| Maybe it isn't a Bant Company world after all. The story at #SCGCOL, as you may recall, was the dominance of the powerful three-color deck. The addition of Spell Queller, Selfless Spirit, and Thalia, Heretic Cathar proved far too much for everyone to handle and led to Devin Koepke and Team Cardhoarder hoisting the trophy. At #SCGBALT, Bant Company once again flexed its muscles, making up a whopping 42 percent of the Day 2 metagame. With four copies of the deck in the Top 8, it would have been easy to expect Bant Company to record another win. But it didn't. A former Pro Tour champion did. Osyp Lebedowicz might be on the outside looking in with regards to the Magic Hall of Fame, but #SCGBALT was a subtle reminder that he's still one of the best players this game has ever seen. The Pro Tour Venice champion might not be playing much Magic nowadays, but when he is, he's busy proving something that many have known for some time—you don't want to be paired against him in constructed. His take on G/W Tokens was as old school as they come, with no new cards from Eldritch Moon, but as the old saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." As we head into Pro Tour Eldritch Moon and #SCGRegionals, we've got quite a few questions to answer. Will G/W Tokens continue its resurgence or was this a one-time victory in the hands of an elite Magic player? Is this Crush of Tentacles deck that Cory Dissinger crushed everyone with—pun very much intended— as good as it looked or simply a flash in the pan? And the most important question of all—is Bant Company as format defining as it appears? I'm excited to find out and I hope you are too! — Cedric Phillips, Media Manager @CedricAPhillips |  |  | Is This The Best We Can Do? A lack of innovation is starting to frustrate Ross Merriam. While he played Bant Company at #SCGBALT to a 15th-place finish, he knows that we can do better. Right now, we're at a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" stage of Standard, but Ross believes that will change this weekend. |  | Video: B/W Control In Standard! With all the talk about Bant Company, there has to be a deck out there to beat it, right? Gerry Thompson thinks he found his weapon of choice in B/W Control. Does the addition of Liliana, the Last Hope help put the deck over the top? Find out as GerryT explains why his build is the best for #SCGRegionals. |  | Beating Bant Company Jim Davis knows a little something about Bant Company. During Season One of the SCG Tour, the 2015 StarCityGames.com Players' Champion won #SCGBALT with the powerful deck. So when Jim says he's found three ways to beat Bant Company, we'd all be wise to listen. | | | Cory Dissinger stole the show at #SCGBALT with his G/U Crush deck. Check out Round 12 where Dissinger battles Andrew Berke and shows how his deck might be the answer to Bant Company. |  | | The StarCityGames.com Regional Championships are upon us! It's that time of the season to sling cardboard at the same time the big-shots are doing it at the Pro Tour and leave your footprint on this format. It's hard to feel too good about said footprint if it looks like the same shoes that everybody else is wearing, and when it comes to decks, it's no different. One of the greatest things about a top performance at #SCGRegionals is showing off the technology that you used to cut through the competition and stand above the rest. This weekend will be defined by players that are able to compete with the likes of Spell Queller, Collected Company, and Dromoka's Command from the Bant Collected Company decks. The best way to do this is to fight on an axis that they can't quite compete with and Cory Dissinger found one of the most creative ways imaginable to accomplish this: | | This deck is a bit odd at a glance, but it is secretly the Standard-version of a combo deck. The goal of the deck is to survive to a point in the game where it has ten lands on the battlefield. From there, the deck plans to cast Crush of Tentacles for the Surge cost to make an 8/8 Octopus and return everything on the battlefield to the owner's hand. After the opponent inevitably deals with the 8/8, the deck uses the large amount of mana it has to morph a copy of Den Protector, pay the Megamorph cost of Den Protector to return Crush of Tentacles to the hand, and Surge the Crush of Tentacles again; returning Den Protector to the hand in the process. 
Assembling this loop results in a situation in which the opponent can't win without the use of flash creatures, and even with flash creatures the opponent still has to be able to profitably race an 8/8 Octopus and whatever other creatures the deck pumps out. In the case that the opponent has a pesky creature like Archangel Avacyn, the Crush deck can quickly close the game with Emrakul, the Promised End and put the opponent in an unwinnable position. 
Before Eldritch Moon was released, a reasonable concern with this archetype was dying against the aggressive decks and finding the time to put ten lands onto the battlefield. Noose Constrictor's printing did a world of good and gives the deck a fantastic answer against the various 2/3s in the format (looking at the company that Reflector Mage, Sylvan Advocate, and Spell Queller tend to collect) while working as a clock against sluggish opponents as well. 
The deck really makes fantastic use of Den Protector in setting up all kinds of uses for the main-mom of Tarkir. Outside of the primary loop in the deck, Den Protector and Pulse of Murasa can create a mana-hungry cycle that can gain six life and return a Den Protector to the owner's hand that will rebuy the same copy of Pulse of Murasa in the effort to create a nice buffer against faster decks. Against the slower decks, the Deathmist Raptors out of the sideboard add an elegant source of card-advantage. They also are threats the other controlling strategies aren't quite equipped to handle. The biggest key to taking down a mid-sized tournament is being versatile and having answers to combat all of the metagame's top dogs while having game against the newcomers that may come out of the wood work to battle. G/U Crush is my choice for most well-position deck going into this weekend and a way to guarantee that win or lose, you'll get to frustrate a couple of opponents and have a blast slinging cardboard! |  |   If you would like to unsubscribe and stop receiving these emails please click here. |
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