Hello everyone! As everyone is now aware, the impact of Alchemy has been the center of Magic discourse. It’s cool to see how these new cards and rules shake things up, but they aren’t the only formats that matter! With the final two Decathlon events coming up and the last two chances to earn tokens to compete for a full set of Kamigawa, having knowledge of Standard is going to be more important than it has been in quite awhile!
Similar to the Historic snapshot, this article will be looking to encompass both Bo1 and Bo3 play, but opposite of the Historic Snapshot, I’ll be using only Bo3 decks for my examples. Considering the Decathlon is Traditional Standard, leaving you with Bo1 decks wouldn’t be the most helpful! Fret not though, Bo1 players! Not only will this snapshot be relevant to you, it will be followed by an updated Bo1 Tier list shortly after! Let’s get into it.
Well folks, we tried. There are plenty of metagame shifts that can temporarily dethrone Izzet Turns as the de facto deck to beat, but nothing seems to truly topple the combo menace. The combination of a great interaction suite, a great proactive plan, and a great reactive plan is just really difficult to beat in this Standard. With Izzet, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that Izzet is definitely the best deck and I don’t think any Standard shifts are going to change that. It simply does everything too well to not be the technical best option at any given point. Even in a Pro Tour with it being considered the deck to beat, it still achieved a 58% win rate. That is a scary level of dominance, but this is the bad news after all! So what’s the good news? Well, Izzet is the best deck, but that’s with an asterisk. There are a few things that have to be considered as well when talking about Izzet.
First off, having the correct build of the deck is vitally important. The deck is excellent when they have the right list for the right time, but getting to that point can be a challenge in itself. For example, you can look at the above list. This was a list that did very well in a Standard Challenge very recently and although it has a lot of it’s bases covered, it is definitely skewed towards beating aggressive decks. That very well could’ve been the best build for the event and may be the best build for the Decathlon, but there’s no guarantee. If that’s the build that people go for and suddenly there’s an influx of Blue decks looking to beat up on Epiphany, it may be the wrong list for that exact period of time.
Second, the deck is still incredibly difficult to play. One of the few saving graces with Izzet is that the deck is hard enough to be a barrier of entry to most players. Even if you feel confident enough to play it in a vacuum, you also have to be confident enough to play the mirror, or worse yet, against a deck that is looking to beat you. Knowing when to jam into a potential Test of Talents is an art in itself and playing Izzet is far from free.
Finally, just because something is the best deck, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have bad matchups. We can infer that the known decks aren’t necessarily great against it as they could topple Izzet for longer than a few weeks, but that’s just the most popular options. Heavy Control is something that can beat up on Turns if they play a lot of counter spells and builds of Monogreen can definitely flummox unprepared Turns players if they’re more concerned with winning the mirror.
Izzet is the best, but we’re not necessarily in a situation where you’re throwing if you aren’t playing it. There are still a few other factors to consider in the meta!
Let’s get the most polarizing deck out of the way first. Monowhite is in a weird spot. In Bo1, it’s one of the best things you can be doing. In Bo3, it can range from one of the best decks of the field to one of the worst. How is that possible? Well it really revolves around Izzet Turns. There’s only so much give Monowhite has to change their deck.
Sure a lot of Monowhite lists can look pretty different, but as long as they have the same plan of play cheap creatures and bonk people to death, there’s not a whole lot of wiggle room for the deck. If Izzet Turns shows up packing Smoldering Egg, Cinderclasm, and bigger wraths, there really isn’t terribly much you can do about it.
In Bo1 this is rarely a problem as playing something as polarizing as Izzet Turns is a greater liability, but it’s definitely an issue in Bo3. Personally, I would avoid Monowhite in Bo3 as the odds of Izzet building to beat creatures seems way too high, but feel free to keep enjoying easy wins in the Bo1 queues!
Temur Aggro on the other hand seems to be on the opposite side of the spectrum. You’re splashing a color to have a better Turns matchup and your individual threats are generally better to pressure the Turns player more efficiently. In the same token though, you have the opposite problem of Monowhite.
First off, Temur doesn’t even destroy Izzet, it’s just fine against it which is pretty awkward considering that’s the deck you’re trying to beat. Second, because you’re more geared towards Turns, your creature matchups suffer. Both Monowhite and Monogreen, albeit not terrible, are not good matchups either. Playing Temur in a metagame you know will be writhe with Turns could be a solid call, but there’s likely to be too many people who don’t want to put their creatures down to justify it.
