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Over the summer, I played one of my favorite decks of the past couple years, U/g Devotion. Most players thought devotion decks were dead once Theros block had revealed all its secrets, but with every new set release, I pursued the archetypes once again.
It wasn’t until Magic Origins was released that my efforts bore fruit. I and many other authors were filled with delight at the long list of possibilities brought to light by the brilliant finale to the core set model.
While everyone else was brewing U/R Artifacts or G/B Elves, I was working to bring back Blue Devotion. Here’s what I rocked all summer.
U/g Devotion by Mike Lanigan
One way to discern if your deck has what it takes is to lend it to someone else to see how they do. I put this process to the test with this deck.
One day my shop was running a small tournament while I was busy with store owner stuff. A frequent customer showed up looking eager to play. With a forgotten deck sitting at home, they appeared about as distraught as a Star Wars fan two months from now who failed to preorder tickets.
The player I lent the deck to is not dedicated to the competitive scene, but their goal was to have fun, so I explained the basics and left them on their way. Being so busy, I didn’t have time to think about the results I was entering in, but at the end of the event I was pleasantly surprised to see my deck had made it to the finals.
In the limited time it was legal, I never got a chance to play U/g Devotion at a bigger event. I had so much fun playing the deck though, I didn’t want to let it die when the format rotated.
Porting Devotion to New Standard
When I saw that Lumbering Falls was in Battle for Zendikar, I knew there was a possibility of porting the deck into the new format.
Any manland WotC gives us will see play at some point. Even cards like Foundry of the Consuls or Spawning Bed are good enough for Standard.
Manlands that double as mana fixers are extremely powerful, and provide a strong incentive to build around. Lumbering Falls and its brother Shambling Vent may not be the most exciting examples we've ever seen, but they still present these incentives.
One of the key components of the U/g Devotion deck was the sideboard strategy against control decks. This may come as no surprise, but I was sideboarding in a healthy Counterspell package.
When Mono-Blue Devotion originally thundered onto the scene back in Theros block, players would bring in at minimum a play set of Dissolve. During that time I had a different strategy that worked quite well for me, but when I started remaking the deck with Magic Origins, I remembered back to how the original version played.
Take note that both of the Origins additions, as well as Collected Company, are instant-speed. This means your opponent never knows what type of disruption to expect at any given moment. Your open mana might represent an additional threat, a bounce or tap effect on a creature, or a counterspell.
This ability to play the game on the opponents' turn was the core attribute I was looking to retain in the new build.
This obviously meant various instants and threats with flash, but it also implies high-impact cards that can be slammed into play after you force the opponent to respond on their turn.
Originally, this role was played by Master of Waves and Thassa, God of the Sea. Both of these cards have a dramatic impact on the way the game plays out. Thassa allows you to filter draws and build to unblockable threats, while Master generates a massive number of threats in one card.
Trying to apply this principle to the new deck, I was at a loss. First of all, I didn’t think the deck had enough meat to make it with just blue and green cards, and second there was nothing remotely similar to Thassa or an elemental army in a can.
The Shift to Temur
I began looking to other colors. I was set on the core of Harbinger of the Tides, Bounding Krasis, and Collected Company. If this strategy was going to work, I would need all three of those cards to build around. That meant adding a third color.
One of Standard's underappreciated bombs is Savage Knuckleblade. When I remembered this card existed, I knew I was on the right track.
Players never got used to playing against this card because there hasn't been a deck that could take full advantage of it. Additionally, with the plethora of Siege Rhinos that were stampeding around the metagame, it didn’t seem like the appropriate time to be jamming 4/4’s.
I only needed to cast this guy one time to realize how insane it really is.
As it turns out, you don’t need to worry about a 4/5 because you can always threaten to pump your Knuckleblade. The risk of investing mana to pump in combat is also mitigated by the counterspell suite, which can protect Knuckleblade should they try to Abzan Charm him or the like.
Before I go on, take a look at the list I'm working with.
Temur Company by Mike Lanigan
You'll notice there are no lands yet; the mana base is still a work in progress. That said, the interesting part are the spells.
The one that probably stands out the most is Shaman of the Great Hunt. I can tell you, that guy has been bananas. Like, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
Shaman is a great follow-up to any interaction on your opponent's turn. During my first tournament with this deck, I was able to sequence the turns that way, adding a +1/+1 counter to two other creatures in the process. To follow that up, later I drew three cards twice with Shaman's other ability. There are few cards in Standard that can get that much mileage.
