Setting Up to Win: Standard

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time on another game in addition to Magic. This new game is Star Wars X-Wing. If you like Star Wars, miniatures, or strategy games, this is something you should make time to try. Once you get the basic rules down, you move on to building your squad and battling with it. This process is quite similar to building a new deck for Magic. There are a variety of strategies and there’s a metagame similar to that of Standard that evolves every time a new expansion is released.

In addition to your ships having abilities, there are a plethora of upgrades that you can choose that will grant additional abilities. Each ship flies differently and depending on what upgrades you choose, a ship can change quite a bit from one person’s build to another.

I bring this amazing, yet seemingly unrelated game, up for two different reasons. The first is for perspective. By playing other games than Magic, it forces your brain to analyze situations differently. This process is great for improving in Magic. Certainly, if you want to be good, don’t spend all of your time on another game, but devoting some time once in a while to other games can actually improve your performance. Other games play differently than Magic and building lots of angles of attack into your working knowledge is a great advantage to have.

The second reason I bring this game up is to talk about the new perspective I’ve gained in Magic by playing X-Wing. In the game, one of the most important parts is planning your opening sequence. A lot of players spend time planning detailed openings that allow the game to play out in the direction they are setting it up. There is also a lot of planning on the fly of course, but having a game plan for your opening is pretty important. Without this preparation, you will be drastically disadvantaged no matter what your opponent brings to battle with.

We can apply this same type of thinking to Magic. Here are some opening strategies currently employed in Standard.

[cardimage cardname='Sylvan Caryatid']

Think about Sylvan Caryatid, and to a somewhat lesser degree Elvish Mystic. By putting this card in your deck you are making some initial claims about your strategy for winning games. The presence of this card in your deck signifies some things that may be obvious but that you probably have not taken a moment to consider. First of all, you are setting yourself up to propel yourself into the midgame as quickly as possible. It’s a defensive creature as well so if you don’t need the extra mana right away, you are also defending yourself, which in turn also helps you survive in order to get to the midgame.

There are many strategies built from this card as a starting point in Standard right now, but without this card, those strategies would be much weaker and may not even exist at all. The best draws the green decks are capable of all start with Sylvan Caryatid being played on turn two.

When approaching deck building in a new format, identifying a card like Sylvan Caryatid is essential to finding the best strategies available. Thinking about your card choices is always important. My suggestion is to think about why you are choosing the cards you are choosing and using that information to help you make your deck building decisions.

[cardimage cardname='Jeskai Ascendancy']

Often players plan their opening strategies on a combination of cards that when played together wins the game on the spot. Jeskai Ascendancy fills that roll in our current Standard format. The interesting part about this enchantment is that it can accomplish that goal in multiple ways.

When planning ahead, you need to decide what you want to happen after you play your Ascendancy. Do you want to try to combo right away, do you want to have a backup plan in case you can’t combo, or do you want to use the abilities of this card in a more fair way throughout the course of the game? Your answer to that question will determine what other cards should go into your deck.

Decks like these develop because someone asks themselves what would happen if they paired a card with another card. Like, what if after I play Jeskai Ascendancy, I just use the abilities on the card to actually pump up my creatures as well as filter through the cards I don’t need in my hand in order to find good cards in each matchup. This seems like what may have happened for Yuuya Watanabe when he was preparing for the World Championship recently.

[cardimage cardname='Favored Hoplite']

Favored Hoplite, or any of the other heroic creatures, are part of a popular aggressive opening strategy right now in Standard. If you know that you want to start the game with a creature that relies on spells in order to become a threat, you need to build your deck with that concept in mind.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this type of opening sequence lately but my focus has been on doing this in Modern. In Standard, Heroic is one of the only ways to have an opening like this, but in Modern we have Infect, Affinity, and Bogles with other possibilities as well.

Let’s say that we want our opening to consist of starting out with Glistener Elf. Conventional knowledge states that after we play that creature, we should follow it up with spells that pump its power up quickly like Giant Growth type effects and preferably ones that also do other things like Vines of Vastwood. Additionally, we should play some blue spells like Spell Pierce to protect our creatures because that’s a good strategy but also because we should include Blighted Agent as one of our possible openers.

What if we decided that our follow up to Glistener Elf should be Rancor though? Is that better, and what implications does that have on the rest of our list? A lot of players get stuck in a rut of pairing card with cards they ‘should’ be paired with. I’m guilty of this type of thinking as well, but pushing past it helps us discover new strategies and helps take decks to the next level.

With this current example, using Rancor as step two could lead to a more aura-based strategy, sort of like combining Bogles with Infect. In a metagame where Path to Exile doesn’t see much play, like the one we’re in right now, that might be a better set up for your protect-the-queen strategy than trying to play only pump spells to win the game.

[cardimage cardname='Dissolve']

Dissolve is yet another opening card strategy that is seeing some play in Standard. All of the other cards have cost one or two mana, so starting with this as your opening strategy already seems weaker than the other strategies. If this counter were paired with other strong removal spells as well as good card drawing and a potent finisher, then this might be a more viable strategy in Standard. As it stands now, playing a strategy revolving around Dissolve is tough to accomplish because your spells cost relatively a lot of mana and they are not that much better for costing more.

There are certainly more opening strategies in Standard right now, but those are the most common as well as the ones that have been finding success. I found it quite interesting that there were virtually no decks with openings like Soldier of the Pantheon or Akroan Crusader that are doing well right now. This seems to be a direct result of the Sylvan Caryatid decks that run lots of lifegain cards, clog the ground, and may follow up with Doomwake Giant.

To those of you trying to play an aggressive strategy right now, consider how other players' openings affect your card and deck choice. Be the player thinking about the card choices you make and not the one following the crowd. Hopefully today I’ve given you guys some strategies to do just that.

Setting up to Win: Finance

[cardimage cardname='Fatestitcher']

These days in Magic finance, you need to be ahead of the game in order to be making money. Unless you are thinking about the possible trajectory or get lucky and identify a card right as it’s spiking, you are not likely going to make money on speculating.

Take Fatestitcher for example. Your window to make money on this bulk uncommon was extremely short. If you waited until you saw it seeing play in Legacy to try to get in, that was already too late. The best time to get in is when you are hearing rumors about a card seeing play and think it has a legitimate shot at jumping in value. These types of speculation tend to be more risky though, but the community reacts extremely quickly to any new development that you must be one step ahead if you want to continue to speculate.

Because speculating has become harder than it used to be, we may need to investigate other ways to make money with our resources. The best way I’ve found is that many serious traders have transitioned into owing or helping run businesses so they can be getting the buy list price instead of full price in trade value. This is not an option for everyone, but if you have built up some skills, maybe it’s time for you to approach your local shop and ask to sell singles there and help them build up a community.

If you are not up for that challenge yet, try to identify trends in the Standard metagame that you can take advantage of. I used to do this before I got involved with my business. What I mean by this is that you don’t have to be ripping people off in order to get ahead in trading. For instance, if you think a card is going to increase in value even a dollar or two, it may not be worth it to buy into that card, but it’s definitely worth it to trade for the card. If you are constantly trading for cards that go up a couple dollars in value you will find your binder continually increasing in value.

Regardless of how you do it, there is still a lot of money to be made using Magic as our medium. How are you going to make your money from this game?