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SOI Standard
Shadows Over Innistrad Standard
Pyrocmancer's Goggles
Seasons Past
Collected Company
Adam Koska
About Adam Koska
Adam is an experienced player from the Czech Republic who has a number of high-profile finishes under his belt:
14th at Pro Tour Portland 2014
9th at Worlds 2009
9th at Pro Tour Kyoto 2009
64 Lifetime Pro Points
Three times Czech Nationals Top 8
The Three Best Engines in Standard
Hello everyone!
Pro Tour Shadows over Innistrad is in the books, and the new Standard format looks simply incredible. Before the PT, it seemed that Standard would be all about Human aggro, Bant CoCo, and B/W midrange / Eldrazi, but the Pro Tour brought so many new and successful ideas that it made my head spin. The diversity that we’ve seen this past weekend was truly unprecedented – almost every major team came up with a different deck, and many of them proved successful. The top 8 itself contained eight different decks: G/W Tokens, Bant Coco, Esper Dragons, Esper Control, B/G Seasons Past, B/G Aristocrats, R/G Goggles Ramp and R/W Eldrazi Goggles. And if you browse through the database of the successful lists, you’ll see many more archetypes, like Grixis control, Jund, mono-white Humans, Sultai midrange... the list goes on and on. I think that some of this diversity will probably fade away as the most dominant pillars of the format cement, but still, there are plenty of options available, plenty of angles from which to attack the format.
The amount of raw data we can work with after the Pro Tour is immense – if you’re anything like me, the database of the highest finishing decks in the official coverage always feels like Christmas. Because the lists are publicly available, I’m not going to talk about any of them in particular today – instead, I’m going to analyze the most dominant engines (which, in some cases, can be adopted by multiple decks) and try to show their place in the metagame, their strengths, weaknesses, and their future. Some of them might have been just good for the one single tournament they did well in (like U/R Ensoul Artifact in the past), while other ones are based on more sound foundations and are going to stay.
Versions:
Magic Origins (Foil)
Engine 1: Pyromancer's Goggles
The first time we’ve seen this card in the new Standard was when Todd Anderson used it in his U/R list with Jace and Thing in the Ice at an SCG Open two weeks before the PT. In Madrid, it has found a home in several different color combinations: some players still stuck to the original deck with blue, but many found blue unnecessary and instead went with green or white. However, all the decks had one thing in common: the card drawing engine of Magmatic Insight and Tormenting Voice (plus Drownyard Temple which you can discard) and cheap removal in Fiery Temper and sometimes Lightning Axe. Many lists also ran Fall of the Titans. The synergy with the card drawing spells is incredible: you don’t have to discard anything (that’s the additional cost, but you don’t pay that, since you copy the spell and put it on the stack), so you can just casually draw four cards. With Fall of the Titans, the Goggles can easily wrath the opponent’s board or do incredible amounts of damage straight to the face. Goggles + the draw 2 spells certainly looks like one of the best lategame engines in Standard right now.
We’ve talked about the strengths, let’s also mention the weaknesses. First of all, Pyromancer's Goggles are legendary and a 5-drop, which means they can lead to some rather clunky draws. Luckily, they will always be in a deck with Tormenting Voice, which smooths your draw when you have multiple cards that you only want once. However, the biggest weakness of this engine is that Goggles can easily be countered or destroyed. Negate is brutal when you count on resolving your key 5-mana artifact, and Naturalize can undo all the work you put into building your engine. Disenchant-type cards can be somewhat played around by leaving your draw-2 spell for the turn when you can cast it with Goggles, but Negate is really difficult to play against.
Even though you can’t always count on your opponent not dealing with the Goggles (especially once people start being more prepared for this engine), the core is so powerful that I’m pretty sure it’s going to remain part of Standard. Kolaghan's Command sees very little play and Blue, which has Negate, is probably the least popular color in Standard right now, which is caused by the fact that it doesn’t have any great card-drawing, while other colors have late-game engines that can close out games in a similar fashion to Sphinx's Revelation. As Standard evolves, different colors gain and lose different tools, but blue doesn’t have much now. And as long as the numbers of countermagic remain relatively low in the format, Pyromancer's Goggles will continue showing just how powerful they are.
Versions:
Shadows Over Innistrad (Foil)
Engine 2: Seasons Past + Dark Petition
I think that this combination has to win the prize for the most powerful thing you can be doing in Standard right now, simply because of the inevitability it packs. You play Dark Petition, search for Seasons Past, cast Seasons Past to bring back a bunch of stuff including Dark Petition (and ideally Nissa's Renewal), Seasons Past goes to the bottom of your library, you tutor it up with Dark Petition again, etc. Sure, we’re talking about the super-lategame here, but these two cards are pretty good on their own and also, you don’t have to be casting the loop every turn – you can spend some time cashing in all the cards you brought back.
It’s quite rare that we have a Standard combination of cards this powerful. Playing Dark Petition also opens up the possibility to play silver-bullets like Infinite Obliteration or Clip Wings, which you can then potentially bring back with Seasons Past. Most midrange and control decks will have a hard time beating this engine once it gets going, and even aggro decks can struggle with the combination of „a sea of removal plus lategame soft-lock“.
Just like in the case of Pyromancer's Goggles, the apparent weakness is that we’re relying on a combination of two 5+ mana sorceries. Our two key spells can be hit by discard or countermagic – Seasons Past almost asks for being countered by Negate. However, while it was very hard for Pyromancer's Goggles to be paired with black for discard, the Seasons Past deck already has black in it, so running Duresses and Transgress the Mind to clear the way for the „combo“ should go a long way towards making it happen. This is, by the way, a reason why Esper Dragons is mostly not even a bad matchup for a B/G Seasons Past control. Trouble starts when the opponent applies pressure backed by countermagic, because fighting a Duskwatch Recruiter engine by discard is not the best idea and when you need both a lot of discard and removal, sometimes things don't go your way when you don’t draw the right mix. Bant CoCo is one of the worst matchups you can face, although it’s still playable, perhaps with the addition of some more hate cards.
