This marks the return of guest writer Frank Lepore who previously authored the much talked about, “Has Magic Lost Its Way” on this site. With barely a weekend remaining in the current PTQ season he offers up a last minute control deck that has performed well for him online for those of your scrambling for a blue envelope this weekend.

Some exposition:  A while back, on ChannelFireball, Gerry Thompson threw out a Grixis control decklist in an article that never got very much attention.  I never saw it or a list like it ever make any headlines, but the deck always performed solid for me.  The threats were all resilient (Wydwen, Demigod, Banefire) and almost every card was a two-for-one (Jace, Cryptic Command, Cruel Ultimatum, etc.).  This was the deck I played at the last PTQ, going 6-2 and getting 13th.  My only losses were to mono-red, which prompted me to put four Magma Spray in the board for Anathemancer/Hellspark Elemental/Figure of Destiny/Outlander which I hoped would give me the time I needed to stabalize.  Well, I gave the deck to my friend Sal to play at an FNM and he immediately fell in love with it.  He took it to the finals and from then on wanted to play it at every FNM.  But something happened.

You know how sometimes a deck no longer feels viable, even though you can’t really explain how or why you feel that way?  Like the times have just changed?

Well, that was how I had felt.  Even though nothing from M10 had really changed in the deck, it just didn’t feel like the deck to play.  I didn’t know why though.  All the cards were still great!  The deck didn’t lose anything and the format hadn’t gained anything that really hindered the deck.  Maybe I just didn’t feel right that I was the only one playing this deck; maybe I was overlooking something, or getting lucky.  Either way, I kept telling Sal to play something else.

Well, last week (8/7) he texted me with a list he wanted to play and it seemed really good.  I got to the store early and started putting it together for him, changing a few cards here and there, tweaking the mana base, and making a sideboard for him.  The final list ended up as follows:

AngelFire 2.0

Baneslayer Angel

2 Essence Scatter
2 Negate
4 Broken Ambitions
4 Cryptic Command
4 Jace Beleren
3 Ajani Vengeant
4 Volcanic Fallout
4 Baneslayer Angel
2 Bogarden Hellkite
3 Plumeveil
2 Hallowed Burial
1 Banefire
3 Rugged Parerie
3 Cascade Bluff
3 Mystic Gate
4 Reflecting Pool
2 Vivid Creek
2 Vivid Meadow
1 Vivid Crag
3 Island
2 Plains
2 Mountain
Sideboard:
4 Kitchen Finks
1 Hallowed Burial
3 Runed Halo
2 Celestial Purge
1 Pithing Needle
2 Essence Scatter
2 Negate

Before Sal got to the store, I played a few games against Brad playing Faeries and it went 2-1 pre-board against them.  I loved playing the deck because it felt like I was always in control of the game.  It was then I realized that the list was just the Grixis deck but with white instead of black!  Ha!  Sal had managed to convince me to let him play the deck he wanted to play by simply switching out one color for another and forcing me to see the deck with new eyes.  I was impressed. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Jordan is a frequent contributor to Magicthegathering.com, former NJ State Champion, and a teammate of Steve Sadin and Michael J Flores at Pro Tour Charleston, where they finished in 26th place as Team Two-Headed Giant. Steve (who did an excellent job of coverage at UK Nationals) sent Paul the breakdown of decks and Paul has produced the following analysis of the Standard rounds in his first ever piece for Top8Magic.com.

Thanks to my once and future teammate, I was able to do some number crunching on UK Nats. This won’t be a full-blown thing, as it was a pretty small tournament, but there should still be a nugget or two worth exploring. Let’s take a look, shall we?

U.S. and Japanese Nationals saw victories from 5Color decks built around the powerful sorcery, Cruel Ultimatum. In England, they took note and filled their deckboxes with Vivid lands and Reflecting Pools in hopes of adding another title to Grixis’ mantle. What they got, however, was something quite different. Instead of a field full of Faeries, White aggro decks and Elves this was one littered with Blightning and Jund decks — along with the ever-present mirror match.

5Color Control decks remained the most popular, eating up 17% of the field in the UK , though it did lose about 5% over Japan and the US. Faeries, White Aggro and Elves! all lost between 5 and 10% of their share of the field, largely being supplanted by Jund and Blightning. The UK also seemed to fill out the ranks with a much larger variety of onesy-twosy decks that had their own categorization. Steve Sadin already did a breakdown for the mothership here, so I won’t delve much further into it, but you get the idea. It was a vastly different field.

A lot of people no doubt noticed the 58% win rate of Blightning decks over two National tournaments and chose it as their weapon of choice as a result. With so many more people running the deck, it was not likely to sustain the great numbers. As expected, there was a drop, but it still came through, with a very manageable 52%. Nothing dominating going on there, of course, but still worth keeping track of. Surprisingly, the pitfall for this deck seems to be in quote-unquote random decks. Jund and 5CC, the two most popular decks outside of Blightning, were both handily kept in check at 79% and 56% respectively, but Blightning only won 44% of its remaining matches, with each minor piece of the metagame taking a bite. None of those decks faced Blightning more than 8 times, but they all combined to put some serious hurt on the would-be best deck.

So what was the best deck? It is a little difficult to say. With such a small tournament, and such a wide variety of decks, there were a lot that had very few matches played. This led to some difficulty in really understanding how each deck did. So you could say that Doran and its 18 matches at 79% was best, or Kithkin at 25 and 64%, or Elves! at 47 and 60%. I could understand an argument for any of those. I’d lean towards Elves! stirctly due to sample size, as losing 4% over almost double the matches from Kithkin is, well, pretty good.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to infer any concrete meaning from this tournament, as the most matches of any one deck against another was 16 (Blightning vs. 5CC), which is an extremely low number with regards to sample size. What we can look at, though, is the overall performances. So while this is going to be the end of the analysis, I’ll send BDM and Matt a spreadsheet that hopefully they can link you to if you want to come to your own conclusions.

UK Nats Spreadsheet