The Aether Revolt Era Begins!

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Newsletter
Thursday, January 19th

Your time is almost up! The Columbus Open Weekend is upon us, and everybody will be watching the SCG Tour on Twitch this weekend! With a fresh set, a fresh format, and huge implications for the upcoming Pro Tour, this is the most anticipated Magic event in a long, long time! Because of all the unknowns, everyone is either trying to solve the format before it begins...or trying to convince themselves that nobody possibly can! When all is said and done on Sunday, and the top 8 decklists are posted for the Magic Multiverse to see, will your name be among them?

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

The Three Decks I Expect At the
Columbus Open
By Ross Merriam  

The "New Splinter Twin" seems rather divisive right now, with some players touting it as format-defining and others finding it vastly overrated. Count me in the former camp, with the clarification that I don't think a deck being format-defining is necessarily ban-worthy. The threat of dying out of nowhere as early as turn 4 is always going to be powerful and forces you into awkward play patterns that a control deck like this easily capitalizes on.

To understand how, you have to consider that the chief strategic weakness of control decks is their lack of pressure. Control decks don't inherently limit what their opponent is capable of doing; they simply work to have the right answers at the right time and overpower their opponent in a longer game. Most successful strategies against control rely on this fact to execute their gameplan.

For example, you can deploy a stream of hard-to-answer threats like planeswalkers, Vehicles, and recursive creatures like Scrapheap Scrounger meant to overload their removal and end the game while they sink tempo into card draw spells in order to find the right answers. In order to execute this, you often need to work the game to a point where you can cast two key threats in one turn and overload their countermagic as well, but tapping out in the mid-game now leaves the threat of dying on the spot.

January 28-29

February 4

February 18-19

Them's The Breakpoints
By Jadine Klomparens  

The beginning turns of a game of Magic are generally the easiest. Both players develop their battlefield according to their gameplan without much credence given to what the opponent may be doing. Eventually, games will reach a point where both players have a somewhat developed battlefield and three to five cards left behind in their hand. In Standard, this mid-game is generally reached around turn 4 or 5. At this point in the game, the three to five cards in each player's hand can be virtually anything. It's time to start narrowing down the possibilities.

From the mid-game on, whenever the opponent makes a play that seems slightly suboptimal, make a note of it. Suboptimal plays tell us a lot. When our opponent uses the wrong card to answer a problem you presented them with, it probably means they don't have the right card in their hand. Even more telling is when they don't answer a problem at all, despite it playing a critical role in the matchup.

Imagine being on the draw against a Jeskai Control deck. The game has progressed normally; you have managed to stick a Thraben Inspector and a Walking Ballista and are whittling away at their life total with those two, but every other spell you've cast has been countered. Meanwhile, your opponent has done control things like cast Glimmer of Genius and make land drops. On turn 6, staring down six untapped lands, you cross your fingers and slam Gideon, Ally of Zendikar. They answer it with yet another Disallow.

What did you learn?

Looking For Aether Revolt's
Hidden Decks
By Ari Lax  

Typically, countermagic forces you to play with your mana untapped in a specific window. If your opponent can force your hand with the right amount of early pressure or double-threat turns, you can get stuck, unable to use your counter on a key spell, and die.

Disallow fixes some of that and is a card that people are underestimating as a result. It lets you counter later key uses of cards like Aetherworks Marvel activations; Gideon, Ally of Zendikar or Vehicle activations before you establish a Torrential Gearhulk; or a Liliana, the Last Hope ultimate. A lot of the traditional disadvantages of counterspells are mitigated with Disallow, while the removal of Emrakul, the Promised End negates the need to exile spells with Void Shatter.

Expect most decks to default to Disallow in the near future for their three-cost counterspell once people realize the full potential utility of the card.