Prepping for Pro Tour Aether Revolt and SCG Regionals!

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Newsletter
Thursday, February 2nd

2017 continues to be a great year to be a Magic player. If you're still enjoying the fresh new Aether Revolt infusion to Standard, you've got a Pro Tour to enjoy (or play in!) this weekend! Did January give you more than enough Saheeli Rai for a week or two? No problem! SCG Regionals is all about the new Modern format! Don't miss your chance to collect your share of $5,000, plenty of SCG Points, and a trip to the next SCG Invitational! We'll see you at Regionals this weekend! And if you can't make it, enjoy the Pro Tour!

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

Dylan Donegan wins Standard Open

Christopher Calhoun wins Modern Classic

Todd Stevens wins Standard Classic

The Pillars Of Aether Revolt Standard
By Gerry Thompson  

A pillar is a card that defines a strategy, either as a build-around or as a payoff for choosing that archetype. Oftentimes, the pillars will invalidate other strategies or similar cards. In this case, Verdurous Gearhulk invalidates a lot of other five-drops, as using those cards is often less powerful than building around the green mythic.

The pillars of a format can, and often do, change. If Standard suddenly revolves around Fumigate, then Verdurous Gearhulk is less good. Similarly, if Aetherworks Marvel makes a comeback, then Verdurous Gearhulk probably isn't the thing you'll want to build around.

Since Verdurous Gearhulk is very popular (and will likely increase in popularity before it decreases), that should also tell you something about the format. If Verdurous Gearhulk were worse, people wouldn't play it.

Standard is about getting onto the battlefield and pressing that advantage. Without Emrakul, the Promised End, there are very few late-game cards worth building toward. Since that's the case, Verdurous Gearhulk is the biggest, baddest thing around.

Toolcraft Exemplar is the best available beatdown tool, whereas Saheeli Rai (or Felidar Guardian) is trying to play foil to everything.

Right now, if you're not building your deck around one of these three cards, you're doing it wrong.

February 18-19
Team Constructed

February 25-26
Modern

March 11-12
Modern

Modern Brew Blitz
By Chris Lansdell  

Several of my friends have had dalliances with the Living End deck in Modern, and I know from their cries that there is little they dislike more than drawing their copies of Living End. That makes sense; the deck draws a lot of cards by design with all the cycling creatures, and waiting three turns for the spell to come off suspend seems highly unlikely. So much do players of the archetype dislike the possibility of drawing the eponymous spell that people innovated a 90-card version with more cycling creatures and extra cascade spells in order to lower the chances of doing so.

What if we changed all that? What if we played creatures we actually want to reanimate instead of a ragtag collection of solid draft cards? What if, instead of dreading seeing that empty top-right corner in our draw step, we actually relished it?

The Return Of The Modern Toolbox
By Ari Lax  

The first big change was an uptick in Death's Shadow Aggro.

In my big Modern breakdowns at the end of last year, I stated that toolbox decks like Abzan Company generally were good against creature combo like Infect, but that Death's Shadow was a major exception. There wasn't a silver bullet creature you could find that crushed them the way Izzet Staticaster or Melira, Sylvok Outcast crushed Infect. The hate was cards like Engineered Explosives that didn't mesh with your main plan. The later Kiln Fiend decks posed a similar issue, but were a bit more vulnerable to the Eternal Witness / Path to Exile plan because their deck was less adept at getting out multiple creatures underneath your setup and was less adept at comboing out early.

The second big issue was Dredge. While Anafenza, the Foremost and Scavenging Ooze are cards, neither works on the scale of hate you needed to stop Dredge's best draws. Yixlid Jailer did, but with Cathartic Reunion, it was very possible to be facing down ten or more power before you could even cast it, let alone Chord of Calling for it. The fast toolbox decks were favored in a straight-up race against Dredge, but Dredge also had built in disruption in Conflagrate and Darkblast that made that plan unreliable. I don't know if the matchup was actively bad, but it certainly wasn't a reason to play a toolbox deck.