I ended up playing Naya for the Standard Open at SCG Syracuse. Here’s the list:
Naya Nonsense
I went 8-7. I lost to every aggressive deck I played against.
Don’t play this deck.
I’m going to touch on a few things you should know as a big creature midrange deck, because how you build the deck is more important than ever in this format.
Don’t skimp on removal, and don’t lean too heavily on your creatures to do the dirty work for you. It’s going to end in a bad time if anything goes under you. And you’re going to fall behind the ball if any haymaker hits you, like Enter the God-Eternals or Liliana, Dreadhorde General.
Don’t play Domri. Either of them. Anarch of Bolas is often a three-mana Farseek that might be a removal spell if you can establish it. The only exception to this is if you play Status // Statue and Sarkhan the Masterless. More on this later.
The third color is good, but don’t do it to shore up your aggro matchups. The manabase hurts too much, and you’ll often wind up killing your own creatures, or worse, getting rebuilt on. You can’t follow up with something that can one-two your opponent, like, say, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria or Finale of Promise into Arclight Phoenix. Play white for Shalai, black for Vraska, Golgari Queen and the plethora of versatile Golgari split cards.
Stop trying to beat everything. No seriously.
Moving forward, I’m going to play some form of Gruul/Jund Warriors:
Gruul Warriors
Tim Wu won an MCQ with something similar, and I trust anything Liz Lynn sends my way. I think this deck is much better than what I played. The manabase is slightly better, and the split cards are amazing, especially Status // Statue. I don’t know if it’s worth playing more black sources to support the Statue half of things.
Gruul Spellbreaker is the best card in the format against Teferi, Time Raveler. As long as they don’t figure out that they should be sideboarding them out against you, you should be beating those decks pretty well.
Oh yeah. I didn’t play Arclight Phoenix because I’m a punk and I got scared. I convinced Kevin Jones to play it and he got ninth on breakers though.
I think that’s it.
Drink water. Get sleep before the tournament.
See y’all in Worcester.
Anthony Lowry is a multi-game competitor, breaking into the FGC as a high level DBFZ player in less than a year, a well-established MTG player, and many other accomplishments.