Post Ban Brewing Directions
Post Ban Brewing Directions
Four brewing thoughts post Sorin and Amalia ban
Sorin and Amalia have just been banned. It will take a bit for the meta to settle enough for me to have some high confidence ideas on how to target it, but here are some early concepts I am working with.
Pioneer has been slow
For the last several months Pioneer has been extremely slow. You can see it in Niv emerging as a top deck. Or you can look through my articles where I shifted from brewing decks full of one mana cards to Storm the Festival decks.
The top three decks have been:
Vampires- A grindy midrange deck
Amalia- A lifegain deck with a combo that wraths the board
Phoenix- Basically a control deck
There was a fairly clear playbook for beating these decks, which was:
Be able to fend off or play through their turn 3 “combo”
Then be able to outvalue them in a long game
I break this down in my Greenshell article.
The result was the main three decks were grindy decks and your gameplan to beat them was to out grind them. That led to a slow format where you could get away with less explosive turns one and two and thus things like playing a lot of tapped lands.
I do not know how the meta will adjust, but given it has been slow I have to imagine we will see a reversion the mean and a faster meta. Which points to needing to focus on coming out of the gate faster than we have had to worry about recently.
Thoughtseize has been bad
If you look through my article history you will see I brew a ton of Thoughtseize decks. You will also notice that I recently have not been brewing Thoughtseize decks.
Quietly Thoughtseize turned into a bad card to brew with.
Again the top three decks were Vampires, Amalia, and Phoenix. All of which Thoughtseize was bad against.
It was good in Vampires, but that’s because it performed it’s dual role of protecting the combo and being a grindy midrange card. If you were trying to use it for just one of those two roles it was not impactful enough and it was hard to find a better deck than Vampires for the dual role use case.
Especially when combined with the format likely speeding up point above, I suspect brewing Thoughtseize decks will be back on the menu.
Go wide with game objects decks have been waiting in the wings
There is a chance Caretaker’s Talent is the best card in the format. It’s basically Up the Beanstalk, but with lots of support in the Pioneer card pool.
Ygra combo, Rakdos Tree, Boros Convoke are all great decks that feel like they have been sitting at the edge of the meta but not able to crack through the top three we had.
Given all these low CMC go wide with game objects decks I am looking to brew Temporary Lockdown and Culling Ritual decks.
For example, here is the current version of my Greenshell deck I am testing. Replacing the Kitnaps I had for Vampires with Culling Rituals for these wide low CMC decks (warning, I keep running out of time with this deck, so if you try it make sure you play fast).
Link to decklist
Why are there no Innkeeper’s Talent decks?
As far as I can tell Innkeeper’s Talent has been the most impactful card from Bloomburrow on Standard.
Like I discuss in this article on Pioneer brewing hacks, one good hack is the top cards in Standard have high odds of success in Pioneer.
This is a card that even seems like it has far more support in Pioneer with cards like Hardened Scales and way more Planeswakers to choose from.
Conclusion
Predicting meta changes is not a particular strength of mine. I am far better at brewing into an established meta. So the bigger test for me will be in a few weeks when we start to get a clearer picture of the meta.
Still, these are a few of the concepts I am using to help guide my brewing into this new meta. Let me know if you have any strong takes on the how the format will change that you are using to guide your brewing.