The creature base can definitely get outclassed by other decks, but you have many ways to interact with larger threats. The majority of the time you can find some way to force damage through. And you can often just fall back on the power of Savage Knuckleblade. They don’t have many six-point chunks of life to spare, and they may be in chump-block mode faster than they expect.
Speaking of Knuckleblade again, he is the perfect threat for this style of deck for so many reasons.
First of all, Knucks is great to cast on turn three. Sometimes you have four mana thanks to Rattleclaw Mystic, who will let you haste him up on curve. Secondly, he fills the role of a board-dominating threat occupied earlier by Thassa and Master of Waves. Finally, there’s nothing better than this guy to hit off of Collected Company.
Another great aspect to playing Temur is that we have access to the wedge's charm as well. These Temur-specific cards have gone unnoticed not because they aren't powerful enough, but because they needed the right deck to take advantage of them.
Temur Charm, for instance, is Mana Leak, instant-speed Hunt the Weak, or pseudo-Falter. Talk about being prepared for any situation.
Not only can you counter nearly any spell, you can also deal with threats after they resolve. The last option happens to be extremely relevant right now with all the tokens running around. Against Bant Tokens, for example, your game plan if they stabilize is to dig for Temur Charm to push through the final points of damage.
Matchups and Further Development
I've been surprised how well this deck has fared in the current metagame. The hardest matchup is G/W Hardened Scales, which you won’t have to face off against very often.
Hangarback Walker is a pain as well. Sure you can tap it or bounce it, but you don’t really have a good way to deal with it permanently in this color combination. I might need to add Touch of the Void to the sideboard to solidify matchups against the thopter-making machine.
All the other matchups are winnable, and according to my limited testing, favorable.
I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough of the creation of Temur Company. If you love countering spells but also being aggressive, this deck is definitely for you.
If you're playing something similar to this deck, tell me how that’s going in the comments. Let me know if you're on the heavy green version too. I prefer the version that can cast Harbinger of the Tides, but I’m open to opinions. Give this deck a try and let me know what you think!
Battle for Zendikar Price Update
In case you missed the memo, Battle for Zedikar prices tanked hard this past weekend. Nearly every card in the set dropped in value.
We all thought this might happen, due to the highly-in-demand Expeditions forcing more and more product to be opened. The result is a market flooded with cards from the set, which brings overall prices down.
This trend should continue, in my opinion, until Oath of the Gatewatch is released. Take advantage of this knowledge now, and if you haven't already, unload your high-end cards from this set to get the most out of them.
As players race to open more and more product, dealers will be flooded with singles. Speaking as a dealer, even though I know prices are trending downward, I made a note to not be afraid of that knowledge. In the following year, prices will recover due to changing demand from the ever-shifting meta.
The lands, planeswalkers, and Drana, Liberator of Malakir are only some of the cards that are good investments. We are reaching peak supply on this set much sooner than most other sets due to the increased demand of Expeditions. Once someone starts putting up results with any of these cards though, there will still be room for prices to increase.
This is a topic I am always right in the middle of with my store, so I see a lot of real-time data relating to it. If you guys have any questions, please leave them in the comments section and I will cover them in a future article.
Until next time,
Unleash the Temur Force!
Mike Lanigan
MtgJedi on Twitter
Jedicouncilman23@gmail.com
Going into SCG States, we could expect a metagame that wasn't too dissimilar from the September format described in our 
For the most part, these changes are well within the range we would expect of deck shifts from month to month. For example, Jund saw a slight .43% increase, but that probably doesn't mean Jund is really moving up in the metagame standings. Sorry that the Siege Rhino vs. Huntmaster of the Fells debate won't be settled today! Jund's .43% change is within the expected variation we would get in any sample of tournaments, just like flipping a fair coin doesn't always get a perfect 50-50 split on heads and tails. We've used confidence intervals to help us account for this variance in the past, and we can apply that same method here.
Collected Company was by far the biggest winner at SCG States, with its two main decks (Abzan Company and Elves) dramatically outperforming their pre-States metagame shares. Naya Company had a small drop but one within the confidence interval, so I'm not too worried about its prospects. Company decks are on the rise for the same reason Affinity was blowing up all autumn: Twin's surprising decline. We'll get to Twin later, but for now it's enough to acknowledge the URx Twin fall and how this allows Company to excel in Modern. Twin decks have a lot of removal and don't care much about a trillion life, which is bad news for Melira and friends. Add crap like Dispel to the mix, not to mention Blood Moon and Anger of the Gods, and you have a real nightmare. Company players can rejoice that this deck is going down. As an added factor, Company players also have an above-average Affinity matchup, which makes these strategies well-positioned in an Affinity-heavy, Twin-light metagame.
