Team Constructed coming in hot for #SCGATL!

Thompson and Klomparens break open new Standard while Merriam has the sleepers for all formats!

Newsletter Thursday, July 20th

The only thing greater than an SCG Tour team event is an SCG Tour event featuring three healthy formats! It took a while to get there, but Standard seems to finally be stable. Add a slew of hungry Standard mages to Modern specialists and Legacy masters and that gives you the best room in the Multiverse to be in this weekend at #SCGATL! Accordingly, Gerry Thompson and Jadine Klomparens are providing you with some of the best tech on the planet for Standard! Ross Merriam didn't stop there; he's giving you his picks for the most underrated decks for all three formats! I can't wait to watch this event on Twitch.tv/SCGTour this weekend. I'd invite you to join me, but I'm sure you're already going to be there! Let's battle! — Danny West, Content Coordinator Michael Hamilton Standard  <#comment>RESULTS-TEXT2-1     Josh Shields Modern  Classic     Jacob Tilk Standard  Classic     Everything You Should Know About Hour Of Devastation Standard   By Gerry Thompson   If I can't find the best G/X Ramp deck, I'm going to assume that most people won't find a good list either. That will deter some folks from playing it, but not all. At that point, if I can gain some percentage points against Ramp decks by hedging, I'll do it. However, I'm not going to bend over backwards trying to beat it. There doesn't seem to be any merit to that strategy. The best versions of G/R Ramp aren't going to be the old-school Jim Davis-style ramp decks. I firmly believe they'll be velocity-based with Vessel of Nascency. Actual ramp cards will be at a minimum, with only Hour of Promise and maybe Corrupted Grafstone making the cut. If Tormenting Voice and Drownyard Temple end up in the deck, I wouldn't be surprised either. Beneath the Sands is just bad enough that I wouldn't want to play it. When it comes to three-mana ramp cards, it's often better to just play more interaction and slow the game down instead of trying to ramp. A turn 6 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger will beat some opposition, but it won't beat a super-wide battlefield. If you cast Ulamog on turn 7 or 8 but their battlefield is relatively tame, that's a virtual win.

August 5-6 Modern     August 12-13 Modern     September 1-3 Standard     Why W/U Monument Was The Best Deck For Week One   By Jadine Klomparens   Previously, every controlling Torrential Gearhulk color combination had a glaring weakness. U/R Control lacked a way to catch up from a battlefield gone out of control in a way that Sweltering Suns couldn't fix, which happened fairly often. U/W Control had access to Fumigate, but its spot removal was so bad that opposing strategies could force the sweeper by deploying only minimal pressure and then rebuild. Jeskai Control had access to all the necessary tools, but lost to its own manabase too often for comfort. Yet with Hour of Devastation, the hole in the U/R Control boat was plugged. From the perspective of the B/G Energy deck I played at the Roanoke Classic, Hour of Devastation is a nightmare. B/G Energy beat U/R Control most commonly in one of two ways. Either it found a way to present a wide battlefield of four- or five-toughness creatures or it used the threat of Nissa, Voice of Zendikar's ultimate to force the U/R deck to play a game it didn't want it to play. The common thread of these two plans, as far as I can see, is that Hour of Devastation shuts them both down.

Underrated Decks In Each SCG Atlanta Format   By Ross Merriam   Jeskai Control has always matched up well against the second of those two, with a pile of cheap, instant-speed removal to answer their threats and, in the case of Electrolyze, gain some card advantage along the way. Once you get them into the late-game, Affinity winds up topdecking too many copies of Ornithopter and Springleaf Drum to keep up, and your remaining Snapcaster Mages and Spell Quellers provide a sufficient clock, with Celestial Colonnade often giving the killing blow. The Grixis Death's Shadow matchup is certainly trickier, yet still tends to favor control. Path to Exile and Snapcaster Mage is the perfect start to answering their threats, and their natural tendency to deal themselves ten or more damage puts them in a very awkward position. They really want to get to nine or lower so their Death's Shadows survive red removal and their Stubborn Denials are turned on, but at that life total, they are immediately in danger of being burned out. They can try to slow down a bit in order to balance the two forces, but that just plays right into your hands, letting you get to multiple-spell turns and making Cryptic Command into a serious threat. Their deck is powerful and the heavy discard and powerful threats means that nothing is going to be easy, but Jeskai is one of the best-positioned decks in the matchup from a tactical perspective.

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