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!
Preordain
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.
Mike Lanigan discusses the impact of the cards of New Phyrexia on Standard’s Vampire archetype.
Since I last wrote of Pauper, much has changed on MTGO! Included here are a full MTGO field archetype breakdown, multiple new decklists, and reader questions from Twitter.
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.
Ian Ellis gives us a second opinion of a card that may be more Hype than Hope, offering a bit of a shield to those who do not follow the popular thought and illuminates the risks for those who support it.
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.
Seeing the results from the National Qualifiers and thinking back on the article I wrote on Vampires, I was led back to that deck. I really love this Vampire deck and what it is capable of, I play it well, and I have had more success with it than any other deck this season. With all those things being true, how could I not play it again?
