Search Results

Hello everyone, here on 95mtg.com! Today I’m going to talk about the deck I’ve always loved to play, even in this Post-Ban Modern Metagame, Humans! Thanks to it, I earned the qualification for the last Mythic Championship, defeating UW Control in the final. Every time I understand that it is the right time for playing Humans, I do the best that I can to set it up properly and to have a good run with it. Why playing Humans in this new metagame? Humans is a deck that tries to disrupt opponent hands thanks to cards like Kitesail Freebooter, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Meddling Mage. At the same time it tries to win fast with Champion of the Parish, Thalia’s Lieutenant and Mantis Rider. Before the last B&R Announcement, there were some Combo Decks that were simply too fast for Humans (especially when they were on the play) like All Spells, Charbelcher and Valki Cascade. Also, the 4C Omnath matchup was very bad on the draw if you couldn’t cast Aether Vial on turn one. These were the main reasons why this deck didn’t see much play in the previous season. Now, with some adjustments, the deck is super competitive again. There are some matchups where Humans is still the underdog, but thanks to a very strong sideboard plan that I’m going to show  you, we can improve our situation in almost every matchup. This is the list that I’m playing in this new metagame: Marco Cammilluzzi - Modern - 5C Humans There is a very basic rule that you have to know before playing Humans: do not keep any opening hand without a Turn 1-Play. I know that there are some opening hands that might trap you with a lot of good cards, but in my experience, not making a play on turn one is synonymous of defeat. In the main deck I’ve decided to cut two copies of Ancient Ziggurat for two Gemstone Mine, trying to improve the chance to play Chalice of the Void in the post-board games and also, to enlarge my range of playable starting hands with just one land and an Aether Vial (if you’ve ever played Humans and had an opening hand with Ancient Ziggurat as unique land and Aether Vial then you’ll know what I’m talking about). I’m playing three copies of Phantasmal Image instead of the full copies because in a field full of cheap removal spells like Lava Dart, Lightning Bolt and Fatal Push there are a lot of chances that you wouldn’t want to draw a second copy in the early game. In the classic two or three flexible slots I decided to add two copies of Skyclave Apparition, with the idea to have a better matchup in game one against Heliod Company, Rakdos Death’s Shadow and Hammer Time, and one copy of General Kudro of Drannith (as Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath and Mystic Sanctuary are no longer legal in the Modern format, we do not need to run three copies anymore). Sideboard My sideboard looks very spicy: 3 Auriok Champion: it’s the perfect card against Burn and Death’s Shadow. Quite powerful also against UR Blitz and in the Mirror match. 3 Chalice of the Void: another very strong card to beat both Burn and Death’s Shadow, but can also be insane versus UR Blitz in games where Auriok Champion is just not enough. It fights well also against Hammer Time and Boogles. 3 Dismember: against creature based combo decks like Heliod Company, Devoted Druid and Hammer Time. They also help against Humans and Eldrazi Tron. 1 Realmwalker: against midrange/control decks. Quite good in mirror. 1 Skyclave Apparition: I‘m already playing two copies in the main deck but it’s very good against creature decks and decks with small casting cost permanents like Hammer Time or Boogles. They’re insane against Control decks as they can hit almost every Planeswalker except for Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. 2 Magus on the Moon: perfect for Primeval Titan‘s Matchups and Tron decks. 2 Rampaging Ferocidon: we’re playing two of these dinos against Heliod Company. Quite powerful in Midrange matchups like the one with Jund where they can help putting a good amount of pressure. Sideboard Guide This matchup got worse since they’ve started playing UR instead of MonoR. When they was only on Red we had Auriok Champion that was the all-star in the matchup. Now, with Storwing Entity, they can fight back really hard, but with an explosive start and Chalice of the Void for one, we can steal the game (remember that you play Cavern of Souls, so you can save your Humans with Mana Value equal to 1 from getting countered by your own Chalice). Phantasmal Image is the best target for Lava Dart, but I still want to play two copies to try to have multiple Auriok Champions in play. Probably they will board in some Blood Moon and this is the reason why I want to add the third copy of Skyclave Apparition (when they leave the