The Walker Madness

Standard nowadays is boring; I even consider it more boring than when faeries were around. 

Jace TMS turned to be the new Tarmogoyf, if someone’s plays blue they have to play Jace TMS, but there aren´t that many answers to planeswalkers as there are to creatures, since Shards of Alara rotated with M10 we went from Oblivion Ring, Pithing Needle, Maelstrom Pulse and Vampire Hexmage as answers to Walkers to only Vampire Hexmage, they gave us a creature with a pithing needle effect on Scars of Mirrodin but creatures are so easy to get rid of that I can’t even consider it an answer to walkers.

So this gave us a wacky field, control decks can be defined by Ux decks, because of the lack of answers to Walkers it’s impossible to play without blue and Jace TMS at the risk of being completely overrun by him, this is the absolute true, the only colors that could compete that as a decent answer to Jace is black, in the form of Vampire Hexmage, unfortunately he’s not easily splash able which limits you to the colors BR and UB where we have dual lands with black. Red is mainly an agro color and is not so common to play it on control decks, and if you are playing blue you are playing Jace TMS so you are playing to drop it before your opponent does and not looking for some way to answer him which by the way you can by just playing your own Jace TMS.

This leaves us with attacking or redirecting damage to Walkers. To attack them efficiently you have to be running a agro deck because most of the times you will need multiple creatures to get through; Jace TMS can bounce, Elspeth Tirel makes 3 1|1 tokens, Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas can turn any artifact into a 5/5, Garruk can make a 3|3 token, Gideon goes up to 8 loyalty counters; or risk being time walked, redirecting damage (or burn) is not so efficient neither; Jace TMS can go up to 5 loyalty counters, Elspeth Tirel to 6, Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas to 4, Garruk to 4, Gideon goes up to 8; so you end up having to attack and throw some burn to kill them or spend multiple cards on it and being fogged efficiently or risk being overpowered by them in a couple of turns. But to make it even worse there are walkers like Elspeth Tirel, Tezzerets, Servant of Bolas and mostly Gideon jura that can protect other walkers and themselves as any card can’t, so besides having to deal with walkers you will need to deal with walkers that protect other walkers and that make you overcommit to wrath effects. While agro decks are still able to handle this, other control and midrange decks aren’t since they have to rely on creatures to attack them and because these decks rarely play efficient casting creatures they end up being easily outmaneuvered either by the walkers effects, by blocking or other cards your opponent can throw in. This is so boring it gets to the point were in a control matchup the one who wins is the one that can get a Jace TMS through counter magic.

So we have a meta with control decks with Jace TMS, agro decks and some combo decks that recently aren’t doing too well. This is a really boring meta, at least for me that is tired of playing Jace battles and that is not very fond of playing agro.

I was having a lot fun playing a Monowhite control deck that was great against agro, efficient against control and really bad against ramp decks but with Scars control matchups became impossible as they completely trash the build.

So while this madness continues, at least until Jace TMS rotates out, I will end playing up some kind of fish build most likely with Jace TMS but I will try to avoid Caw-Go as I’m not very fond of its play stile.

Well time will tell. Until next time.