Smitty's Musings: Human Aggro in Standard

Statement of Purpose and a Vanity Post

Purpose:

This post is going to consolidate all of the Human Aggro & some of the more agressive mid-range strategies for the Return to Ravnica Standard season so long as it's a tier-2.5 or better archetype.

I'm not qualified to do the analysis. I will say that determining why the last 15 cards in a deck are different is generally what helps improve one's card evaluation abilities if done in context with what the other popular decks at the time were, hence the dates on all of the articles and deck lists.

This is a work in progress, I'm going to put time into updating it until I'm caught up, but there are a large number of decks to catalog due to States.

Minor play subtleties for UW Aggro:

Levy Skyknight (and the other multi-colored cards with the detain mechanic) can detain nonland permanents not just creatures; making it much more flexible than I originally thought, as Planeswalkers can be targeted.
Silverblade Paladin is better paired with a Geist of St. Traft angle token instead of the Geist if you just want to push through damage.
Cavern of Souls with "Cleric" as the chosen creature type gives you the ability to play both Geist of St. Traft and Fiend Hunter.

Vanity Post:

Before I took a six month break in my MtG career due to the fact that Standard with two full blocks always feels like stale good-stuff decks take over the format, and since I'm a VORTHOS-spike, this just depresses me so I've taken to just not playing standard between the release of the last block in a set and the rotation in October. I did it when New Phyrexia was released and Caw-Blade was the menace de jure, and again after Avacyn Restored and Delver seemed to be everywhere.

Now many will note that I don't have updates regarding Innistrad & Dark Ascension, and that's due to the fact that I have forum comments detailing Haunted Humans that could make excellent blog posts languishing away in obscurity.

And while it appears, as of November 5th, 2012, that Bant Control will be out in force at the moment, there are Human Tribal decks still viable in the format, so I'm going to collect both decks and articles on the subject here so that the changes in the meta-game and the card choice justifications can be followed with changes in the meta-game.

It is my intent to edit this post as new decks are successful, and this is basically going to be a consolidation of any articles I find, though I'm mainly using TCGPlayer as my source for articles and deck lists as Craig Wescoe - who writes for TCGPlayer, is the professional player & magic author who is most dedicated to White aggro strategies.

As a side note for newer players, Craig Wescoe, is just now starting to live down an incident at the 2010 Columbus Grand Prix where he called the judges to investigate a humorous comment about a wager made by his opponent, which ended with the opponent getting disqualified. Many in the competitive community thought it was a "dick move" and Wescoe has accordingly gotten hell for it since. The flack he's caught hasn't stopped him from placing in large events thou'.

To put the Grand Prix incident in context, if you read about the life of a semi to professional Magic player, the pro-players in the MtG community tend to wager at the drop of the proverbial hat regarding who pays for dinner, etc... And if they are feeling snarky, they'll perform a "Wescoe Check" prior to making a wager of any sort.

I mention that incident because I feel that Wescoe is still one of the best writers over at TCGPlayer, and a "must read" author for any budding aggro player despite that incident.

Articles:

State's Articles:

Competitive Event Placement:

States 2012 Placement:

Smitty's Musings

Monday, November 5, 2012

Human Aggro in Standard