battlefield, your opponent will create a blue Token that can block and kill your Auriok Champion, so be careful!). I think Thalia is not good enough as they play very cheap spells and she doesn’t affect the board. Chalice of the Void prevents you to die from their main plan (Colossus Hammer + Sigarda’s Aid), but they can still play the equipment with Stoneforge Mystic. Dismember is the perfect answer for their major threats (Puresteel Paladin, Stoneforge Mystic and Inkmoth Nexus). As I mentioned before, there still are some matchups where Humans Deck is the underdog and Jund’s matchup is one of them! Meddling Mage would ususally name Lightning Bolt, but you should consider that when you’re on the draw, to name Liliana of the Veil could be the best option. Having two Skyclave Apparition in the main deck gives us a better way to fight Wrenn and Six. Dismember is a must because after board you will have to struggle, other than Tarmagoyf and Scavenging Ooze, with Plague Engineer too! The Die Roll has an important role on deciding who’s going to win the match. The best you can do here is to go all-in and kill your opponent as fast as you can. Meddling Mage normally names Oblivion Stone and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon because if one of these cards resolve, you are likely going to lose the game. Humans play really well against control decks that have a few different types of cheap removal thanks to Meddling Mage (who usually names Path to Exile). UW-based decks will also interact with your creatures with cards like Supreme Verdict and Cryptic Command. A  Stoneforge Mystic on turn two on the draw doesn’t scary us that much thanks to our Kitesail Freebooter full set that will steal Batterskull from the opponent’s hand. Without any recursion with Mystic Sanctuary and Cryptic Command in the format, I like to play some matches against this deck. In game one this matchup sounds very hard because they have a turn three combo that we can’t beat. Thalia doesn’t work too well in these matches and your aggro plan isn’t fast enough. Meddling Mage in game one will names Heliod most of the time but your opponent has still access to 4 Collected Company. In post-board games you want to have an Aether Vial with three counters on it in order to be able to interact and stop their combo: Rampaging Ferocidon might sound strange but  it is just another good way to put pressure on the game while stopping their infinite life gaining. The deck is well prepared for this matchup thanks to Skyclave Apparition and Auriok Champion, but you have to remember that Shadow will run at least two Kozilek’s Return in the sideboard to can ignore the Auriok Champion‘s protection from red and black. Chalice of the Void could be super strong because it counters almost half of their deck. It is a good matchup because without the Cryptic Command/Mystic Sanctuary lock, without Uro‘s stuff and Field of the Dead‘s army, for Control Decks like this one it is very hard to win against Humans. A lot of lists are running Lightning Helix but I’m pretty sure that’s not enough. Skyclave Apparition fits perfect against this deck to take care of both, Omnath and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. In this case the die roll is important as this is a very close matchup. Casting multiple Meddling Mages will help, but with the first one I would name Searing Blaze because it is the most painful removal that they have in their deck. I’m not a fan of Skyclave Apparition in this matchup, but if they put Roiling Vortex into play, I want to have a way to deal with it. I love Mantis Rider but paying three mana for a creature is too expensive versus mono red, so I board out all four copies. Ok players, that’s it for today. I hope you will give a chance to one of my favourite decks in the format. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I would be happy to answer. Thanks for reading this far and I’ll see you all on next week, always here on 95mtg.com! Image Copyright: (c) 1995-2020 Wizards of the Coast LLC, All Rights Reserved #kaldheim #khm #modern #strategy

