Rotation 2016

Hey everybody!
Time for another game day at spalanz.com, and today I wanted to take some time to mourn two of my favourite Standard decks from this past season. Rotation doesn’t actually happen until Friday of course, when Kaladesh hits for real, but I’ve spent the last couple of days going through my current stable of decks to weed out those with cards from both Dragons of Tarkir and Origins. One deck emerged unscathed, my W/B vampires deck, and another retained the majority of its cards, mono-black vampires. While a couple had never really gotten off the ground anyway, I’ve nevertheless had two that will suffer significantly for the loss of Magic: Origins from Standard. Let’s take a look!

So first of all, I’m sure plenty of seasoned veterans of the game will be thinking, why would my decks suffer from the loss of Origins? A lot of folks have a bit of a snobby reaction to the core sets, and almost rejoiced when they were cancelled, but I really like both the variety of cards you get in them, and also don’t build decks with which to destroy people. I like a variety in a lot of what I do, and this is certainly clear in the decks that I’m gonna be talking about today!

First up, it’s my treasured blue/red land prowess thing. I’m not great at coming up with names for my decks, in case it wasn’t abundantly clear already. This deck was a departure for me, because I built it when I made the decision I wanted to see what blue could do. My favourite colour-pair is black/red, and I knew I didn’t want to go down the avenue of blue/black, so veered instead into the toolbox that is Izzet. And as it turned out, I had a lot of fun with this!

The deck involves prowess, obviously, but is still quite creature-heavy, because that’s where I’m most comfortable (though not as bad as my attempt at building a Jeskai deck!) There is also a lot of Awaken shenanigans with the lands, including two copies of Wandering Fumarole, a card that I really enjoy having out on the table more to mess with my opponent than anything else.

The main goal is to use the counter-magic and buff the smaller dudes until I can get the big Djinn characters out; they’re both Flying for the evasion, so they should act as finishers. It has performed really well, but now that rotation will kick a lot of the useful cards out of here, it’s almost a case of back to the drawing board. I don’t want to merely draft more cards into the deck, as it might end up a bit too much of a monster, but I have previously earmarked one or two from Eldritch Moon that could be useful. While there seems to be more of an emphasis on artifacts for blue/red in the set, I suppose we’ll see what Kaladesh can do for me…

Creatures:
Mahamoti Djinn
Soulblade Djinn
Stormchaser Mage (2)
Jhessian Thief (2)
Mizzium Meddler (2)
Acolyte of the Inferno (2)
Umara Entangler (2)
Halimar Tidecaller
Mercurial Geists
Harbinger of the Tides

Instants:
Negate (2)
Dispel (2)
Scatter to the Winds (2)
Titan’s Strength (2)
Brute Strength (2)
Sure Strike (2)

Sorcery:
Rush of Ice (2)
Clutch of Currents (2)

Artifacts:
Prism Ring (2)
Orbs of Warding

Land:
Highland Lake (4)
Looming Spires (3)
Skyline Cascade (4)
Wandering Fumarole (2)
Mountain (6)
Island (7)

My second Standard deck that I’m going to miss is something else that is pretty much outside of my comfort zone when it comes to playing the game: red/green landfall elementals!

This deck was a bit of an experimentation as well, as I very rarely play green (I think I play blue more, in fact!) I was enamoured of the landfall mechanic when Battle for Zendikar arrived, however, so had wanted to do something with that. I like the idea of lands coming into play – which should happen a lot, you know? – actually doing more than just providing mana. So with that, I set about building up this thing:

Creatures:
Omnath, Locus of Rage (2)
Grove Rumbler (2)
Fierfiend Elemental
Zendikar Incarnate (2)
Cobblebrute
Valakut Predator (3)
Cinder Hellion
Embermaw Hellion
Oran-Rief Hydra (2)
Akoum Stonewaker (2)
Jaddi Offshoot (2)

Instants:
Titanic Growth (4)
Swell of Growth (4)
Titan’s Strength (2)

Enchantments:
Retreat to Kazandu (2)
Zendikar’s Roil (4)
Flameshadow Conjuring
Zendikar Resurgent (2)

Artifact:
Sword of the Animist

Land:
Cinder Glade
Timber Gorge
Looming Spires (2)
Forest (8)
Mountain (9)

It’s basically a deck that makes huge dudes bigger, and bash everyone in the face. I suppose it’s kind of an aggro deck insofar as it doesn’t really care about defense, but more about presenting a lot of threats from the off, and isn’t very subtle all told. There are a few bits in there about making tokens and stuff, though that’s not super overpowering. Hopefully things like Akoum Stonewalker will draw enough attention that the big Hellions and other Elementals will go unmolested! But not very sneaky at all – the one concession to anything other than face-punching is the Jaddi Offshoot, which is a good chump-blocker that can help gain a bit of life if I’m struggling from not putting up any kind of defense.

I’m not a big fan of green at all, but I did enjoy playing this one, as it failed very rarely. Sometimes it could be overpowering with the right draws, which made some matches too one-sided for me, but a decent deck that will be sorely missed. There may well be some cards in BFZ block that I’ve missed, which could plug some holes once Origins goes for good, but I’m thinking that this deck might actually be retired for the time being.

Of course, rotation isn’t only a time to be sad, as it does also mean that a whole raft of new cards are incoming, which forces a re-evaluation of the previous two sets that will hopefully allow for more cool decks to emerge. I sadly didn’t make it to the prerelease at the weekend, and haven’t spent a tremendous amount of time studying the cards from the new set yet, so I’m kinda excited to see what’s going to be new when I get my hands on those new packs for the first time!