Standard Naya Midrange by Hisamichi Yoshigoe
Planeswalker (3)
Creature (14)
Sorcery (4)
Artifact (4)
Land (22)
Who said Naya in Standard was only about Runes? Hisamichi Yoshigoe brought this Naya Midrange deck to the New Capenna Set Championship and ended up taking all the way to third place and a World Championship invite, which is an amazing result!
This deck is very similar to Esper and Grixis in the sense that it plays a lot of snowball-y two and three-drops. You want to keep getting value every turn from your Luminarch Aspirant, Wedding Announcement and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and top it off with The Wandering Emperor and Esika’s Chariot.
What I like about this deck is that it supplements those haymakers with Voltage Surge, which is exactly the kind of cheap removal that this deck needs. Only costing one mana means that you are able to break serve on the draw and being able to deal four damage lets you smash cards like Raffine, Scheming Seer, Goldspan Dragon, Kaito Shizuki or Esika’s Chariot, which means you will get to trade up on mana very often.
I’m a big fan of Workshop Warchief in this grindy format, but what surprises me is the full playset of Gala Greeters. I didn’t think too much of this card when I tried it myself, but believe it or not, every single copy that was played at the Set Championship made it into the Top 8! To my knowledge, there were only six total in Hisamichi and Shota Yasooka’s decks and they both made the Top 8 with their respective builds.
This deck can uses all the free Treasures from Gala Greeters and Fable token really nicely by running the full four copies of Emeria’s Call, which is a nice value card that you get to run in your mana base, so it doesn’t actually take up any space in your deck.
Is this deck better than Esper or Grixis? I’m not sure, but Hisamichi pulled off an amazing result with his brew and that is definitely worth highlighting.