Eating the Poisoned Apple Hi everyone, welcome back on 95mtg.com! This past weekend we had to battle in the MTG League Weekend. My weapon of choice for this past weekend was Snow-White Aggro. I headed into the weekend in the top quarter of the league, and luckily, came out not too far behind where I started. I did lose a little ground, but still in a solid position to make a run moving forward. While I wasn’t enamored with the deck, I thought we made enough innovations to make the deck better and we believed this was the most well positioned deck going into the weekend. Sometimes when your team doesn’t do great, you can say “hey, we just guessed the metagame wrong” and this time I actually don’t think we did. They were indeed who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook. DECKLIST Here’s the list I played: Mike "Siggy" Sigrist - KHM Standard - Snow White Aggro My initial read on the deck was that when prepared for, decks with unfavorable matchups, like various adventure decks, could make their matchup against White quite fine. In practice the games were incredibly close even in this instance. Cards like Soul Sear, Wilt, and Glass Casket over various other removal spells could break up the soft locks Snow-White Aggro could presents with Maul of the Skyclaves and ways to protect the equipped creature. But when they didn’t draw one of their few copies of these cards, it was easy for White to run away with the game. The big innovation, and one that seemed so obvious was adding Lurrus to the main deck. Lurrus combined with Selfless Savior and Alseid of Life’s Bounty was another way to set up proactive soft locks. Despite some nasty things Halvar could do when you drew Maul and keep it always equipped, we thought that we would had won such a high percentage of those games anyways, so we needed to figure out what to do without the Maul. Well you’d be using the Sword half of Halvar, and guess what? It was much less threatening than Lurrus. The deck has one very strong feature, and that’s making your opponent’s early turns bad. They leave up Bonecrusher Giant? You play Seasoned Hallowblade. They cast Lovestruck Beast? You counter with a Skyclave Apparition or Maul of the Skyclaves and  keep stepping on the gas. While the deck was favored against earlier builds of Adventure Decks, and I think against Naya Punch in general, it lost a lot of points to adapted builds. At best the deck had a 50% win rate against prepared opponents, and since we got around to testing Lurrus later in testing, we didn’t have a large enough sample against the developed decks. So much so, we hesitated with how many Lurrus we should play and while our initial build had 3 and no copies of Halvar, God of Battle, we decided to split the difference in case we were so wrong about how bad we thought Halvar was. We weren’t wrong, Halvar is far too weak in my opinion, and while it does some cute things, it’s simply too much mana for its effect. The games where it’s “good” in I think you’re very likely to be winning in anyways. Lurrus has the ability to turn some losses into wins, while Halvar does that far less often. Our biggest misevaluation here, in my opinion, was the Temur Adventures matchup, where Brazen Borrower is a much bigger headache than it may appear. The White Deck beats these adventure decks by going tall to avoid red removal, and interacting with their larger creature and getting big attacks in. Borrower bouncing a big Luminarch Aspirant, or Seasoned Hallowblade equipped with a Maul or with two Luminarch‘s counters makes it hard to ride the one large creature to victory. This, coupled with fast Goldspan Dragon kills, makes it pretty tough to slow the game down and lean on Lurrus as well. This I think is a close but unfavorable matchup for White (especially you consider that if Temur wants to, they can make their matchup better, while you mostly don’t have much wiggle room). All in all that was my biggest issue with Snow-White Aggro initially: it had very little room to wiggle if people wanted to beat it. The options available couldn’t allow you to turn into a good midrange deck like the best aggressive decks of the past. Lurrus was the best at this, all the planeswalkers want you to stay hyper aggressive and curve out creatures. This is truly Snow-White Aggro’s biggest weakness moving forward. WHAT LED US TO THE POISON APPLE? So what was the poison apple that we ate that made us land on Snow-White Aggro? Some may blame Abe Corrigan for putting it on a serving dish, and perhaps Matt Nass for then cutting it up carefully and feeding it to us individually, while eating it himself loudly declaring how delicious it was, and those people wouldn’t be wrong. Honestly, the fact that the format left itself open enough that after working through all possibilities, we thought Snow-White Aggro was the most well positioned and well-tuned list we had, given the possible ranges of opponent’s deck choices. We also knew going into this weekend who our opponents were. Not what they were playing, but we could guess what their range was, and in some cases we knew exactly what they’d play. I knew Chris Bortehlo was going to play Temur Adventures because of his impressive run getting #1 Mythic with the deck, but we didn’t thoroughly test that matchup because no one else was. So why spend a bunch of time amongst all of us on one matchup when we have a field of other decks to worry about and we don’t anticipate a lot of Temur in the