MTGO Standard Challenge – December 2 & December 3, 2023 – Top 8 Decklists and Breakdown

Hi! My name is Vertyx and I will go over the top finishes of the Magic Online Standard Challenge that took place on the weekend: December 2nd and December 3rd 2023!

December 2nd, Top 8 Decks

The first challenge is in so lets analyze the top 8!

2 copies of Esper Midrange, 3 copies of Mono-Red Aggro, 1 copy of Azorius Midrange, 1 copy of Azorius Artifacts and 1 copy of Dimir Midrange!

Lets go take a look at the decklists!

1st (by Arianne) and 7th place (by Slasher21) were taken down with Esper Midrange!

I covered this deck a bunch of times but lets take a look at it once again and separate it into 3 piles which are threats, interaction and other supportive permanents.

Lets start with the threats which include a lot of generally strong creatures with powerful abilities like Deep-Cavern Bat, Dennick, Pious Apprentice or Raffine, Scheming Seer.

The interaction part includes removal in the form of Cut Down, Go for the throat or Destroy Evil and it also includes counterspells in the form of Make Disappear.

And the “other permanents” part includes Subterranean Schooner which provides a good “pay-off” for your cheaper creatures. And the rest is 2 playsets of enchantments which are Wedding Announcement and Virtue of Loyalty which help you to make your battlefield stronger by providing a few tokens and most importantly making your creatures bigger!

2nd (by deleon91), 3rd (by _Marian_) and 5th place (by Danielpena397) were taken down with Mono-Red Aggro!

This deck aims to win the game by eliminating the opponent as fast as it can! It uses a lot of threats to do so ranging from very cheap cards like Monastery Swiftspear or Kumano Faces Kakkazan and also some more expensive ones like 2 mana Bloodthirsty Adversary or even 3 mana Squee, Dubious Monarch and Goddric, Cloaked Reveler.

And when threats are not good enough to win, you can remove some problematic threats with Witchstalker Frenzy or you can go straight to the face with Play with Fire or Lightning Strike!

4th place was taken down with Azorius Soldiers by VictorCarvalho01!

This deck also aims to win the game quickly, but with soldiers instead! This deck is focused on a lot of cheap one and two mana soldier cards like Recruitment Officer, Lunarch Veteran, Resolute Reinforcements or Zephyr Sentinel so you can get the pressure going!

Of course the deck still has a few more expensive cards and they are Werefox Bodyguard which helps you in removing blockers and Knight-Errant of Eos so you can refuel your hand with threats!

As for the rest, the deck has Make Disappear to catch some unwanted spells and Wedding Announcement which provides a few tokens and most importantly an anthem effect!

6th place was taken down with Azorius Artifacts by 4b8!

This deck plays similarly to a control deck in a way that it wants to make sure that the opponent cannot eliminate you, so you can then use some of your artifacts to win the game with. For that reason the cheap cards in the deck are trying to slow the opponent down and they include cards like Market Gnome, Spring-Loaded Sawblades or Braided Net and some of them are also trying to ramp you like Thran Spider or Fabrication Foundry!

The more expensive artifacts naturally have more powerful abilities and they include cards like The Mightstone and Weakstone, Unstable Glyphbridge as a boardwipe and a threat in one and Thousand Moons Smithy as a threat generator!

The gameplay is somewhat similar to control decks, but this deck operates mostly on sorcery speed and its threats/finishers also accomplish their goal in a slightly different way.

And 8th place was taken down with Dimir Midrange by malekz!

This deck tries to win the game with cheap flyers, powerful payoffs and interaction in one!

Lets start of with the threats which as already mentioned include a lot of cheap flyers like Spyglass Siren, Deep-Cavern Bat or Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel, but also some more expensive payoffs like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse or Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor which lets you draw a bunch of cards with your cheaper threats!

The interaction part isn’t small and it includes a lot of removal like Go for the throat, Bitter Triumph or Anoint with Affliction, but also some counterspells like Negate or Make Disappear!

And the rest only includes Subterranean Schooner which slots well into an archetype full of cheap creatures!

And that is it for the first Challenge, let’s go take a look at the one that took place on Sunday, December 3rd 2023!

December 3rd, Top 8 Decks

The second challenge had a more diverse top 8 compared to the first one!

It had a single copy of Mono-Red Aggro, Bant Control, Azorius Artifacts, Gruul Aggro, Esper Midrange, Azorius Midrange, Azorius Soldiers and Rakdos Breach!

Let’s go take a look at the decklists!

1st place was taken down with Mono-Red Aggro by deleon91!

As previously mentioned, this deck aims to lower the opponents life from 20 to 0 as quickly as possible and it does that with a bunch of cheap threats like Kumano Faces Kakkazan or Phoenix Chick, but also some more expensive ones like Feldon, Ronom Excavator, Squee, Dubious Monarch or Goddric, Cloaked Reveler.

