Team Open Tactics in Prep for #SCGBALT!

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Newsletter
Thursday, February 16th

#SCGBALT is going to be amazing! Standard, Modern, and Legacy all under one roof in team competition? How amazing is that? We've got Pro Tour Champion Shaun McLaren looking at the strengths of Standard right now, Emma Handy recommending her favorite Legacy deck at the moment, and Chris VanMeter talking about a Modern deck way too many players are sleeping on! No matter which seat you're in this weekend, we've got what you need!

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

My New Favorite Modern Deck
By Chris VanMeter  

In the past I have tried decks that are looking to interact. Jund-style decks always seem like they are so interesting to me, but I find, and it happens in Modern in particular, that I am just miserable playing those decks. It is a great feeling when what you play happens to line up with how you have configured your highly interactive deck and you get to use all your sideboard cards to crush your opponents, but Modern is just so big I find that I'm often caught on the wrong side of the parings battle and get crushed by non-interactive decks, even ones I'm supposed to have a good game against sometimes.

I have come to realize that with Modern I have two options:

Option A is that I can play an interactive deck and hope to have my sideboard cards line up with what I'm playing against.

Option B is that I can play a non-interactive deck and plan my sideboard to line up against what I expect will be bad for me, and even have the chance to win the game through any amount of hate because of the degeneracy of my deck. Also, there are options in this category that aren't commonly "hated" and can navigate the game exceptionally well.

I'm done with Option A and am currently entrenched in Option B for the time being and I've never felt greater about the format.

Here is my current Modern weapon of choice, and a deck that I recommend putting in some time learning if you plan on playing it.

February 25-26
Modern

March 11-12
Modern

March 24-26
KLD/AER Limited

Understanding Prowess In Legacy
By Emma Handy  

The burn suite is relatively standard for this type of deck. The eight Lightning Bolt effects are likely the most versatile cards in the deck, disrupting the fair creature decks and changing the clock against unfair decks. Having Chain Lightning do its best Lava Spike impression feels unfair when coupled with prowess creatures, effectively dealing an extra point of damage for each prowess creature its caster controls.

Price of Progress is only a two-of in the maindeck due to its ineffectiveness against the fair decks with copious amounts of basic lands (see: Miracles, Burn) and decks that plan to win with two or fewer lands on the battlefield (Reanimator, Storm, etc.). It is likely the most powerful red card in the format, but the context of the matchup is so important that it's hard to justify playing more than the pair. Between Ponder, Brainstorm, and Gitaxian Probe, it isn't hard to find one- and two-ofs in the deck in the matchups where they're important, but the precision of the deck requires a minimization of dead draws in the deckbuilding process.

Fireblast is in a precarious position of wanting to be seen every game, yet the second copy being almost uncastable. It's incredibly difficult for decks to play around a zero-mana four-point instant-speed burn spell and the power of Fireblast isn't really up for debate. The aforementioned deckbuilding restriction (reducing the number of dead draws) means that it isn't realistic to play more than one Fireblast. In lieu of the second Fireblast, we play...

Is This Standard Good?
By Shaun McLaren  

Take a look at the top six decks from the MOCS qualifier this weekend. Six G/B decks.

What about the Top 8 of Grand Prix Pittsburgh? Five G/B decks with G/B winning it all.

You might say, "Well, that's an awful lot of G/B, which doesn't seem like a good thing to me."

But if you look at those G/B lists, you'll find all sorts of hidden gems and thoughtful choices, much like how you have to scoop up a bucket of swamp water and really examine it up close under a microscope to see all the unique organisms swimming around.

Same thing applies if you want to combo off with Saheeli Rai and Felidar Guardian; there are a ton of different options for supporting cast and characters to help you do so.

Standard really excels at having variety from decklist to decklist, despite the core of many decks being the same.

I love examining differences in lists. Over the years I've pored over hundreds, if not thousands of different Jeskai lists in Modern. It's almost like you're getting to know a person by looking at what cards they value in their list, which cards they've identified as powerful and which they haven't.

Some formats do not have this quality, and I think it's a very good thing to have. It makes it so it takes an intricate understanding of an archetype to get things just right.