More little green men who are happy to see less Deceiver Exarch at the top tables! Elves hates sweepers, doesn't pack a lot of removal, and struggles to assemble synergies under constant burn pressure. If we continue to see less Twin, we'll also see more Elves along the way. Unlike Abzan Company, however, Elves can struggle with the Affinity matchup, which is a big reason you see Company mages sleeving up Abzan cards and not just Elvish Archdruid and his people. We're at a weird point where there's enough Affinity for Abzan Company to benefit from the matchup, but also enough Affinity for Elves to be held back: the relative Company shares could change, depending on how this shakes out.
No matter what the Modern metagame looks like, we can always count on Abzan and Jund to be locked in an eternal struggle for top BGx contender. Jund is on top for now, but don't count on that to last forever. As players start packing larger creatures to get out of Lightning Bolt range, or try to go too wide for Kolaghan's Command to handle, you can expect the BGx mages to return to Path to Exile and Lingering Souls. Stony Silence doesn't hurt either, as no one wants to go into events with a bad Affinity matchup. I don't know if we're at the Jund/Abzan tipping point yet, but as Abzan keeps climbing we might get there soon.
Remember that untiered list which got added to the table? That would be Gruul Zoo, aka "Small Zoo", aka "Too-Much-Pressure-Zoo". While everyone else was messing around with those silly robots, Zan Syed took a fiery 
On the one hand, I'm never surprised when Merfolk does well. It's such a solid deck with lots of random strong matchups and punching power. On the other hand, I don't really understand why this deck is doing well in our current metagame. Twin, Merfolk's best matchup, is on a hard decline. Affinity, Merfolk's worst matchup (and I mean god-awful worst matchup), remains at the top. My only explanation is that Merfolk has a lot of middling 50-50 or 55-45 matchups to make up for the awful Affinity duel, which gives it 
I'm only including Ad Nauseam here because it showed up in the quantitative analysis. From a qualitative perspective, I don't see Ad Nauseam being any better or worse off after States than it was before. This is a rogue combo deck that will sometimes excel and sometimes fail spectacularly. It's the kind of deck that is good at smaller events where you can take a field unprepared, but much worse in larger ones where you will randomly stumble on bad matchups. For all intents and purposes, Ad Nauseam should still remain a ~2% deck in your book, even if it was slightly less popular at States.
Not all -.5% changes are created equal. Unlike Ad Nauseam's dip, Grixis Delver's small decline represents a real drop in the format. As we've seen over the last few months, Grixis strategies are struggling mightily to remain relevant in Modern. Grixis Control (and its midrangey Liliana of the Veil-powered variants) saw a slight uptick to around 3.2%, and it's no coincidence that this increase (+.53%) is almost identical to Grixis Delver's decrease. This represents Grixis players shifting their cards around to keep competitive in a format that is heavily anti-Grixis. We see this echoed in Grixis Twin's decline (see below), a further indictment of the Grixis color pairings. There are lots of reasons for this shift: decks going big or wide to dodge one-for-one RB removal, a painful manabase that can't recover lost ground against linear decks, etc. The end result is less Grixis in Modern, and although I expect this to turn around in the future, I don't expect we'll see that for at least a few more months.
Infect always hovers in the 3.5% - 4.5% range, occasionally rising higher when players forget about it. This time, players remembered. Infect had a good September, starting with some strong finishes at SCG Cincinnati and retaining momentum throughout the month. It's no surprise that Infect retreated in October after players caught on and packed their Spellskites. Infect also suffers splash damage from rising Abzan Company shares, all of which contribute to this temporary decline. Expect Infect to stay in this range for the next few months, bouncing up and down as other metagame factors make the deck better (more Affinity) or worse (more Twin).
Poor Sun Titan and Dragonlord Ojutai. After months (years!) out of the spotlight, UW Control finally earned a coveted tier 2 slot in our September rankings. States casts doubt on these September finishes, suggesting the deck might not be as lasting or powerful as many expected. I'm a little surprised at this because UW Control has enough sweepers to handle go-wide linear decks and enough lifegain/mana stability to avoid incidental lifeloss. We might think this would set up the deck for States success. With one notable exception, 
Here we are again: another metagame-related article reporting on another Twin decline. The most important part of the SCG States drop is the split between UR Twin's and Grixis Twin's relative dips. Grixis Twin, following the fate of Grixis decks throughout the format, took a giant hit to its old share. Then there's UR Twin, the time-tested contender, with a much more modest .5% drop. Incidentally (spoiler alert for next week!), UR Twin fared much better in the overall metagame, so I'm willing to write off at least the UR Twin decline as a States-specific oddity. It's certainly not reflected in the overall metagame, where UR Twin is back to a much more respectable 4.2% share after weeks under 3%. Grixis Twin, however, is a very real decline corresponding to the Grixis combinations' very real downfall. Throughout the year, we saw Grixis Twin's fortunes rise with the rest of the Grixis decks. As such, we can't be too surprised when Grixis shares trend in the other direction. To some extent, we'd need a lot more data to know if that's a real relationship or just a cute narrative, but I'm sticking with it at least through the end of the year.
