| June is here and the SCG Tour is heating up this month with three Opens, including this weekend's stop in Atlanta! Not only are we back in action, but #SCGATL hosts the first Standard Open since before Pro Tour Shadows over Innistrad. The SCG Tour was dominated by Bant Company and Mono-White Humans before the PT, but now the metagame has shifted toward a bunch of new exciting decks. A bevy of decks centered around Cryptolith Rite have made a giant impact, B/W Control is the go-to choice for control players, and G/W Tokens is the current deck to beat. Not only did Steve Rubin win the Pro Tour with the deck, but both Grand Prix Minneapolis and Manchester were taken down by the powerful deck powered by Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Nissa, Voice of Zendikar, Archangel Avacyn, and Secure the Wastes. While the SCG Tour featured Modern Opens the past two events, the last Standard Classic was also taken down with G/W Tokens, piloted by current Player of the Year Race leader Andrew Tenjum. Can the deck be stopped? We'll see this weekend as a number of brews put up strong finishes in the GPs last weekend, including Tamoharu Saito's U/R Flyers and Martin Muller's Mono-Blue Prison deck. I hope you're ready to watch some Standard, because I sure am. Not to mention the POY race and Season Two race on the SCG Tour is going to get crazy this month with three Opens! Join Chris VanMeter, Andrew Boswell, Nick Miller, and the rest of the SCGLive crew this weekend for #SCGATL on twitch.tv/scglive all weekend long for the action. — Cedric Phillips, Media Manager @CedricAPhillips |  |  | Tabula Rasa Tom "The Boss" Ross takes a break from writing about aggressive decks to focus on something more important. Find out what makes the back-to-back Invitational champion tick and how even someone with his kind of success can get stuck in a rut. |  | How To Playtest Properly What separates good playtesting from great playtesting? Michael Majors lays it all out, breaking down the key factors to successful playtesting. If you're serious about improving via testing, this is a must read from the platinum pro. |  | The Struggle The push and pull between life and Magic is a constant conflict. Mark Nestico gets serious in this piece where he talks about how he handles the swings life and Magic throws at him while offering advice to those in a similar situation. | | | The Commander VS Crew returns for some pauper action! Will Justin Parnell, Stephen Green, Wes Wise, or Jeremy Noell come out on top of the clash of commons? |  | | I battled in a Standard PPTQ with Esper Dragons recently and did fairly well. I lost in the finals, but the deck felt like it had some unnecessary weaknesses. Playing Silumgar's Scorn made the mana more clunky than it needed to be and the presence of Jace, Vryn's Prodigy opened the deck up to a lot of the early game disruption that my opponents were playing. If I could mulligan my deck choice for the tournament I would eliminate the blue cards and try to vanquish the field with a Black/White Control deck instead. I tinkered with some of the different versions of the deck, trying out an Eldrazi package, playing some number of Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim, and going the heavy Planeswalker route, but in the end I returned to the GP New York winning decklist from Seth Manfield. There are a lot of great reasons to pilot this deck and I felt like I only needed to make a few small changes to what Seth played. This is what I'd sleeve up going into the Standard Open at #SCGATL. | | The most alluring aspect of this deck is the absence of main deck creatures. Yes, there are bodies generated by Gideon, Ally of Zendikar or Secure the Wastes, and the valuable Shambling Vents get animated fairly regularly, but this deck defends itself from some of the better cards in standard by not playing creatures in the early turns. Many of the aggressive decks in the format try to cement their early advantage through Reflector Mage and Declaration in Stone. Stranding these cards in the opponent's hand is as good as them taking a mulligan. The focus of the deck is on controlling the game and generating card advantage; then during the late game a big Secure the Wastes plus a Gideon Emblem or Westvale Abbey activation will quickly close things out. 
Four Anguished Unmaking? Is that a typo? Let me say that this card is an all-star! The instant-speed removal is spectacular against angels that swoop in to save the day or unassuming clerical congregations that somehow spawn demons. Also, the versatility is hard to overvalue. Clearly there are strong creatures in the format that need to be dealt with and Planeswalkers are running rampant, but there are also enough decks that take advantage of powerful enchantments or artifacts that you want to have an answer. Cryptolith Rite? No problem. Pyromancer's Goggles? Yeah, that is covered too. Paying the life for Anguished Unmaking hurts some, but the versatility of the card trumps the costs. Being burned out is not a concern in the current metagame and this deck can recover from the life loss through Sorin and Shambling Vents. 
Next you may wonder about the value of main deck Hallowed Moonlight. Having a cheap card that conveniently cycles and has a huge upside seems like a no-brainer to include in the main deck but most control strategies have relegated Hallowed Moonlight to their sideboards. Collected Company has firmly established itself as one of the most powerful cards in standard so the inclusion of this "Negate" effect is clearly there for the green instant. However, the white rare has a lot more utility than just stopping Collected Company. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Secure the Wastes, Hangarback Walker tokens, and a smattering of other standard players make the Moonlights worth the slot in the main deck. 
Finally, I would like to highlight the sideboard of this deck. Being able to transition out the spot removal spells for a very healthy dose of discard makes B/W Control especially potent against other slow control strategies. Also, I am a big fan of playing Dark Petition with some silver bullet targets to search up. The sideboard hate cards can be adjusted depending on your local metagame and the tutors act as additional copies without significantly diluting the deck. Three mana is the sweet spot for searching up and casting in the same turn, which is why my list includes Infinite Obliteration and Flaying Tendrils. Standard is currently a wide open format with many viable options. This list has the versatility to be effective against a wide range of strategies and is also powerful enough to be a top tier contender. I recommend you join me in forgoing the summoning of creatures and deploy mighty Planeswalkers instead at #SCGATL! — Craig Krempels, @CraigKrempels |  |   If you would like to unsubscribe and stop receiving these emails please click here. |
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