Cableguy's Standard Package, Part 2

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Cableguy

1 May 2014

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Cableguy’s Standard Package

Standard is a unique format in a lot of ways it is the most complicated format and in a lot of ways it is also the easiest. An example of this when a person first decides, “hey I want to play Friday Night Magic too,” and they have all of these commons, uncommons, and a few miscellaneous rares they collected from drafting and possibly prereleases. It is during this time that standard format is the easiest; most of the cards are known to you and you feel confident from drafting and playing sealed. Eventually just as you are getting your foot in the door to getting better and getting better card the set rotates. Now you have to learn all new cards, spend more money, and essentially relearn everything you thought you knew about standard. This doesn’t happen just once it happens more and more until you finally see the uphill challenge you will have to face playing in a format like standard. Let’s say you want to win FNM so bad and maybe enter the Star City 5K that you buy a $500 deck that pros are playing and you have been proxying. As the set continues the bulk of your deck decreases in value till it rotates and now you have to pay another $250 to make your previous deck legal again, except now your deck isn’t the best and you feel cheated so you eventually spend another $250 (or trade) to correct it. This cycle never stops for those who play standard. To compete religiously in standard you know you will have to spend some money somewhere and hope you turn a profit from booster packs you win or winning small events to big tournaments. This is a short term investment and for some people is extremely difficult to stay involved with.

Legacy is a long term investment. You are usually spending at least $1,000 dollars for a tier 1 legacy deck and this is assuming you have no cards for it already. The kicker though is that this is a one-time payment because the sets never rotate out but sets rotate in. Eventually you will spend more money playing standard than you will legacy, that is inevitable (assuming you don’t buy a legacy deck every month for the funsies because yeaGO is flipping the bill. The gameplay depth in legacy however is much more in depth with hundreds of potentially game braking and devastating cards that can beat you down quicker that a turn one Goblin Guide. This requires more advanced knowledge of the game and the cards involved in it. Generally high level players play legacy and there are a very slim few new players that play legacy (with tier 1 decks). Standard is the opposite to a point where you have a plethora of newer players that buy tier one decks because they like the idea and saw someone win with it. Generally the people that get good at standard stay in standard and play legacy; and the people that are good at legacy play whatever format they want because they got the dollar bills (and the advanced level skill). So to conclude this section of the article; Standard is an easy stair stepping difficulty from easy to hard but money wise is medium to hard overtimes. Legacy requires high level of skill to start (tier 1) and costs a high amount of money to start but in the long run you would end up spending less. Again this is assuming someone plays casually at first and decides to get relatively serious. Didn’t include modern because it’s not a real format (Joking). Modern if anything is a mix of the two styles. Now on to more important things.

Expected Meta Changes

The real reason for this article, yay! The reason for this article is I want to go over what to expect tournament wise FNM and up with the addition of Journey to Nyx, and examine how some of the top decks today with utilize the new cards for tomorrow.

First off let me begin by saying this, everything must change because nothing is constant. You can stew on this all you like I am sure I am wrong somewhere o.0 but the idea when it relates to magic is undeniably true. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, I am talking about how the meta swings every which way when a new set is added. After a while you think to yourself, “Man I love aggro…time to play control,” and you wouldn’t be wrong. It is instinct; if you play a game, you want to win. It is the reason why free games that offer micro transactions to ‘enhance’ the players experience make millions of dollars a year. I have done this and I am sure the vast majority of people have, it’s natural, even though you regret it all to hell later. The point I am trying to make here is if you want to win you have to adapt to survive. What you have to get good at is reading the signs of a swing and picking the right direction to stay ahead of the competition. This same concept can be used in business principles.

So how do we change? The question itself is hard to answer. Even a lot of pros like to play something comfortable until it is decided what the changes are and jump onto the winning train. Some which love to innovate come up with a deck they think will be vastly superior in the upcoming sets. The best example of this I can give is Delver. Just when you thought it was over he is back. I had the pleasure of watching Todd Anderson’s baby which started as an Illusion deck Phantasmal Bear etc, turn into Delver. I saw him play it day in, day out, nurturing the idea with untargetable spells so his idea’s wernt sacrificed Badum Tss . The point is he was right about the way the meta was going to shift and tempo became such a powerful thing we almost hated him for bringing it to everyone’s attention.

Where is the set going to go next? If I knew for certain I would be on the first plane to the next 5K with an IOU for yeaGO to go win. That aside you can take a pretty educated guess and that is what I plan to present to you all. That way if I am right you have someone to blame for games being decided by turn 5. If that wasn’t a hint I think that aggro and more aggressive midrange decks are going to get a HUGE boost in play. The archetypes I plan to see are: Mono Black Aggro, G/R Aggro, Naya Aggro, Mono Black Devotion, UW Devotion, BR Aggro.

There is a lot of aggro there for a reason. Decks now have a favorable way to mana fix properly and weed out any unnecessary sacrifices they have made to balance 2-3 colors. Less temples more bashing in the face. A good example of this is Spike Jester this little rascal is GREAT but didn’t see any play at all because his mana was too rough to cast; now he will be a 4 of in BR Aggro. There are numerous decks out there that will evolve and change like this. If you want to play a control deck you better focus the control almost entirely on creature removal and have a way to gain life somehow.

At the moment my deck of choice is Naya Aggro because I am consistently able to win on turn 5 even from a horrible board state. It’s not an uncommon strategy now of course and I did very little to edit it except add cards I like and fixed the mana. To compare power of decks I like to test them against prior decks of standard both now and before (I have a LOT of decks made on my profile) even going back to mythic conscription. If I can make a point to how strong this deck is, it beat Caw blade five games to none and the nuts and bolts of that deck were banned. Though admittedly it’s not the fairest way to compare power so let me give another I have beaten Mono Black Devotion 88% of the time in 42 games. Mono Blue Devotion 94% of the time in 35 games. UW Control 95% of the time on 37 games. RG Aggro 69% of the time in 36 games. These numbers are NOT made up. I work at a call center and I get a lot of time to sit there and deck test, but not just against myself, these also include numbers of games I have played against other people with the same deck over MWS, Here, at home against roomie, etc. I am bored lonely man I get a lot of time to think about this stuff ;-;

Brad Nelson recently put out an article as well going over kind of the same idea’s I am. We disagree on a few things but he talks about the decks he favors in the next set, and other things as well and if you get the chance you should read it to get more than one view on it. One thing we agree on though is the speed of the decks coming, sleeve up your Nyx-Fleece Ram’s because stuff is about to go down.

Now normally I would review a deck that won recently in high end competitive play and go over why it won and so forth. The downside is once the next set comes out it won’t matter a whole lot. To go over it briefly, I will use Simon Stahl’s UW Control deck that in the finals beat Mono Black Devotion. This is for the same reason I listed above, he had enough creature removal that he was able to stabilize and beat him to death with 1/1’s and AEtherling. If you are interested in playing control in the next set it is a good place to start analyzing and deck building from and the deck list can be found here.

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