Observations in testing (standard)

The whole point of testing is to obviously learn more about the format. That said, the point of this topic is to freely discuss what we learned in testing. Individual decks can be posted in their own topics, this is meant to be more broad in scope. Anyway, allow me to talk about what I learned yesterday:

Last night I played mostly r/g/b tokens and 5 color control. I don't think I have to tell anyone that 5cc is ridiculously powerful. It's actually intoxicating to blow someone out with Cruel Ultimatum and the sheer CA and power of the cards at your disposal is exhilerating. I think most of us got a shot at this deck last night and we all fell in love with it. I know I did.

The deck mowes through aggro like nothing. Between the sweepers and finks it's just sick how you blow out these decks. One thing that took me by surprise though was the main deck mind shatter doogle had in his list (I'm sure his current list will be posted elsewhere). The mind shatter is even good against aggro.

Now in Chapin's 5cc articles on SCG, he seems to argue that mind shatter and mind spring are obsoleted by Cruel Ultimatum (CU). I couldn't disagree more. Against control, CU is a beating, but assuming it even resolves, they get to choose the cards they discard and they likely have more than 3 in their hand even if it does. Don't get me wrong, it's teh nutz, but nothing puts them out of the game like a resolved mind shatter. And in Doogle's list it's main. I love it! No one plays around it and you just catch them with their pants down game 1. Conversely, the mind spring is totally obsoleted by the abundance of card draw in the deck. Esper charm, Cryptic Command, Mulldrifter and CU, all mean your hand will often be stock. That should be another Mind Shatter for sure.

Also of note, memory plunder is nuts in the sideboard. Make sure it's in your 5cc list.

We can pretty safely conclude at this point, that 5cc is the ten ton elephant in the room and is the deck to beat at the moment. One deck that seems to do well against it game 1 is faeries. For the same reasons that it did well against it in block. This time, our lists lack cloudthresher and the deck is even slower now, meaning the fae are even harder to get ahead on. Typically 5cc is so slow that faeries has no trouble getting and maintaining a lead. Fae lists now run Jace, which is savage against 5cc and allow them to stay ahead both in terms of card advantage and tempo.

I'd be curious to see how Doran does against it, so I'm going to get a doran deck ready for our next testing session. Also, how does mono red fare?





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I also played r/g/b tokens last night, and blew out almost everything that wasn't 5cc. I can beat them with the right draw, but my hands last night were utter dog shit and I just plain got beat

It was also funny to watch Mark Jung test 5cc. He was playing a couple other decks, a WW deck of sorts and a Sharuum deck. When he got his mitts on 5cc he lit up like a christmas tree and relegated his other decks to the scrap heap.


That's all I have for now, I encourage you to read Chapin's article on SCG from yesterday and look at his 5cc list and the changes he has made to it.

Most of your dont know but I was there last night...

my names is Kent btw...

anyways 5cc was everything greg just said and a bit more. the charms make the deck have stuff to do early game and making someone discard their hand for a mind shatter is possibly the most heart breaking thing ever.

as for now i have fae sleeved up and i was the one playing it last night...its still good but the discussion is does fae go white for esper charm? i think md keep fae as is but from the board esper charm is very hard to ignore....

thoughts?

maybe go blue for naturalize/chameleon coll?

im really up for whatever

can we get the current 5cc list? and as much of the sb as possible for now

-Kent