Lately I have been closely watching Standard due to the BG Seasons Past deck. It has everything in a deck that I enjoy: removal, cool threats, card advantage, control as well as a miserable look in your opponents eyes while you out value them and shut them out. Recently a few new cards in Standard have caught my eye and I now want to brew and play it more than I have since GB The Rock when Liliana of the Veil and Thragtusk were legal.
The new cards that really entice me to come back to Standard are Splendid Reclamation, Grapple with the Past and Ishkanah, Grafwidow. Delirium and land interactions have caught my left eye while my right eye was already watching the Seasons Past decks, so I decided that I would combine the two for this new Standard brew which I now present you below.
BG Seasoned Lands
Any of my regular readers know that I love The Gitrog Monster in Legacy. They know that I love grindy control style decks based out of Golgari and they know that I love “cute” interactions. I love the way that the BG Seasons Past deck can just return everything from Evolving Wilds up to Dark Petition to go and grab Seasons Past so you can wash, rinse and repeat. This is my fresh new take on this great Standard deck and now I lead you all through my new additions. Rather than going into details about an existing deck that I am sure many Standard players recognize and know, I will just be focused on the changes that I have made.
Creatures
To lead the charge with our lands theme we begin with The Gitrog Monster. This is a great large beater that can allow us to draw through our deck, play extra lands and chew our opponent into a bloody arm hanging out of the Monsters mouth.
Tireless Tracker is here to give our opponent a clue about what our deck is trying to do, bad pun intended. We can ramp hard and begin cracking clues in order to grow a large Tracker and be able to draw into anything we need to close a game out. Later in the game when we fill our Graveyard with Lands then a timely Splendid Reclamation presents us with a lot of clues and the mana in which to crack many of them.
Ishkanah, Grafwidow is a valuable tool to have with all of the Spirit decks running about. Flying can be problematic to deal with and since delirium is relatively easy to get here, we could easily Traverse the Ulvenwald to find this large creepy looking Spider if we need her. I will say that I hate spiders, they are creepy with too many legs and eyes and they can all die. But for what we want in this deck, she will do just fine.
Land Recursion
In this section we can begin with the simple Drownyard Temple. This land adds a colorless to our mana pool, but for three generic mana it can return to the battlefield from the graveyard which gives us an easy extra card drawn a turn with The Gitrog Monster, also works well to sacrifice to World Breaker should we find it in the graveyard.
Grapple with the Past is a newcomer with Eldritch Moon being printed and helps us get to Delirium as well as return used creatures or lands as needed.
The single Pulse of Murasa is a way that we can fight aggressive strategies in the main board as well as a way to get back lands or creatures for value. Running this alongside Den Protector can allow us to get a nearly infinite number of chump blocks and life gain against aggressive strategies while we dig for sweepers and beaters.
Splendid Reclamation wraps up our land recursion package and can give us a way to ensure that we have Land in play while getting value from Tireless Tracker. Being able to return all of our lands to get clues, and then have the extra mana to crack them and grow our Tracker to a very unmanageable size for many decks.
Planeswalkers
Here we only have one Nissa, Vastwood Seer. It helps us find the additional land that we need and once flipped can begin making the 4/4 Ashaya, the Awoken World, drawing us cards or drawing cards and gaining life with an activation of her ultimate and the more land that we find when drawing cards, the more value we get from The Gitrog Monster.
Sideboard
The sideboard has been designed with discard and ways to fight aggressive decks. Jaddi Offshoot seems very good as an early blocker and if we can resolve a Splendid Reclamation it will likely gain us a lot of life to offset early aggressive starts.
Gaea’s Revenge is a way to get through an Ojutai’s Command and get into aggression as the game goes later. The haste is key for Revenge being chosen as an addition to the deck.
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet seems as though it is a great option against aggression. The lifelink and ability to make a Zombie every time a creature dies are all very appealing for our deck which is slow and wants to control the early game and keep your board clear after the fact.
The rest of the sideboard is meant to handle anything that we might find problematic like a Collected Company with cards like Duress. The Virulent Plague is there for any token matches, and it would likely be in the main board if it seemed as though tokens decks were as popular as they were before Eldritch Moon. The additional removal being the fourth copy of Languish is definitely appealing against heavy creature decks like Bant Company, UW Spirits and the Wx Humans deck.
Initial Thoughts
Being out of a Seasons Past shell I have to assume this deck has a lot of competitive potential. The deck has threats and removal all along the curve and just like Seasons Past it has Dark Petition so we can find any card needed if not just Seasons Past for value. I would like to believe that we get away without running any true Planeswalker and it could be correct to add an Ob Nixilis Reignited or more likely Liliana, the Last Hope since they both provide us with an answer to Creatures as well as card advantage while we stabilize to get us ahead. Given the amount of the cards this deck can draw, it may even be relevant to go higher than sixty cards to help ensure that we cannot easily deck ourselves.
Happy brewing to each and every one of you. If anyone has an idea for a brew that they would like to see, I will gladly take requests and challenges either on Twitter, Facebook or where ever you might find me. 🙂
Aaron Gazzaniga manages a restaurant and in his off time has been an avid magic player/brewer since 2003. Having begun in Odyssey Standard Block and always favoring control and prison style decks, we come to this moment in time where Aaron finally gets to talk about and share his ideas.