Because the key spells cost BB and GG, it wouldn’t be easy to add a third color. Another reason is that you want a lot of basics for Nissa’s Renewal. However, if the metagame shifts and there will be more problematic cards we need to handle, the options are there. Right now, there are many creature decks in the format, which means that removal is rarely dead. But if decks like Goggle Ramp or Esper Planeswalkers become more popular, playing a deck with 15 maindeck removal spells suddenly doesn’t sound like such a great idea. I think that in such a situation, adding blue is likely the best solution. We already have Evolving Wilds, so adding some Yavimaya Coasts and U/B duals shouldn’t hurt the manabase so much. And blue gives us access to Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, who can sift through the useless removal and get cards that matter. Also, blue gives us Negate to have an edge in the mirror or against Goggles.
Versions:
Dragons of Tarkir (Foil)
Engine 3: Collected Company
Listing this engine third is not meant to show that Collected Company is worse than the two engines above, but it’s a card that we’ve already played with before Shadows over Innistrad, so I think that most people who play Standard are aware of what this card can do. At PT Madrid, we’ve essentially seen two different ways in which you can use this card: for value (Andrea Mengucci) or as a combo enabler (LSV). The first approach, usually in the form of Bant Company, is more resilient and adaptive, the second one has more brute force, but is weaker against some particular cards like Kalitas. But both provide a way how to get card advantage and tempo almost for free, as long as your deck accepts some restrictions.
Unlike Goggles and Seasons Past, Collected Company is not that easy to hate out. In the previous format, where Rally the Ancestors ran rampant, we saw things like maindeck Dispel, but I think that right now, things are far from that state, as many decks don’t even play any Dispel targets at all. Fighting CoCo with removal is possible – after all, the deck inherently relies on cheap creatures. But trading 1 for 1 against it won’t do, because it has so many 2 for 1s: Bant Coco has Duskwatch Recruiter, Tireless Tracker, Ojutai's Command, and of course the namesake card itself, B/G Aristocrats have Duskwatch Recruiter, Liliana, Elvish Visionary, and a ton of ways how to combo you out with Zulaport Cutthroat or Westvale Abbey. If you want to beat CoCo, you need to have removal and be doing something proactive yourself, like casting massive Secure Wastes with Gideon and Nissa backup.
Can Collected Company evolve? Definitely. Even at the Pro Tour, we’ve seen Abzan CoCo in the hands of Jeremy Dezani, or even some Jund variants. Because of how great Reflector Mage and Jace are, Bant Company has the upper hand in a vacuum, but in the right meta, other versions are certainly possible as well.
I think that these three are the most well pronounced engines in the new format, the ones that do the scariest things. There are many decks that use card combinations which could be labeled as „engines – G/W tokens, for example, use synergies between tokens and the „anthem“ effects of Gideon and Nissa. The key combination of Esper Dragons is Dragonlord Ojutai / Silumgar + Silumgar's Scorn. But I think that in terms of a game plan, none of these are so crucial for the decks which use them. They just happen to be combinations of cards that work well together. The three engines that I talked about really form something special, unique tools that give you a ton of power and help you attack the format from a different angle, which is why it’s important to keep them in mind for as long as they remain legal in Standard.
Before I leave today, I have to talk about the issue that perhaps even overshadowed PT Shadows over Innistrad – the „pay the Pros“ affair and everything that happened as a consequence. I actually had several paragraphs written and ready to share at the end of this article, voicing my opinion of the step by Wizards to take away the Platinum benefits mere few months before they were supposed to kick in for the players who have worked for them this season. The unfair timing of this change, as well as the self-righteous air of presenting it as something that’s undeniably great for the Pro community, when in fact it was disastrous, that’s what really made me angry, even more so because I personally know two great players (Petr Sochůrek and Lukáš Blohon) who have worked very hard to lock Platinum for the next year and were left with almost nothing. As it turned out, there were many Magic personalities with a similar opinion, and the Twitterverse was full of articles and tweets rejecting the changes as unfair and shortsighted. In the end, Wizards changed their previous position and I’m happy that I don’t have to write an article explaining why the original changes would have been disastrous.
Right now, the situation is as follows: Wizards promised to fix the biggest flaw in the original concept and give back the Platinum players the benefits for the next year. What happens after that is still uncertain, but Wizards promised to improve the communication with the community, to make sure that whatever the changes, it’s not going to be something as first-hand crazy. Because of this, it’s a good time to talk about what the Pro circuit should look like. Should there be professional players with Magic as a job? Personally, I enjoy watching games between great players, as there’s usually so much to learn. Watching Shota Yasooka play Esper Dragons is typically remarkably inspirational. However, Magic is such a difficult game that most players need close to a full-time schedule to become that good. Paying them to play the game and come up with amazing plays and deck ideas improves the experience from the coverage of various tournaments by a mile. Would you watch a coverage of a GP side event played by people you didn’t know? I don’t think so. Magic needs superstars, their incredibly high level of play and also the stories that go with them. I think these guys should be paid enough to keep them attracted to the game. A packed Worlds prize pool is a way too random reward and something that can’t be relied on when you want to pursue Magic as your job. Platinum, however, can do that, and I think it should definitely stay, in some way or another. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading and see you next time,
Adam
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