The Star City Games: Phoenix Open Weekend is around the corner and I’d like to talk about a few decks that I’ve had experience with in playing if you don’t want to succumb to/play the Delver/Wolf Run decks. These strategies are typically strong against the Delver and Wolf Run decks, their primary weakness however is a dedicated control deck for most of them. The last deck’s weakness is Humans, which may or may not be played at the SCG Weekend.
The first deck I’m going to talk about here is a 5-Color Flare deck, but not the Frites deck.
5-Color Flare:
| Creatures (6) 2 Phantasmal Image 2 Sun Titan 2 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite Spells (29) 3 Oblivion Ring 2 Ratchet Bomb 2 Ancient Grudge 4 Desperate Ravings 2 Forbidden Alchemy 2 Geistflame 4 Mana Leak 3 Day of Judgment 4 Faithless Looting 3 Unburial Rites Lands (25) 1 Forest 1 Island 1 Mountain 2 Plains 1 Swamp 1 Blackcleave Cliffs 4 Clifftop Retreat 1 Copperline Gorge 4 Evolving Wilds 2 Glacial Fortress 4 Seachrome Coast 3 Sulfur Falls (0) | Sideboard (15) 1 Ratchet Bomb 2 Wurmcoil Engine 1 Phantasmal Image 1 Ancient Grudge 1 Blue Sun’s Zenith 2 Dissipate 2 Negate 1 Day of Judgment 2 Whipflare 2 Nephalia Drownyard |
This is the deck that Alexander West played in Hawaii. I found that the deck was weak to Tempered Steel, so I changed the Whipflares to Slagstorms. This deck has the original Esper Flare shell, with new additions from Red, in the form of card draw. Faithless Looting is one of the best cards to be printed to sustain this archetype. You don’t have to rely on Think Twice and Forbidden Alchemy to draw cards and Liliana to pitch cards away that you don’t want in your hand. Evolving Wilds allows the deck to actually play the 5 Color spells and Geistflame is a very strong card in the current format even still. Ancient Grudges are a concession to the rise of Swords and Sword playing Delver decks and only gets stopped by a Dissipate or two cards out of their hand (Mana Leak x2 or Leak+Snapcaster.)
The Ratchet Bomb/Sun Titan interaction is incredibly strong against cheap aggressive decks as well. Don’t be afraid to play a Phantasmal Image as a blocker against Doomed Traveler in the Humans decks, you can easily rebuy the Image in a later turn with a resolved Sun Titan. More Sun Titan tricks include:
- Sacrificing Evolving Wilds with triggers on the stack to effectively ramp yourself with your 6 basics
- Rebuying your Ratchet Bombs
- Permanently exile a non-land permanent with a Bomb set at 3 and a recurring Oblivion Ring (in response to the enter the battlefield trigger you sacrifice the Ratchet Bomb forcing the leaves the battlefield trigger to be put on the stack above the ETB trigger, leaves play trigger resolves first, the oblivion ring lands in the graveyard and the Oblivion Ring’s enter ability still must resolve.)
Elesh Norn is the primary Rites target against aggro decks to wipe their board and make your other creatures better. Out of the board you have mill lands and counters for control, sweepers and lifegain (Wurmcoil Engine) for aggro. This deck is a little weak to graveyard hate but can be played around with practice. This deck’s worst match-up is by far UB Control with Mill as the primary win condition. This deck wants to put cards into the graveyard so continually drawing cards effectively makes the UB control’s plan even easier to execute.
The next deck I’m going to talk about is Esper ‘Walkers:
| Creatures (4) 2 Consecrated Sphinx 2 Snapcaster Mage Spells (30) 2 Mortarpod 3 Curse of Death’s Hold 1 Doom Blade 2 Forbidden Alchemy 1 Go for the Throat 4 Mana Leak 3 Think Twice 2 Gideon Jura 3 Liliana of the Veil 2 Sorin, Lord of Innistrad 3 Day of Judgment 4 Lingering Souls Lands (26) 2 Island 3 Plains 5 Swamp 1 Darkslick Shores 2 Drowned Catacomb 3 Evolving Wilds 2 Glacial Fortress 4 Isolated Chapel 4 Seachrome Coast (0) | Sideboard (15) 1 Batterskull 3 Ratchet Bomb 2 Intangible Virtue 1 Volition Reins 3 Celestial Purge 1 Karn Liberated 1 Black Sun’s Zenith 3 Despise |
This deck relies on it’s planeswalkers and Lingering Souls to keep you alive and help you control the game. Mortarpod shines as a way to kill Thalia efficiently as you can simply reequip a vampire Sorin token or Lingering Souls token and kill her if she is played in later turns after you originally kill her. The deck also is given some reach with Mortarpod tokens pointed at your opponents face as well as an animated Gideon when your opponent is very low.
The sideboard plan helps shore up the Human matchup, with Intangible Virtues to make your tokens bigger and better to block as well as an additional sweeper in Black Sun Zenith. Despise is a very good card against both control and aggro decks to discard pesky Geists or Hellriders in the Aggro decks, and opposing planeswalkers in the Control decks. Batterskull in the board provides a lifegain answer to the aggro decks that is hard for them to answer and Ratchet Bombs are great against the Human, Token and Delver decks. This is the deck that I like the most right now going into SCG: Phoenix. It has good game against Delver and Ramp, can beat RG Aggro provided you stop their Hellrider/Geist initial start and can counter their sword/kill the creature they are equipping too.
These are the two decks that I’m most likely to play in the Standard event this weekend. I feel that they are both very potent and play towards my style of play as well. For Legacy I’ll be playing Loam if I don’t get sucked into enjoying Modern side events. The biggest thing to note is that you should play a deck that you are comfortable with at these big events. Don’t audible to a deck that is completely different from what you’ve played in the past and change your deck only if you’ve recently played it. Being familiar with how your deck draws and the outs that you have in your presented deck can go very far in a tournament like this weekend’s. I switched last minute to GW tokens in SCG Vegas and I really wish I stuck with the Solar Flare deck that I was playing at the time. I wish all the AZ magicians good luck this weekend and hope that one of our own take both of the titles down.