And when you need to squeeze in the last points of damage you got removal for blockers in the form of Witchstalker Frenzy or burn spells that can go straight to the face like Play with Fire or Lightning Strike.

2nd place was taken down with Bant Control by Nameless_Thing!

This deck goes hard on its Azorius Control base by using some of the strongest control cards that the format has to offer! It includes a lot of cheap interaction like Get Lost, Lay Down Arms or Syncopate, but also some more expensive cards like Sunfall, The Wandering Emperor or Leyline Binding so it can have the battlefield under control at all times!

With those cards the deck is able to control the battlefield from a very early standpoint, and then green comes in with Up the Beanstalk so you can always have cards to cast!

And when it comes to closing the game out, the deck has a few tools such as The Wandering Emperor, Horned Loch-Whale or Nissa, Ascended Animist!

3rd place was taken down with Azorius Artifacts by BERNASTORRES!

This deck was also already covered so lets just recapitulate what it tries to do! It plays similarly to a control deck but its basically just sorcery speed based and its win cons are also a bit different so lets go straight into it.

The cheaper artifacts help you control the opponents battlefield like Market Gnome, Spring-Loaded Sawblades and Braided Net, or they even ramp you like Thran Spider or Fabrication Foundry!

And the more expensive cards provide even stronger abilities like a boardwipe in the form of Unstable Glyphbridge, a token generator in the form of Thousand Moons Smithy or The Mightstone and Weakstone as a ramp card card that lets you choose from removing a creature or drawing cards when it enters the battlefield!

4th place was taken down with Gruul Aggro by trog3r!

Same as mono-red, this deck also wants to lower the opponents life from 20 to 0, but it adds an element in the form of green!

The deck still has its mono-red “staples” like Monastery Swiftspear, Kumano Faces Kakkazan or Goddric, Cloaked Reveler, but it also has a lot of green cards that add some interesting abilities.

They include cads like Yavimaya Iconoclast or Picnic Ruiner that contribute into the aggressive creature gameplan of the deck, and they also include other cards like Questing Druid that supplies you with cards and Audacity that lets you power up some of your threats!

5th place was taken down with Esper Midrange by Arianne! It was already covered a bunch of times but lets take a look at it again.

The deck consists of threats, interaction and other permanents that work well with the rest of the deck.

The threats include a lot of powerful but also cheap creatures like Dennick, Pious Apprentice, Tishana's Tidebinder or Deep-Cavern Bat so you will always be effective with your spells.

The interaction includes a bunch of removal like Go for the throat or Destroy Evil, and also some counterspells like Make Disappear.

And the other permanents include Subterranean Schooner which works well with your cheap threats and 2 enchantments in the form of Wedding Announcement or Virtue of Loyalty that provide a few threats and make the rest of your battlefield stronger.

6th place was taken down with Azorius Midrange by YungDingo!

This deck plays a lot of the same cards as Esper, but compared to it it stays more low to the ground with its threats having creatures like Spyglass Siren, Warden of the Inner Sky or Tishana's Tidebinder.

Thanks to the creatures being cheap, the deck works even better with cards like Subterranean Schooner, Wedding Announcement or Virtue of Loyalty since you will more likely be able to swarm the board with more creatures.

And the last card section is interaction and that includes a counterspell in the form of Make Disappear and removal in the form of Destroy Evil and The Wandering Emperor.

7th place was taken down with Azorius Soldiers by ThaisM!

This deck is full of cheap soldier cards like Recruitment Officer, Resolute Reinforcements or Zephyr Sentinel, but also some more expensive ones like Tishana's Tidebinder as an interesting type of interaction and Knight-Errant of Eos which helps you in refueling your hand.

The rest includes interaction in the form of Make Disappear to catch unwanted spells and other permanents that help you with your gameplan like Subterranean Schooner (which works well with your cheaper soldiers) or Wedding Announcement and Virtue of Loyalty that provide an anthem effects for your battlefield.

And 8th place was taken down with Rakdos Breach by FerMTG!

The last deck aims to control the battlefield until it gets to resolve Breach the Multiverse or Etali, Primal Conqueror which will hopefully let you take the game down!

Most of the deck is filled with interaction since the deck wants to control the battlefield and it includes cheap ones like Go for the throat or Brotherhood's End, but also some more expensive ones like Burn Down the House so you can take out the whole battlefield with a single card.

The other cards either ramp you into your payoffs like Big Score and The Celestus or they are the payoffs themselves either it being planeswalkers like Chandra, Hope's Beacon, creatures like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Etali, Primal Conqueror or cards that let you get those onto the battlefield like Breach the Multiverse or Virtue of Persistence.

End Step

And that’s it for the article! If you want to read more, I suggest you to check out my Mythic decks of the week article where I cover the most interesting decks that people reached Mythic with every week!

MTG Arena Mythic Decks of November 2023 – Week 4