Also, there are plenty of relatively cheap strategies in standard that are effective – allies just isn’t one of them unfortunately.

Depending on what cards you have, Big Red, Boros, Mono-red goblins and Vampires are all reasonably priced, although Koth does make some of these decks more expensive. If you want to play cheap constructed magic, I hear pauper is great, and block constructed is fantastic, and your cards will go up in value once the PTQ season starts.

Vampires and Boros really reward tight play, and while they aren’t Caw-blade, they have a solid plan vs every deck in the format.

Liked the Ally deck too, been wanting to try some of that. I really like Allies and was disappointed immediately after they were first previewed, because I knew they’d only be a one-block thing (unlike Soldiers, Wizards or Elves, for example). Makes it hard to make it into a deck you can tinker on with every new set that comes out.

But playing it in Standard casually sounds like a lot of fun. Time to invest a few tix, I think

Thanks for the extra content, not a bad audible – listening to Marshal consistently say “I could do this, or this, or this, or that” pretty clearly defined the difference in power level between the two decks.

I appreciate your commentary, but use a thesaurus for that one, perhaps.