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.

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.

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.

It was not until the entire top eight had four copies of Jace the Mind Sculptor in their main deck that the talks became serious. We all knew nothing would happen then because New Phyrexia was yet to be released, in printed form at least. But now, the release has come and gone, players have adopted some new cards into their decks, and a new deck or two have made tournament appearances. So, what’s changed since then?

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.

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.

This week, Corbin Hosler describes how a trade went wrong and needs your help to make it right with the upset trader. He also tells you what cards to pick up in Legacy, what Standard cards need to go, and has an update on the Prediction Tracker!

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.