Compare this to decks such as Burn, which tend to have a lower skill ceiling because you have fewer decisions throughout the game, even if many of those decisions are very important. Affinity can outmaneuver almost any deck when piloted correctly. While Affinity aims to kill around turn four, its ability to grind down an opponent who stalls with removal is very strong and rare for aggressive decks in Modern. Cards like Etched Champion, Inkmoth Nexus, and Blinkmoth Nexus go a long way towards this end. Unlike Affinity, the majority of aggressive decks in Modern are overly linear with fewer choices and decision trees. This difference is a big reason why aggressive decks wane in certain metas, but Affinity normally does not.
Steel Overseer and Signal Pest demonstrate another strength of the Affinity deck: its ability to go wide quickly with big payoffs. Cards like Ornithopter, Vault Skirge, and Memnite require some support to make them worth playing, as they are quite underpowered on their own. Signal Pest and Steel Overseer, along with Master of Etherium, pump these smaller creatures, rewarding you for playing synergistic cards. Left unchecked, they will just take over the game, which is a big issue for opponents who don't (or can't) answer them. They also often require different sets of answers. Signal Pest cannot usually be traded with through creatures, Overseer requires immediate burn or removal, and Master will usually demand a hard removal spell to kill at all. The ability to play a very aggressive game, one bolstered with must-answer threats like Overseer and Ravager, creates an absurd amount of pressure for your opponents.
One of the biggest reasons Affinity continues to succeed is its diverse and effective sideboard. That said, this returns us to an earlier point about the deck rewarding high-skill pilots: over-sideboarding slows the deck down but under-sideboarding can leave you dead to cards like Stony Silence or Night of Souls' Betrayal. Affinity experts need to balance these tensions. Some all-star cards in current Affinity sideboards are Blood Moon, Ghirapur Aether Grid, Spell Pierce, and Thoughtseize, which all help steal percentage points back in tough matchups. Blood Moon can snipe wins versus various three-color decks and shut down land-based combo decks like Bloom Titan. Ghirapur Aether Grid allows Affinity to fight through the powerful Stony Silence and turn otherwise dead cards such as Springleaf Drum and Mox Opal into damage dealers. Thoughtseize and Spell Pierce allow the deck to take on a more aggro-control role post-board, letting you apply pressure while holding countermagic against the sweeping sideboard cards many players will have for Affinity.
The BGx matchup, especially Abzan, can be a struggle for the average Affinity draw. Their combination of cheap efficient creatures and removal makes the matchup feel like a race, but one where the BGx decks have cards like Lingering Souls, Lightning Bolt, and Tarmogoyf to swing the battle. The bad news is that Affinity cannot match the individual cardpower of Abzan or Jund, and both have tools to fight Affinity after board. The good news is that BGx decks suffer from having many fetchlands that want to find shocklands. This helps Affinity get there with weaker hands that can only deal 14 damage. Much like Burn, Affinity takes advantage of the punishing Modern manabase, only it seeks to punch through for single massive attacks rather than wear you down with burn spells. The keys to victory, especially against BGx, are experience and smart sideboarding. Overall, although Abzan and Jund can beat Affinity (especially postboard with Silence and Ancient Grudge), Affinity players well-versed in their deck can weave through the matchup and take down many closer games.
Twin, especially UR Twin, has long been seen as a poor matchup for Affinity and its absence is seen as a reason for Affinity's recent dominance. This evaluation isn't wrong, but I believe that Twin is a more card-dependent matchup than many realize. Thanks to their interactive elements, Twin's kill is often faster. If they can resolve the combo, you have exactly four Galvanic Blasts to break it up in game one. Post-board you have a more answers, but Twin will be bringing in its own dedicated hate. Twin is one of the harder matchups for Affinity of the top tier decks as waiting until turn five to play Splinter Twin with Dispel backup can usually get the job done, even if the disruption plan is not enough. To win, the Affinity player must put the Twin pilot under enough pressure to force a combo on turn four with no protection. In that situation, Affinity can take down the game. The best plan for Affinity is to simply play as aggressively as possible and force Twin to combo or die.
