A Look at the Standard Challenge Winner, GW Midrange

Standard GW Midrange by Cabezadebolo

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Today, I wanted to highlight the deck that won the last Standard Challenge on Magic Online. I’ve only been playing Alchemy and Historic during my preparation for the Neon Dynasty Championship, so I’ll admit that I’m not fully familiar with the current Standard metagame shifts, but I expected to find a Top 8 full of Runes decks. Instead, I found a whole lot of white aggressive decks trying to race Runes with their own aggression and annoy them with Thalia, Skyclave Apparition, Brutal Cathar and Fateful Absence. 

This GW Midrange deck is trying to go over the top of these aggressive white decks with cards like Esika’s Chariot and The Wandering Emperor while gaining life from Prosperous Innkeeper. Against control decks, you can go wide with Wedding Announcement and Chariot and against Runes, you have a very annoying Archon of Emeria, The Wandering Emperor at instant speed that can exile a big attacker and even a couple of Valorous Stance and a playset of Skyclave Apparitions if things go wrong. 

I like that this deck has a clear goal in mind and executes it really well. Instead of playing the unimportant small white creatures that are just running at each other in the white mirrors, you have cards like Esika’s Chariot that create a lot of value and mana dorks to power them out on turn three. Even Yasharn can be quite useful these days against all these Oni-Cult Anvil Rakdos Sacrifice decks. 

What to make of it? If the metagame is moving on from Runes and taking a heavy White Weenie and midrange turn and this is what you can expect on the ladder and in tournaments, I would probably be looking at revisiting Izzet with cards like Burn Down the House and Cinderclasm to try to metagame against these decks.