Hello everyone! Welcome back to The Magic Hole. We’re going into standard this week. I know its stale, and trust me, I’m as excited as anyone else for Dominaria United to drop as anyone else. But there's still standard to be played out there. Fair warning for this one, it can be tough coming up with brand new themes to play every week. I could (and occasionally do) revisit a deck concept a few weeks later, just cause it was a sweet deck and there are tons of ways for that concept to be played. That being said, sometimes my new ideas for decks don’t actually pan out, but I still want to walk through the process of my decision making in building the deck, and allow people to watch the struggle of trying to win with one of my bad ideas.
So, without further ado, my very bad, no good, rotten idea of a deck. Selesnya modify. Selesnya does have the best pieces for a +1 counter deck, with things like Oran-Rief Ooze, Primal Adversary, and the omnipresent Luminarch Aspirant. You would think this would be enough of a start to make a solid modified themed deck, Especially Luminarch, being arguably one of the best cards in the format. My thought was that these creatures would get so unmanageable so quick, that the opponent would be overrun with 7/7s and 8/8s, but that was only the case a few times.
Most of the time, we were lagging behind a Naya Runes deck that is just as good at getting +1 counters on their creatures, while also getting trample, lifelink, and haste from their rune package. We do have access to trample as well, with Kodama of the West Tree allowing all of our modified creatures to have trample, and also ramping us. But this just wasn’t enough when our board of 4/4s were staring down an 8/8 trample, haste, lifelink. Or getting absolutely burned out by a Boros deck that kills any creature that sticks to the battlefield. Or sometimes you get Doomscarred 3 turned in a row…you know, stuff happens.
Some of my favorite tech for the deck was including Fight Rigging. It synergizes really well with the rest of the deck, but it does feel like it's difficult to play this card fairly, without cheating something disgusting out. For us, we were just creating extra value by maybe popping out another Aspirant, or best case scenario a Wandering Emperor.
Overall we were able to win 2 games, which I was even surprised about after losing the first 3. This deck gets a kitchen table score of 7/10, and a ladder-climbing score of 3/10. I think there are some major improvements that could be made, but even with those it is just doing worse than a Naya deck at getting +1 counters on its creatures, and not providing any of the support Runes do.
Thanks again for hanging out in The Magic Hole! I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, feel free to leave a comment and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Also, don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and TikTok!
