Magic Decks

I put together the RUG Twin Pod deck that won Australian Nationals on Magic Online. I've played a few games with it and have done a lot of reading about the standard format and have come to a few conclusions.

• RUG Twin Pod is the most powerful deck in the format.
• It's also the hardest to play. Just remembering what all of your different creatures are at each converted mana cost is rough for someone who hasn't played constructed in 2 years. What you should search out depends on what your opponent is playing and I just can't know what they're playing without a lot of practice.
• I'd rather practice drafting than standard.
• Caw-Blade is the best archetype in the format.
• The Caw-Blade mirror is very skill intensive.
• I've never played a game with or against it in my life. Before Jace and Stoneforge Mystic were banned it was all anyone played.

In short, the best decks require a lot of skill and practice. I'd like to think I have the skill but I definitely don't have the practice and I'll probably scuttle my chances at doing well if I just assume I can pick it up as I go. What I need to do is find a deck that either doesn't require much practice (ie: isn't interactive with the opponent) or which is so similar to previous decks I've played that I can pretend I know what I'm doing. It should also be able to beat Caw-Blade since I'm betting that will be a very popular deck at Nationals. It sucks to have bought all the cards online for a deck and decided I won't use them, but I should be able to flip them back to vendors for a small loss. What was I saying about renting decks...?


I have four options in mind now. There's a $75k tournament being held this weekend so I'm going to hold off making a decision for sure until then since something might come out of that event but for now...

UB Control. This deck won US Nationals last weekend. Counterspells, wraths, huge bombs... How can you go wrong? Not knowing what to counter for one thing. One the plus side it plays with the Karn planeswalker and how can you say no to playing even more games of Magic?

Elves. Screw interaction. Playing some cheap dudes, make a ton of mana, cast overrun a bunch. Who needs to learn what the opponent can do? Fast, brutal aggression. As an added bonus it doesn't seem to be a very popular deck so possibly other people won't be prepared to play against it. Also, it looks to be dirt cheap, relatively speaking, which is nice.

Destructive Force! The one time I made top 8 I did so on the back of Wildfire. Destructive Force costs one more but it does an extra damage and blows up an extra land. The deck runs the new Chandra planeswalker who can fork spells. Why blow up 5 lands each when you can blow up 10! It also runs mind twist and a proliferate subtheme to generate all the mana needed to cast huge dudes. Turns out inferno titan and his 6 toughness will totally live through a destructive force... Supposedly it has a good match-up with Caw-Blade since it doesn't really matter how much incremental advantage they've gained if you can land a mind twist or an obliterate.

Pyromancer Ascension. This deck is pretty much just straight cheap cantrips with the goal of getting two counters onto this enchantment. Then the cantrips are big card drawers and you win by casting lightning bolts at the opponent's dome. For the life of me I can't see how bolt is a valid kill mechanism but it made top 8 at US Nats so it has to have something going for it. Some people play the splinter twin combo in the main or board as a second way to win. It feels like you spend a lot of time playing with yourself and then try to win which seems easy enough.