Finally that leaves us with Monogreen, the trickiest of all. For the Pro Tour, those who played Monogreen had extremely mixed results. For some, it felt like the worst possible option and they were outclassed by everything they faced. For others, it was a great option that had very few bad matchups. Where does the truth lie? Somewhere in the middle!
The deck had polarizing finishes, but the average win rate with it was quite high overall. The deck is definitely a solid option as it does it’s one thing very well. It’s quite fast, isn’t as susceptible to cheap removal, and has a lot of powerful standalone threats. Despite the seemingly mixed results at the Pro Tour, that has a lot to do with how the very best in the game teched to beat the Green machine and less about the deck itself. For the average player, Monogreen seems like a great choice and is definitely one of the decks you should consider for the Decathlon, especially if you haven’t played much Standard recently.
Let me set the record straight, Orzhov is quite the powerful deck. You play a lot of good cards, you can grind really well, and you will generally dumpster the creature decks. The issue with the deck is obvious though: Izzet. Izzet demands you to either interact with their turns game plan or have a clock fast enough to pressure them effectively. Orzhov does neither of those things, and they aren’t remotely close to doing so either. I wouldn’t say the matchup is unwinnable, but they play 4 Duress and 4 Go Blank just to have any type of a chance as well. That being said, is this going to be a bad option for the Decathlon? Yes and No.
In theory, I would say No as if you’re looking to at worst 5-1 an event, being a dog to the best deck is not something I would recommend. However, if there’s one thing I learned after all my years playing Magic, it’s that the incentive to play the best deck will very rarely outweigh the incentive to play the deck someone enjoys. Instead of metagaming, most players are just going to play the deck they have the most practice with, and for the vast majority of players, that’s going to be a creature deck. If you face 5 creature decks in your run before you face Izzet twice, the odds of you getting there are very high.
On the other hand, if you’re playing creature decks, you can expect a decent amount of people to play Blood on the Snow for no other reason that they enjoy the strategy. It’s a weird cat and mouse game and while I wouldn’t play Blood on the Snow in the Decathlon, I’m figuring plenty of people are going to.
Despite extremely low play from this strategy, I’ve been pretty impressed with it’s results. It looks to play the line between being good against aggro and Turns, and while few decks can successfully pull it off, I believe this can. This inherent shell is so good, I pretty much ported it over to Alchemy and have been dominating the creature decks there as well as the slower decks. If you want to learn more about the Alchemy version, you can check out the Premium article below.
This list has accrued a lot of top 8, 16, and 32 finishes with an insanely small sample size, and for some reason, players still aren’t picking it up. Not only would most opponents not know what to do against you, you have a smattering of really excellent cards that can bail you out of a lot of tight spots.
Lastly, this deck is one of the few that boasts a good Izzet matchup and you can definitely tech it harder against Izzet as well if that’s what you’re fancying. I’m not positive if I’m going to play this over an Izzet deck myself as I may be getting too into metagaming for an event that’s going to be mostly whatever people want to play, but it’s really between Izzet and this for me.
To speak towards the Bo1 players, if you like the look of this list, cut the Test of Talents and shave Duress for pretty much anything else that isn’t bad against creatures. This shell is awesome in Bo1 and I highly recommend it for having something to cut through the creature decks while simultaneously having strong cards for the slow decks.
A QUICK SUMMARY
To wrap up, here’s where we’re at.
For Bo1 players, keep playing your aggro decks and Blood on the Snow. Those aren’t going anywhere anytime soon so you can rest assured they will remain good options.
If you’re going to play in the Decathlon or Bo3 in general, I would most highly recommend just playing Izzet Turns. It’s the best deck for a reason and if you’re seasoned with it, it’s going to be your best choice. If you’re not familiar with Izzet and like beating down, I would definitely recommend Monogreen. You could play Blood on the Snow if you expect people to not pick up Turns, but that’s definitely a risk.
Finally, if you want to try and beat the metagame entirely, Dimir Witch looks like the deck with the highest chance to do that. Like Turns I would recommend you get in a decent amount of reps first, but if you’re a seasoned player, it’s definitely something to consider.
Thanks for reading everyone and best of luck to those playing in the Decathlon!
Robert "DoggertQBones" Lee is the content manager of MTGAZone and a high ranked Arena player. He has one GP Top 8 and pioneered popular archetypes like UB 8 Shark, UB Yorion, and GW Company in Historic. Beyond Magic, his passions are writing and coaching! Join our community on Twitch and Discord.
