Getting Married: The New Standard

Mike Flores

Poor Masques Block. It seems that Seventh Edition and Invasion Block got the seven year itch about five early. "Goodbye, Lin Sivvi!" chuckles that dandy Gerrard Capashen. "You and your little Rebel brats can get out of our big boat now! I'm sure Tahngarth, Talruum Hero and I will be much happier with our new pals, Pianna, Nomad Captain and Kamahl, Pit Fighter."

Yes, the marriage between Masques Block's fading creatures and Invasion Block's Fires of Yavimaya is about to end. While Wandering Eye will probably never itself see play again, the wandering eyes of Seventh Edition and Invasion Block have just caught sight of a new bride: Odyssey. In less than two months, the wedding bells will ring, and on the weekend of November 10-11, State Championships will celebrate the first big event of a fresh Standard format. But like any wedding celebration, preparations must be made for a successful ceremony.

Here are four strategic concepts you should keep in mind in order to avoid getting cake all over your face in the new Standard:
Something Old: Static Orb

"Ah," says Domain. "With Rishadan Port leaving with the rest of those Masques Block troublemakers, I will take over! I will pick up where Invasion Block Constructed left off and totally dominate Standard! With more efficient permission spells bolstering my already impressive Evasive Actions, I will solidify my position, and kill any and all opponents with token generation, or perhaps lock their permanents with Legacy Weapon! Bwahahahaha!"

Not so fast, Domain. Don't forget that while Rishadan Port is no longer present to hold you in check, there is a persistent little leftover from Tempest still in the environment. Static Orb will put a significant deterrent on your Harrow-based mana selection. Furthermore, it isn't too easy to spring the Legacy Weapon lock on a Static Orb deck that also packs permission of its own. While the free counterspells Daze, Foil, and Thwart, are leaving along with the rest of Masques Block, variations on both the German Freeze and the Borteh-style Static Merfolk deck should find some incarnation in the new Standard to bedevil both complex strategies like you, as well as more standard blue- or blue-white-based control decks.
Something New: Price of Glory

Brian Kibler already did an extensive review of this powerful new card. Besides playing foil to the instant-based permission and card-drawing of blue control decks, Price of Glory can also potentially put the hurt on green's combat tricks, and even red's instant burn spells; white mages should almost be glad that Rebels are on the outs, as this card significantly affects their end-of-turn searching strategy.

While Price of Glory appears to be primarily an efficient sideboard card, it is also potentially a central influence on deck design. There is no particular reason why this card shouldn't find a home in a deck designed to spend mana for creatures or sorceries on its own turn, along the lines of the b-g-r decks played at Nationals by Darwin Kastle and Dr. Michael Pustilnik. Because decks running an eight pack of Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise, they can accelerate consistently to 2 ManaRed Mana by the second turn, Price of Glory has a good chance of sliding under conventional permission walls. Once this enchantment actually hits play, it will fundamentally affect how the opponent plays for the remainder of the game. Fact or Fiction will become an uncomfortable sorcery, and the permission spells that didn't get the job done to begin with will have a really hard time acquitting themselves as the game progresses at the Price player's pace.

I think that non-Price playing decks may also have to alter their card selections, at least in terms of sideboard, in order to minimize the impact of this powerful spell. We may see Aura Blast and even Wax/Wane supplementing Disenchant in u-w sideboards for no other reason than to limit the amount of collateral damage involved in removing Price of Glory from play. I don't foresee nearly as much of a Dismantling Blow presence in post-Masques Standard... with Price of Glory replacing Rishadan Port and Dust Bowl as the anti-control mana restriction choice for red-capable decks, the incentive to playing Tsabo's Web by those decks will also be reduced, making Dismantling Blow useful only against the opponent's permanents. In any case, tapping three mana on one's own turn to remove a Price of Glory will be troublesome in the early and mid-game, and leaving a Price of Glory untouched until the late game will be bad news for an instant-heavy deck anyway.
Something Borrowed: Predict

In 1997, Andrew Cuneo was slamming the Foreshadow on Memory Lapse victims months before Alan Comer made that combination famous with his addition of Portent in the Turbo-Xerox deck. While we no longer have the amazing Portent for cheap manipulation and Foreshadow synergy, blue mages nonetheless get to play with Memory Lapse and Foreshadow's Odyssey reprint, Predict.

