Countdown to Dominaria!

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Newsletter
Thursday, March 29th

It feels like the calm before the storm, doesn't it?

Dominaria preview season is right around the corner and I couldn't be more excited. Sure, we've already seen some cards from Magic's newest set, but that hasn't tamed my excitement at all. If anything, the Dominaria leaks have gotten me even more excited because the cards we've already seen are so sweet! From Sagas and Legendary Spells to the return of Skizzik and Llanowar Elves, Dominaria looks like the perfect way to celebrate Magic's 25th anniversary and I can't wait to see what WotC has in store for us.

But Dominaria isn't here quite yet, unfortunately, so we here at SCG need some things to bide our time. Fortunately, WotC came up with a sweet new format called Brawl, and deckbuilding extraordinaire Sam Black is rather excited to dive into it. Speaking of diving in, Ben Friedman's obsession with breaking Jace, the Mind Sculptor in Modern knows no bounds and he presents decklists aplenty for fellow Jace aficionados. And if you love artifacts? We've got that covered too, as Ben Weitz takes some time out of his busy day to show you all the ins and outs of Ironworks Combo for your next Modern tournament.

It's crazy that we're celebrating Magic's 25th anniversary already. To think that the best TCG of all time is 25 years old is somewhat staggering, but if things truly do get better with age, Dominaria is gonna knock our socks off like a nicely aged bottle of wine. I hope you're as excited as I am!

— Cedric Phillips, Content Coordinator

April 21-22
Prerelease

April 28-29
Team Constructed

May 5-6
Team Constructed

Brawl!
By Sam Black  

Given how simple the format is, it's kind of ridiculous how excited I am about Brawl. This probably surprises you. I may not be the expected target audience for "Commander for new players." I have a pretty extensive collection and could fairly easily build the Commander deck of my choice, but I haven't played the format for several years. I genuinely love casual Magic—through college I basically gave up on playing competitively because my school was pretty remote but played casual games with 250 card singleton decks all the time, and I currently maintain a Cube of my own design. Commander lost me with the Commander products. They have a place, and they let a lot of people who couldn't otherwise engage with the format, but they basically just don't feel like Magic to me.

Anyway, Brawl has a lot of advantages—the fact that it doesn't use Commander products is just the beginning. Getting away from a large quantity of artifacts you almost have to play to feel like you're even trying (basically any good artifact that generates mana, because the basic Commander rules guarantee a mana sink, and a lot of the early mana artifacts were simply undercosted) is probably an even bigger improvement. It's also great from a collection management standpoint—yes, I could go through my whole collection and find all the stuff I'd want to build a Commander deck, but it's much easier to just flip through my Standard cards when I want to build a new deck, and they're cheap enough that it feels pretty easy for me to maintain several different Brawl decks so that I can lend them to friends who haven't made decks themselves.

Bernal, Hoey, & Tenjum win the Cincinnati Team Constructed Open!

Daniel Gillette
Standard Classic

Brent Clift
Modern Classic

Daniel Duan
Legacy Classic

Jace 'Til You're Blue In The Face
By Ben Friedman  

With a stellar matchup against small, go-wide decks, the beefcake strategies get a lot tougher, and vice versa. Path to Exile is the best universal answer in Modern, but it comes with its own set of drawbacks. The best way to ameliorate those drawbacks is to play large amounts of Field of Ruin to eventually run most opponents out of basic lands altogether, as we see in U/W Control.

Unfortunately, this archetype runs into its own problems with its lack of strong early-game removal. Rob has said himself that he Pathed his opponent's Turn 2 Dark Confidant and lost to a follow-up Bloodbraid Elf into Liliana of the Veil often enough that he couldn't bear to play straight U/W any more.

There's a perennially underrated option, though, that most U/W players would do well to consider. Oust is stellar against all the beefcake creatures that Lightning Bolt can't kill, and it synergizes with Path to Exile and Field of Ruin in a most excellent manner. Another option is to try to have it all, to take some of the best tempo elements and smooth removal suite of Blue Moon, staple on a few of the powerful white sideboard cards and flexible removal spells, and tie everything together with Jace and some flash creatures.

Guess we're taking things back to U/W Flash and Jeskai Tempo.

While The Iron Is Hot
By Ben Weitz  

Samuel Pardee, Matthew Nass, Andrew Baeckstrom, and I all played Ironworks Combo at GP Phoenix, with Pardee, Baeckstrom, and I all going X-4 and the other, Matt Nass, making the semifinals. Those aren't absurd stats, like the opening performance of the grindy Death's Shadow decks, but still very good. We started with a list by Shaheen Soorani, and then improved little things here and there:

We went up to the full four Mind Stones.
We replaced Sanctum of Ugin with Buried Ruin.
We added Wurmcoil Engine to the sideboard as a powerful trump card against Hollow One and Jund.

But mostly, we just decided that the deck was well-positioned for our expected metagame. We thought most players that like to play fair decks would gravitate towards Jund over Abzan or Jeskai, which drastically reduces the number of copies of Stony Silence and Rest in Peace in the room. Those cards are by far the biggest issue as most other hate cards can be readily played around. Ironworks Combo is also a very fast, linear combo deck, which positions it nicely against Tron and means your deck can only be so bad against anyone.

Before we get into sideboarding, I admit that the deck looks kind of like a pile of random cards, so first let's go over what it's trying to do.