field? We took a shortcut: we think that White beats Adventures, so this is at least going to be close. And we were mostly right, it’s close, but advantages Temur instead of White like we thought. The development of the format, and the fast pace of it led us down this path. Sultai was the most popular, most winning deck, at the very beginning of testing. The very next weekend, Mono Red and Snow-White Aggro preyed on it and knocked it down a bunch of pegs. This opened up the metagame to Adventure decks previously held in check by Sultai to start hard targeting these aggro decks, especially Mono-Red. The core of Edgewall Innkeeper, Lovestruck Beast and Bonecrusher Giant is just an incredibly strong package and whatever you build around that shell is likely to work. While these red based removal decks had a weak spot against Seasoned Hallowblade and large Luminarch Aspirant protected by Selfless Savior, they could adapt and play cards like Soul Sear, or other colors besides just Gruul. If people went back to Sultai to beat Adventures, we’d be ready with Snow-White, a deck we felt quite confident and still feel quite confident beats Sultai. Standing on all of the public discourse that happened over that final week, Snow-White Aggro was kinda left under the radar, despite having a breakout weekend just days before. Most people thought it was a flash in the pan and couldn’t hang in the format. In the back of my mind I believed this was true, but people hadn’t properly adapted to it. We thought the deck had another good week or two left. This is where our events different from open field events. The professional players during this specific time period were paying very close attention, their careers rely on it, my career relies on it. While you may not see White Aggro on the ladder as often because something new and more exciting and fun to play emerges, we all had paid attention to the deck and had a plan for it. While the open field events players can just put a couple of Archons in their Naya decks and called it a day, that’s not how this game of leveling each other goes. Everything is a possibility. These aren’t the best players in the world for nothing. So in our mind we thought the decks we could play to attack a metagame of various Adventure decks and Mono Red, were various Doom Foretold builds or Mono White. This one proved itself favored against Sultai, another way people may choose to attack the Adventure decks if they went to that level. While we did some work on Doom Foretold we sort of decided we’d run out of time for a well built version of it. I’m usually largely opposed to 80 card Yorion decks as well. I find them very often to be over-hyped, and don’t win as much as people believe. The deck is “fun” to play and players will gravitate towards that control style of play and doing cool things and the feel good you get from it makes you lose focus of the times you did nothing but cast a removal spell and an Omen and then die. Basically, you play the games you win for a long time, the games you lose are over very quickly and easy to dismiss so you kinda brush it off. When we analyzed the data from Doom Foretold, something we’re very careful about doing, it had zero, and I mean zero favorable matchups. Sometimes you need to take shortcuts to eliminate decks and this was an easy one to take in my opinion. The biggest strike against Snow-White Aggro in retrospect, and one I hadn’t considered going into deck registration, was how difficult it was to play. It’s very complicated and requires you to make good attentive reads on what your opponent could have and make their plays bad. Sequencing is key, and something you learn over time. Don’t play your Luminarch Aspirant’s directly into two mana removal if you can help it unless you have a Selfless Savior up or no other play. Do make them have it when your hand requires you to do so. I practiced more than usual with my deck the day before League Weekend because of this, and I think overall I played well on day one, with some minor mistakes here and there. On day two I think my focus slipped and I played poorly, and in some cases didn’t even realize it until after a game was over. These weekends can be grueling, so having your cards do your work for you instead of having to play your A+ game at all times has real value. When all was said and done, I was choosing between Snow-White Aggro to beat them or Naya Punch to join them (if you’d like to know more about this deck, check it our on my previous article), and I would have been happy registering either. I finished with a 5-6 record overall, and while I’m not truly extatic about that record, I think any weekend I get around 50% of match wins against the best in the world I can hang my head high about. I think our read