Presenting the Champions of Season 32

This past week we had the capstone events for this season of both SPDC and MPDC, generally referred to as our WORLDS event. Although the rotation of Standard means that a lot of this past season's metagame won't be directly relevant, I still thought it was worth taking one last look by highlighting the two champions from our WORLDS events. Storm_blade took the trophy in SPDC with his Simic Eldrazi deck, while rremedio1 took the trophy in MPDC with a 4 color Sultai Control deck. Let's take a look at their lists:

Simic Eldrazi

SPDC 34 Champion Storm_blade

Creatures 4 Eldrazi Skyspawner 4 Elvish Visionary 4 It of the Horrid Swarm 4 Primal Druid 4 Scion Summoner 4 Wretched Gryff 1 Monastery Loremaster 2 Eldrazi Devastator 27 cards Other Spells 4 Epic Confrontation 4 Pulse of Murasa 2 Might of the Masses 1 Cathar's Shield 11 cards

Lands 11 Forest 11 Island 22 cards Sideboard 3 Negate 3 Root Out 2 Deny Existence 2 Drag Under 2 Dispel 2 Rabid Bite 1 Bone Saw 15 cards

The strategy of this deck is to play lots of early creatures like Elvish Visionary and Primal Druid, generate mana ramp via the Eldrazi Scions from Eldrazi Skyspawner and Scion Summoner, then leverage all that mana to Emerge either It of the Horrid Swarm or Wretched Gryff, or simply power out the Eldrazi Devastator to overwhelm your opponent. It's mostly a creature-based deck, but it does have a smidgen of removal with Epic Confrontation. It also plays Pulse of Murasa (and Monastery Loremaster as a virtual fifth copy) to keep itself alive and recur its creatures, a couple Might of the Masses to give it an additional angle to win, and a Cathar's Shield to help protect its best creatures from burn-based removal.

Sultai Worlds

MPDC 34 Champion rremedio1

Creatures 4 Elvish Visionary 3 Primal Druid 3 Vulturous Aven 3 Wretched Gryff 2 Eldrazi Skyspawner 2 Pilgrim's Eye 2 Ruin Processor 1 Dutiful Attendant 1 Monastery Loremaster 20 cards Other Spells 4 Pulse of Murasa 4 Reave Soul 3 Oblivion Strike 2 Brilliant Spectrum 2 Complete Disregard 1 Rolling Thunder 17 cards

Lands 5 Forest 4 Evolving Wilds 4 Island 4 Swamp 3 Holdout Settlement 2 Unknown Shores 1 Mountain 23 cards Sideboard 3 Boiling Earth 3 Negate 2 Natural State 1 Caustic Caterpillar 1 Drag Under 1 Duress 1 Monastery Loremaster 1 Roilmage's Trick 1 Rolling Thunder 1 Ruin Processor 15 cards

rremedio1's build relies on a surprisingly similar base of creatures, but having access to Black gives the deck access to a whole host of powerful removal spells like Reave Soul, Oblivion Strike, and Complete Disregard, as well as generating even more sacrifice synergy with the excellent Vulturous Aven. Rather than the big Eldrazi, rremedio instead chose Ruin Processor, which serves a similar role but also sometimes gives you an important boost of Life as well. Brilliant Spectrum is probably the most surprisingly card in the deck, but when you have access to four colors, it becomes quite strong. Finally, it's worth noting that in order to support all those colors, the deck runs two Pilgrim's Eyes as well as Holdout Settlement and Unknown Shores.

Congrats to both Storm_blade and rremedio1 on their victories! I personally can't wait to see what the new format has in store once Kaladesh is released on Magic Online - which, if I recall correctly, starts today!

The Week of August 14th in Standard Pauper

We're two weeks into our new season of Standard Pauper tournaments, and I think it's fair to say that Eldritch Moon is having a big impact on the metagame. We're also continuing to see an uptick in attendance at Monday Pauper Deck Challenge. We had 16 players in attendance this week, which means once again we had a Top 8 playoff, with every player who went 2-1 in Swiss getting the opportunity to battle for the trophy! With 12 decks once again to consider, let's take a look at what archetypes came out on top this week in Standard Pauper.

Izzet Burn and Sultai Control were the big winners this week, accounting for five wins between them. The Izzet deck is a creature-like build based on maximizing the value of your spells and burning out your opponent, aided by the untap ability of Thermo-Alchemist. Sultai Control remains unchanged from its previous iterations, yet is still able to do well against a much more diverse field. Meanwhile, PauperRBust took the build he dubbed the Aristocrats from last week to another Top 4 win, using the GB Control shell and augmenting it with Bloodbriar, It of the Horrid Swarm, and Ulvenwald Captive. The standout accomplishment was probably Amnaremotoas' nearly mono-White Blood Mantle deck, which captured the first place trophy in SPDC with a mixture of Aura recursion and sacrifice synergy built around Bloodbriar and key interactions with Angelic Purge, Lunarch Mantle, and Vessel of Ephemera. Finally, the Top 8 of MPDC was noticeable diverse. It included a familiar BW Allies deck, a Dimir Tempo build by olstyn, a Rakdos Burn build from Paranoid_Android, and a Gruul Monsters deck by rremedio1.

Here's what I am seeing at this point in the season:

1. While Green Control builds with Pulse of Murasa continue to do well, they no longer seem as dominant. In some ways it's surprising that burn archetypes did so well this week, given the power of Pulse to keep your Life total high. But with the diversity of Red burn and the availability of Blue card draw, Izzet is going to be a difficult combination to beat.
   
2. There's still plenty of room for innovation and rogue archetypes to perform well, with four out of the twelve top decks making their first appearance this week. This also means that the metagame is harder to predict, complicating deckbuilding, especially for the Sideboard.
   
