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.

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.

In the third and final installment of his design review of New Phyrexia, Gregory discusses the Green and Artifact cards.

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.