Standard

Getting RUGged!

No matter how many intro articles I write, I’m never sure just how to get started. I haven’t been part of the online Magic community for too long, but I’ve only been writing since just about the time I got involved in Twitter and Podcasting and whatnot. Mostly about casual formats, since those are what I’ve focused on for most of the time I’ve played. After the bannings last season, I’ve been moving into more competitive formats and traveling for Magic events.

I’ve learned a lot in the last year, mostly about technical play and how to identify the important parts in each matchup. Standard is probably my favorite competitive format because of how everything changes from week to week. There’s always a new best deck, new technology to adapt for, or the scramble to try to break open mirror matches.

My favorite part of any format is always the exploration of new decks and design spaces. You see, I’m a brewer at heart. I don’t like playing decks that I haven’t had a hand in building, and I don’t like when someone can guess my decklist within a few cards after seeing my first three turns. Information is a powerful tool in this game, and when you’re aware enough of people’s expectations, you can leverage those into a huge advantage.

That isn’t to say that you should build a brand new 75 for each event that you go to, or that you should be avoiding the best decks just so that you aren’t playing the best deck. There’s a difference between attacking the metagame and being stubborn for the sake of being different. Maybe Delver decks shift towards [card]Restoration Angel[/card] plus [card]Blade Splicer[/card] to beat up on GR aggro, and you break the mirror with [card]Feeling of Dread[/card]. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to break the format.

That’s part of why this Standard format is so exciting to me. Tier one is three and a half-ish decks, but there are enough powerful cards in the format that you can attack from a ton of different angles based on what you expect to see.

I’ve been playing a different deck every week for this Standard format so that I can recommend sweet decks to my friends for the PTQs they’re trying to take down. The first place I wanted to go to was UWR control, which is still a sick deck, as far as I’m concerned. You have a pretty even match-up against just about everything, and the deck can be built to beat up on just about any of the top decks in the format.

The problem is that my friends were expecting a huge part of the field to be RG aggro, and that’s a matchup that’s very difficult to win even presideboarded. Let me tell you, I can’t wait for [card]Sword of War and Peace[/card] to rotate. That card single-handedly makes it next to impossible to play a control deck in this format.

How do you beat a format that seems to be mostly GR Aggro and GR Ramp? You need to have a deck that’s capable of grinding out the value creatures of the GR deck and still go over top of the ramp deck. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to do that available in this Standard. Unfortunately, I guess the cat’s a little out of the bag at this point, but RUG Pod is a sweet deck if you’re expecting mostly midrangey and aggressive decks.

You have the same kind of value creatures that can trade off with theirs, but you also have an engine that generates cards, board presence, and mana for you in [card]Birthing Pod[/card]. Pod also lets you win the Huntmaster fights that RG mirrors tend to devolve into in the mid game, which is pretty important in letting you start to attrition out the RG aggro decks. Here’s the list my friends and I have been testing with:

[deck title=RUG Pod]
[Lands]
4 Copperline Gorge
4 Hinterland Harbor
1 Kessig Wolf Run
1 Rootbound Crag
8 Forest
1 Mountain
5 Island
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Birds of Paradise
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Strangleroot Geist
2 Phantasmal Image
2 Borderland Ranger
1 Deceiver Exarch
1 Aether Adept
3 Huntmaster of the Fells
1 Phyrexian Metamorph
1 Acidic Slime
1 Zealous Conscripts
1 Deadeye Navigator
1 Inferno Titan
1 Consecrated Sphinx
[/Creatures]
[Sorceries]
3 Green Sun’s Zenith
4 Ponder
[/Sorceries]
[Artifacts]
4 Birthing Pod
[/Artifacts]
[Sideboard]
3 Pillar of Flame
1 Viridian Corrupter
1 Zealous Conscripts
1 Wurmcoil Engine
2 Dungeon Geists
1 Huntmaster of the Fells
2 Wolfir Silverheart
2 Garruk Relentless
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The more popular Pod configuration at this point is Naya as far as I can tell. The biggest things that you gain for being Naya as opposed to RUG is [card]Restoration Angel[/card] and [card]Blade Splicer[/card]. To be fair, those cards are pretty insane, and Naya Pod certainly ought to be the midrangey green deck of choice once Delver picks up again, since those cards give you a much better game against [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] and [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card].

Against the other green creature decks though, RUG Pod lets you cheat up the chain with [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card] and [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] to find more Huntmasters and your six drops. The card that I’m the most excited about though is [card]Deadeye Navigator[/card]. This is a guy that seems pretty sweet in most of your matchups, as long as you set up the turn that you go for it.

Against RG, you can set up Navigator plus Huntmaster, and that’s all but unbeatable for them. You can just leave up 1U to protect both pieces from removal, and then just start gaining life and churning out chump blockers. Against ramp decks you can do something similar with [card]Inferno Titan[/card] and [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] or [card]Acidic Slime[/card].

The thing that I really like about these decks is that you have the tools to beat up on the RG aggro decks, have [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] and [card]Wolfir Silverheart[/card] to race the ramp decks, and can just grind out the control decks of the format, such as they are.

Your roughest matchup is against [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] decks, but I don’t think that’s too much of an issue. Every deck in the format loses to Delver, flip, and [card]Mana Leak[/card]s/[card]Vapor Snag[/card]s for days. This deck has the tools to beat the [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card]/[card]Sword of War and Peace[/card] lists, even if you’re not favored.