3. On a related note, all five colors are making their presence felt, although White overall seems like the weakest of the five. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as White felt somewhat weak in Eldritch Moon.
   
4. The inclusion of so much removal in both Red and Black hit the Emerge decks hard this week, making It of the Horrid Swarm and Wretched Gryff much less important. It's hard to invest lots of mana in creatures just to see them immediately go to the Graveyard.

That's it for this week. Hope to see you across the virtual table sometime soon!

The Week of August 7th in Standard Pauper

A brand new season of Standard Pauper weekly events has begun, bringing Eldritch Moon into Standard and already shaking up the metagame considerably. And at least for MPDC, this also meant a small surge of interest in the format, bringing in 18 players for this week's event and giving us our first Top 8 playoff in quite some time. With that, of course, comes four more decks to evaluate for this week, bringing the total up to 12 decks that made the playoffs between SPDC and MPDC. Let's take a look at that first snapshot of the new Standard Pauper metagame:

First off, as should have been expected, several players chose simply to run the pre-Eldritch Moon favorite Sultai Control without making any changes, which accounted for three of the twelve winning decks. Similarly, both PauperRBust and cRUMMYdUMMY took the GB Control shell and tweaked it in slightly different ways, but both took advantage of the mana ramp from Ulvenwald Captive and the new powerful Emerge creatures.

Second, we also had one other returning deck in the case of AEFabricio, running the GW Fliers deck that enjoyed moderate success last season.

Third, both DrChrisBaker and littlefield went with Izzet instead, choosing to run few creatures (but including the new Thermo-Alchemist) and instead focus on powerful spells, including Galvanic Bombardment and Take Inventory.

Fourth, we saw two brand new archetypes from both rremedio1 and Paranoid_Android. Rremedio1 ran a four color Tokens build, combining synergies from Impact Tremors, a mass of Black removal, Pulse of Murasa, and the new Emerge creatures. Paranoid_Android's build was a much simpler Azorius Fliers utilizing Displace in order to gain some incremental advantage off of his creatures' enters-the-battlefield effects.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday, the first place trophies both went to Simic Emerge decks run by amnaremotoas and JogandoPelado respectively. This new archetype looks to be quite strong, and will certainly be a force to be reckoned with going forward.

The biggest takeaway from this week is that Sultai colors look to continue their dominance in the format. This is perhaps not surprising given the relative weakness of both White and Red at Common in Eldritch Moon. While all five colors were represented in the finalists' decks, Blue, Black, and Green seem to by far have the most important cards in the format right now. Of course, there's still plenty of room for innovation and change in the metagame, so it will be interesting to see what next week brings!

Thanks for reading.

What Has Emerged in Standard Pauper

I am, at usual, running behind on my blog posts. I had a fantastic time at GenCon, and I will plan on recapping some of my experiences in a later post. But for today, I wanted to briefly write about how the Commons from Eldritch Moon fared in the first week of Standard Pauper events.

If you read Part One and Part Two of my Standard Pauper review of Eldritch Moon, you already know what I believe were the most important cards from the set. And the results from this first week were right in line with my expectations. While cards like Displace, Galvanic Bombardment, Take Inventory, and Thermo-Alchemist all made appearances in a variety of decks, the big winners of the set appear to be the two Emerge creatures It of the Horrid Swarm and Wretched Gryff.

These creatures not only immediately give you great value, but as it turns out their Emerge costs are actually cheap enough that you can get them into play fairly easily, sometimes as early as turn four or five. And provided you are running enough other creatures, it is also somewhat routine to be able to dump them into play back-to-back, quickly making the game revolve around who can keep the greatest number alive the longest. Based on all of that, it should come as no surprise that the 1st place trophy for both SPDC and MPDC was captured by a Simic colored deck built around these two creatures.

Even with all the removal in the format, I expect we'll see plenty of these two creatures for some time to come.

Eldritch Moon First Thoughts

As I mentioned in an earlier tweet, I am currently on the road on vacation, which is certainly an inconvenient time for the full set of Eldritch Moon to be revealed. Finding time to blog, much less work on my set review, is going to be a challenge, but I will do my best to get the content out as fast as I can. But for today, I wanted to offer my first thoughts on Eldritch Moon after going over all of the Commons a few times.

1. The power level of the Commons is significantly above average. By my count, there are at least two dozen cards that I expect to see regular play in Standard Pauper, and several of those seem good enough to be make a major impact on the format.
   
2. Although they are only present at Common in a handful of cards, all three of the new mechanics should see play in the format. Escalate is the most represented of the three, but Meld's representative Midnight Scavengers is quite strong, as are It of the Horrid Swarm and Wretched Gryff, our two Common Emerge cards.
   
3. Of the returning mechanics, Madness got a nice boost from the handful of new cards, while even Delirium and Skulk have some potential new playables.
   
4. The "Graveyard matters" theme seems stronger in Eldritch Moon than in Shadows Over Innistrad, at least at Common.
   
5.  Not only are the Commons more powerful, but they seem to be unusually complex as well. Thraben Standard Bearer, Ingenious Skaab, Make Mischief, and Crossroads Consecrator are all examples of Commons that would be red-flagged for one reason or another, yet still saw print despite also not being tied to the new set mechanics. While these cards are not necessarily amazing, the level of complexity is remarkable in this post New World Order era.

Anyway, that's enough from me for now to at least whet your appetite for my full set review. No promises on when that will be published, but I will do what I can while I am traveling. At the very least, it will be available prior to the release of Eldritch Moon on Magic Online. I'm definitely looking forward to it!