on the metagame was spot on, which is a good feeling, and I think with better execution we could have done better with Snow-White Aggro as well. While I wouldn’t strongly recommend white moving forward, I still think our deck is a good version of white aggressive strategies and if you like this kind of deck then it’s totally reasonable to play it, especially after having a poor weekend. The only major changes I’d consider are removing the Halvar for a third Lurrus main deck, and trimming an Archon for a 4th Glass Casket as it’ll apply in both the mirror and other matchups. Sideboard Guide: Here’s our sideboard plans for Snow-White Aggro going into the event: I think leaving a Reidane in on the play is reasonable. It’s a bit clunky for the matchup but can keep them off a Henge or Embercleave. Magistrate isn’t super strong here but can steal some games. We didn’t expect much pure Gruul, so we just wanted to slightly improve our bad cards. If they have Archon of Absolution out of Naya add 2 Scalding Cauldron and cut a Skyclave Apparition and either another Apparition or an Alseid of Life’s Bounty. Add 2 Scadling Cauldron if they play Archon of Absolution. Sometime’s I’d leave in a single Selfless Savior over a third Maul of the Skyclaves on the draw, as it’s very easy to get tempo’d out when you play Maul and get the creature removed, and the Maul gets much less impressive when facing down a Archon of Absolution. Can keep all the Giant Killers if they have a lot of Elder Gargaroths It’s still unclear to me what the best of the bad one drops is between Giant Killer and Usher of the Fallen. Usher gets completely bricked off by Ruin Crab while Chop Down is mostly useless it can get a Thieves’ Guild Enforcer with a Thought-Thief in play. I’d lean towards Giant Killer being slightly better. This is a very bad matchup, and Idol of Endurance gives you a chance, though you need to naturally draw it. We have the Kaldeim Championships just around the corner so I’ll continue focusing on Standard and Historic and how those formats evolve. I’m also really looking forward to the release of Time Spiral Remastered, one of my favorite Limited formats of all time. I’ll see you again next week, here on 95mtg.com! Image Copyright: (c) 1995-2020 Wizards of the Coast LLC, All Rights Reserved #kaldheim #khm #standard #strategy

Hello everyone! Most of you have probably never heard my name, so I would like to introduce myself before jumping into the analysis of this new Kaldheim Standard format. My name is Walter Scuderi and I am an Italian magic player. I have played our beloved game since I was just 11 years old. I managed to play a couple of Pro Tours in the past and I am really excited about the opportunity to get back in the competitive scene. I hope you all will like what I have to say. I can’t wait for your feedback and I’m hoping you’ll appreciate all the stuff you can find here at 95mtg.com. Let’s drop all the preambles and get to what really matters: the new Kaldheim Standard! With the release of the new set Kaldheim on February 5th, the Standard format showed a lot of new decks that we can analyze according to the results of the first week of tournaments. This is where players start to try new cards and new interactions to find the best deck that can dominate the metagame. AGGRO IN KALDHEIM STANDARD RG ADVENTURES This is one of the best choices for the first week. Gruul had a solid base already in Zendikar Rising: the adventure base formed by Edgewall Innkeeper, Bonecrusher Giant and Lovestruck Beast dominated the metagame in the past year. With the new expansion, we gain one of the best cards of the new set: Goldspan Dragon. This big red dragon is looking to be one of the most played cards of the new Kaldheim Standard metagame. It gives your deck a good solution for the late game and is a hasty flyer. This is really important in a matchup where your opponent can clear the board (cards like Extinction Event and Shadows Verdict are played in multiple copies in all Yorion decks) to restart the race. SIDEBOARD Wilt: This is a really good card to have in your sideboard and you will use it often. It’s a good play against Embercleave, and can also destroy The Great Henge and The Akroan War. It’s strong against WR to destroy Glass Casket and Showdown of the Skalds as well. It can also be good against Yorion decks to avoid Binding the Old Gods or to interrupt Kiora Bests the Sea God sheaningans before your opponent taps all of your permanents and steals one. Soul Sear / Fire Prophecy / Run Afoul / Redcap Melee: In each sideboard you will find this removals for the massive presence of aggressive decks in this meta. Soul Sear is really important especially against WR to kill Seasoned Hallowblade since it would remove its ability to be