Mike Lanigan looks at powerful new strategies in Standard.

Jay continues his development of “The Standard Cube” by looking at white instants and sorceries. How many Wraths? Find out inside!

A Birthing Pod deck? Can it be so? Yes my friends, and it is as glorious and utility-filled as all of your little dreams had hoped! Twice now my Houston playgroup has had somebody run this list in a PTQ to Top 8 contention, to lose in the last round of Swiss. Here’s the list, with every card explained, that was used!

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.

Corbin Hosler takes a look at the metagame post-Valakut and has some hot new cards to watch out for as the metagame evolves in the coming months, as well as provides the weekly update of the Prediction Tracker!

Wanting to give the newest and mono-Blackiest cards a chance to shine, Gregory Marques walks us through his current project.

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.

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.

My quest led me down past Mirrodin, into the evil depths of Darksteel, and out along the treacherous path of Fifth Dawn. As I pressed onward, I looked back through the Scars of Mirrodin. Looking back from that perspective, it didn’t seem quite as bad. Nightmares of the Ravager long since overcome, only to be replaced over and over again. With the [card Jace, the Mind Sculptor]evil demon[/card] lurking everywhere, sometimes it’s hard to remember clearly what it was like in the past.

This time around, things are different. The story is not the same. We have [card Jace, the Mind Sculptor]the villan[/card] but no clear path to victory. In that regard the present is like the past.