Team Constructed is back for #SCGKY!

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Newsletter
Thursday, May 18th

First and foremost, congratulations to Gerry Thompson on winning Pro Tour Amonkhet! This victory was a long time in the making and we couldn't be happier for Gerry's success. But that was last weekend! The Magic world keeps on spinning, and this weekend, the SCG Tour heads to Louisville, Kentucky for our second ever Team Constructed Open Weekend! That's not one format. Not two formats. But all three major tournament formats—Standard, Modern, and Legacy—will be in action at every table this weekend!

If you're the Modern maestro for your squad, Todd Stevens spent his week analyzing Modern's top tiers! Then we've got Jadine Klomparens studying Standard, and Todd Anderson talking about what Legacy is like without Miracles gumming up the top tables. Do yourself a favor everyone: Watch #SCGKY this weekend at twitch.tv/SCGTour. This isn't just a tournament; it's a celebration of how many ways you can play our great game together.

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

Gerry Thompson relentlessly runs over Pro Tour Amonkhet!

Modern's Current Top Tier Decks
By Todd Stevens  

The other deck I would put in tier one is Grixis Death's Shadow. The main reason to play Grixis over Jund is because Stubborn Denial gives the deck a one-mana counterspell against the unfair decks of the format. Also, Snapcaster Mage is the perfect card to pair with the abundance of one-mana instants and sorceries the deck plays. Grixis Death's Shadow decks have been tuned more and more over the last couple of weeks, and it wouldn't surprise me to see it become the default Death's Shadow deck within the next month.

The difficulty of playing Death's Shadow decks, paired with the high cost of the deck, repetitive gameplay, and being public enemy number one has caused a decrease in the popularity of playing Death's Shadow recently, but if you want to have the best chance of winning on the SCG Tour^® in the coming weeks, you should strongly consider playing one-mana 13/13s. However, not everyone has access to the cards or wants to play the decks that are in peoples' crosshairs. So here's the list of tier two decks that are still solid choices to play if your goal is to take home the trophy.

May 27-28
Modern

June 10-11
Modern

June 30 - July 1
Modern/Standard

The Problems With
Playing Midrange
By Jadine Klomparens  

Next up, we can aim to win the game by interacting with their Aetherworks Marvel and then ending the game before they are able to cast Ulamog from their hand. This is a narrow path to walk, but it's theoretically possible. Interacting with Aetherworks Marvel is difficult but not impossible. Blue has a relatively easy time of it with counterspells, and if we're willing to simply hope that the first spin whiffs, many other colors have ways to take the Aetherworks Marvel off the battlefield.

Killing them before they can hardcast Ulamog is the real trick. The high density of interaction we need to ensure that we can reliably handle their Aetherworks Marvel plan means that we don't have the luxury of playing a wide variety of threats. We probably need to be able to end the game quickly with one sticky threat. For the most part, that probably means Planeswalkers. Both Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and Chandra, Flamecaller are supremely capable of ending games very quickly and are great options if you're looking to attack Aetherworks Marvel from this angle.

To round out this timing discussion, the last theoretical window for victory against Aetherworks Marvel is in the super late game. This would involve having a late game more powerful than Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger or the ability to answer every Ulamog in their deck. I say theoretical, because this seems an unlikely proposition to me. Maybe a white Torrential Gearhulk deck with plenty of Cast Out and Stasis Snare could do it, or maybe the power of multiplication in Sam Black's Anointed Procession deck is enough. I'm not sure, but this is potentially an avenue of victory worth exploring.

The Scariest Decks For SCG Louisville
By Todd Anderson  

Stoneforge Mystic is likely good again, but people haven't had time to figure that out yet. With so few big Legacy events in the last few months and the recent upheaval of the format thanks to the banning of Sensei's Divining Top, only a scant few people have had time to perfect a new iteration of the old "Stoneblade" strategies. While they certainly exist and the best players in the room will likely find a good build, I wouldn't expect to play against it much. Not yet, anyway.

Elves is likely an absurd deck that, in the right hands, should be favored to win most of its matches. Miracles was a very bad matchup for Elves thanks to Terminus and Counterbalance.

That one-two punch really left Elves pilots in something of a pickle. If they over-extended in the early turns, they could just lose to a sweeper. If they didn't play out their hand, much of it would become invalidated once Counterbalance hit the battlefield. But all that's behind us now.