indestructible. Ox of Agonas: This is the most played card of the sideboard for players that use red. Drawing three cards against UR can be helpful. It’s also very good against Rogue decks, where you can play it from the graveyard for it’s Escape cost pretty easily and gain some advantage. Klothys, God of Destiny: This is another card that you will find in every sideboard and is a strong opponent against Yorion decks. This card stacks up well against RB midrange removing cards from any graveyard and avoiding Kroxa from possibly Escaping and hitting the battlefield again. This card is also useful against UR and Rogues as it’s really hard to remove from the battlefield. Walter Scuderi - Standard - RG Adventures BOROS Boros comes back to Standard with the addition of another card that you will see played a lot: Showdown of the Skalds. This new Saga is what an aggro deck wants, four cards that you can play until the end of next turn is all that you need. The second and the third parts make our creature bigger, what more can you ask for? Usher of the Fallen is another good addition because it is an important one mana drop. The interaction between Shepherd of the Flock and the new Saga makes the white creature another 4x to play. Giant Killer is not an aggro card per say, but in a metagame full of big creatures it must be played with multiple copies. SIDEBOARD Redcap Melee / Glass Casket / Baneslayer Angel: These are standard utilities to side against all aggro decks. You should side Redcap against UR as well to destroy a possible Bonecrusher Giant. Drannith Magistrate: This is a really great card that you can side against Adventure decks. It also works well against Yorion decks to avoid your opponent from playing Ultimatum combos. Phoenix of Ash / Outlaws’s Merriment / Reidane, God of the Worthy: These are all good cards against control decks. While Phoenix of Ash can come back after death, Outlaws’ Merriment is a good enchantment to have on the board. Reidane is the most versatile card of the sideboard because it can  slow down a control deck by making Snow-Covered lands come into play tapped. Walter Scuderi - Standard - Boros MONORED It’s really hard to see a Standard format where Monored is not a good deck and Kaldheim Standard makes no difference. The solid base of last year’s Monored can now benefit of the addition of the Snow-Covered Mountains. This gives access to the one mana removal Frost Bite, which the deck really needed. Another important improvement is Faceless Heaven, a land that gives a good solution after a board wipe and can be a good mana sink for the late game. Goldspan Dragon is present here too as an additional demonstration that this card will be a Standard staple for sure. SIDEBOARD Roiling Vortex: This is a card we see in all monored decks. It is very effective against control decks since it is a clock that your opponent must consider. The most important thing it does against Yorion decks is that it makes the Ultimatums way more complicated to use as they will cost 5 additional life points. Weathered Runestone: Grafdigger’s Cage is useful against RB midrange. Ox of Agonas: It has the same functions it has in the Gruul deck. Walter Scuderi - Standard - MonoRed MONOGREEN The last aggro deck that you will see around is Monogreen and, just like for Monored, there are the Snow-Covered lands that allow you to cast a strong removal for only one mana, Blizzard Brawl. This spell will act as a 1 mana removal with a little pump as a small benefit. Old-Growth Troll is another good addition, a 3 mana 4/4 that comes back later as a token is not bad at all! SIDEBOARD Chainweb Aracnir: This is the best card that you can play in your sideboard if you think that you will face a lot of Rogues. For them, this card it’s a nightmare. It deals damage to a flying creature when cast and then even more damage when Escaped. Garruk’s Harbinger: This is the best card against Yorion decks because it has hexproof against black and they have very few ways to deal with it. Weathered Runestone: Always the same lovely graveyard hate. Walter Scuderi - Standard - MonoGreen My first impression of the new Kaldheim Standard is that it is really good and fresh. We will need some time, of course, to see how the metagame will evolve but I think that with this new set the metagame will allow you to play a lot of different types of decks and all of these will be competitive. If you like the aggro strategy I hope that this article will help you to make a good choice of what deck to play for your next games. I’ll see you next week with the analysis of other archetypes and my general thoughts on the format! And welcome again on 95mtg.com! Image Copyright: (c) 1995-2020 Wizards of the Coast LLC, All Rights Reserved #kaldheim #khm #standard #strategy