Hello, fellow planeswalkers! Wizards of the Coast announced its first annual banning on August 7th, 2023.  It turned out to be much to do about nothing.  Despite speculation about banning cards that would have rotated from standard and the questions about the One Ring in modern, Wizards of the Coast did not ban any cards today. This means that going into the release of Wilds of Eldraine no additional cards will be banned in standard.  This means that the card pool for standard will continue to increase as we go through the release of new sets over [...]

Hello, fellow planeswalkers!  Welcome to Standard Weekly! Monday, August 7th is an important day in the World of Magic The Gathering.  Wizards of the Coast will make its first annual ban announcement before the arrival of the first fall set.  This year, the set will be the Wilds of Eldraine. Earlier this year, Wizards of the Coast announced that rotation will happen every three years rather than every two years.  This will add four additional sets to standard.  How the addition of these sets will affect standard is unknown, but to soften the impact of these additional [...]

Dissecting New Decks in Standard Hello everyone!  Welcome to Standard Weekly! This week we got to play with the cards from Phyrexia: All Will Be One for the first time in standard.  While a lot of the preexisting decks stayed relatively the same, there was one new deck that interested me: Mono-Red with Koth.  The build of the deck was created by Twitch streamer Crokeyz’s.  It takes advantage of several new cards from Phyrexia: All Will Be One and some under utilities cards from Dominaria United.  I like the deck enough that I play it at Friday Night Magic. [...]

The Best Red & Black Decks Hello everyone!  Welcome to Standard Weekly! This week’s article will focus on the best multi-colored decks that utilize black and red.  First, we will look at Rakdos Midrange followed by the two Grixis decks popular in standard.  Along with Mono-Black, these are the Tier 1 best-of-three decks according to data from untapped.gg.  Mono-Black has over 24,000 games played.  Rakdos Midrange has over 8100 games.  Grixis Vampires has over 3200 games played.  Grixis Midrange has over 16,000 games played.  On a typical day on MTG Arena, these decks make up over 35% of the best [...]