The real problem is going to be as [card]Restoration Angel[/card] becomes more popular. The Angel lets them generate value at instant speed, probably blow you out, and have a 3/4 body that you can’t really interact with favorably since none of your guys can fly and it’s bigger than most of your creatures anyway.

The sideboard is the part of this deck that I’m the least certain of, since it’s going to change a ton based on what you’re expecting to play. A [card]Frost Titan[/card] will go a long way in ramp matchups, but I don’t think you really want another six between your maindeck and sideboard. Another [card]Daybreak Ranger[/card] seems like it would go a long way towards beating [card]Restoration Angel[/card] and any Humans decks that you’re expecting to see.

The cards that I’m the least sure of out of the sideboard are the [card]Pillar of Flame[/card]s or the [card]Viridian Corrupter[/card]. I’m not sure that you really need another guy that destroys artifacts, but that seems like a safe place to be since it’s reasonable to expect [card]Sword of Feast and Famine[/card] to become more popular as a response to these RG aggro decks. The Pillars give you another edge in the RG matchup, but I’m not sure that it’s worth splashing a removal spell that you want early, but will never be able to cast until later.

My other friends were expecting a lot more control and ramp decks that try to go over the top of the beatdown decks, and they wanted something that was preboarded to beat those two. My thoughts on beating those two decks is that I wanted Planeswalkers against control decks and [card]Tamiyo, the Moon Sage[/card] and [card]Frost Titan[/card] against the ramp decks to trump their Titans. As long as you’re going a step bigger and your Titan beats theirs then you should have a pretty easy time in that particular matchup.

Here’s the list I ended up with after playing a few matches against Esper and GR Ramp:

[deck title=UGr Ramp]
[Lands]
4 Copperline Gorge
2 Inkmoth Nexus
2 Kessig Wolf Run
4 Hinterland Harbor
7 Forest
5 Island
1 Mountain
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
3 Birds of Paradise
2 Huntmaster of the Fells
2 Primeval Titan
4 Frost Titan
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Rampant Growth
4 Green Sun’s Zenith
3 Temporal Mastery
4 Ponder
3 Tamiyo, the Moon Sag
3 Garruk Relentless
1 Karn Liberated
2 Sphere of the Suns
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
2 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Acidic Slime
1 Karn Liberated
2 Dungeon Geists
2 Bonfire of the Damned
2 Pillar of Flame
1 Devil’s Play
3 Cavern of Souls
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

If there’s a deck in Standard that can abuse [card]Temporal Mastery[/card], it’s this one. Early on it’s an [card]Explore[/card], which is fine, if not awesome. But later on, you get to start taking [card]Time Walk[/card]s with one or more Planeswalkers or Titans on the board, and that’s generally all but impossible to fight through.

The strongest [card]Temporal Mastery[/card]s are generally the ones that involve multiple [card]Frost Titan[/card]s and [card]Tamiyo, the Moon Sage[/card], because you can leverage that into what is effectively another free turn. Especially with Ramp and Control decks running either an abundance of colorless lands or three or more colors, it’s generally pretty easy to shut off the colors of the cards that are the most troublesome.

I think that one of the reasons that this deck is stronger against the field than RG ramp is that you’re better against [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card], which is going to dominate the midrangey green mirrors. RG Ramp is going to cast a Primeval or [card]Inferno Titan[/card], get Conscripted, and then die either immediately or to the [card]Kessig Wolf Run[/card] their opponent tutored up. With [card]Frost Titan[/card], they have to get up to seven mana before their Conscripts do much of anything, and even then they only hit you for six and lock down your Titan for a turn.

The sideboard for this deck is one that I’m pretty comfortable with for now, though it’ll have to shift some as [card]Restoration Angel[/card] Delver decks become more popular. [card]Ancient Grudge[/card] and [card]Acidic Slime[/card] make you even more favored in the mirror, as do the [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card]s and [card]Karn Liberated[/card] that let you go over top of other threats that Ramp decks run.

Against the faster green decks, you have a suite of removal you can bring in over some of your more expensive Planeswalkers, [card]Temporal Mastery[/card], and [card]Primeval Titan[/card]s, depending on what they showed you in the first game.

How is this deck going to adapt to the Restoration Delver builds? I think the first answer is more [card]Dungeon Geists[/card], since those are your best answer to [card]Restoration Angel[/card]. All you need to do is buy enough time to start casting Walkers and Titans on an empty-ish board and you ought to be fine. It’s also possible that [card]Stingerfling Spider[/card] as a [card]Green Sun’s Zenith[/card] target is worth trying out, or [card]Combust[/card] out of the sideboard. More likely though, we can just go with more [card]Devil’s Play[/card] and a few more red sources in the main deck. These give you answers to Delver early on, Angels in the mid game, and are great at hitting Planeswalkers in the control matchups.

The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re trying to build a new deck is that you need to be doing something intrinsically powerful. There are all manner of cheap creatures that can run away with the game if unchecked and six drops that win the game if they resolve on an empty board. In a format like that, you can’t afford to be doing something cute. You can’t afford to avoid running good cards for the sake of being different.
All you want to do is take some of the more powerful interactions in the format and put them in a new shell that lets you attack from a different angle, like [card]Pillar of Flame[/card] giving [card]Sun Titan[/card] decks a way to beat Zombies and GR Aggro, or [card}Restoration Angel[/card] breaking open the Delver vs Wolf Run matchup. Sometimes it’s the small changes that make all the difference!

That’s all I’ve got for this week, but by next week I’m hoping to have gotten in enough games with the new Delver decks that I can recommend some ways to approach the new metagame!

Carlos Gutierrez
@cag5383 on Twitter

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