Blade is the premiere control deck in the format, and it can be played as-is with the mere addition of Batterskull.