While Memory Lapse was already seeing play in permission decks, the loss of Accumulated Knowledge leaves the door wide open for Predict as a Standard staple. With no information whatsoever, Predict will nevertheless play Inspiration a surprising amount of the time... against many decks you will have a 30+% chance of a double cantrip draw just by naming the appropriate basic land. Predict will always be able to play the role of "bad Impulse" for mana smoothing purposes, and in combination with Memory Lapse, it will serve as a surprisingly powerful and mana efficient long term solution to, well, everything (everything that can be countered, that is).

Even though Odyssey has many Constructed-quality flashback spells, randomly throwing a Beast Attack into the opponent's graveyard is not as bad as it might initially seem. For one thing, you will never be able to keep the opponent from access to flashback card advantage without dedicating deck slots to cards like Cremate or Syncopate, and one shot at a Beast Attack from the graveyard is a lot easier to manage than one from the hand as well as one from the 'yard. Besides this, blue, as a color, is probably the best suited to handling the flashback threat... most of the constructed cards you'll actually have to worry about are token generation effects, and blue's Boomerang spells, especially Recoil and Repulse, handle these cards quite nicely.
Something Blue: Shadowmage Infiltrator and Wild Mongrel

No environmental forecast would be complete without an eye to the upcoming beatdown creatures, and the (black and blue) Shadowmage Infiltrator and the (sometimes blue) Wild Mongrel represent the best of best in terms of Odyssey's contributions.

Not since 1997-1998, when the likes of Jon Finkel and Brian Kibler first laid their hands on Ophidian, has an environment been so conducive to successfully resolving a 1/3 creature of this nature on the third turn. The evasion-bolstered Shadowmage Infiltrator is even more dangerous than the original Ophidian: nowadays, the likes of Wall of Blossoms or Wall of Roots will not contain it. When the Shadowmage Infiltrator starts to beat down, it actually damages the opponent as well.

Especially considering the removal of Last Breath from the Standard environment, this sort of creature will give the average control deck serious fits. It is notoriously easy to force through, and once down, it will generally draw a couple of cards before the proper answer can be cast. Similarly, the Shadowmage Infiltrator isn't just blue, it's black and blue. That means that Duress will probably join Counterspell and Memory Lapse in the average Infiltrator aggro-control deck. Unlike the traditional permission spells, which are useless against an angry Urza, proactive Duress can yank that powerful Rage from the opponent's hand, making the removal of the unblockable Infiltrator from the board quite difficult once it has resolved. With blue and white too slow, and even versatile red on the ropes, the b-u Infiltrator deck should be a popular attacker in the States Red Zones.

On the other hand, we have green's quiet addition: Wild Mongrel. While our esteemed Dragonmaster has already reviewed this excellent Grizzly Bears variant at length, I would like to add that it is also one of the best solutions to the Shadowmage Infiltrator problem in the Standard environment. So long as the Mongrel is sitting on defense, no Finkel should be brave enough to swing... the Mongrel can turn 3/3 and black, at once capable of containing the normally hard-to-block Wizard, yet impossible to sanction by the opposing blue mage's targeted spells.

There you have them: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Because of the presence of Static Orb and Price of Glory, I predict a disincentive to both traditional u-w control decks like the kind that Zvi Mowshowitz and Scott Johns ran at the 2001 US National Championships, and the newer age b-u-w and b-u-r Probe-Go decks that we saw from a variety of players at Worlds (especially given the loss of Nether Spirit). This is not, however, to say that blue as a color is disempowered. On the contrary, aggressive blue decks with cards like Shadowmage Infiltrator should prosper. The green creatures continue to be very efficient, so I think a union of these two colors with a solid creature base and either permission or tempo cards should also be successful.

Are those wedding bells I hear?