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Standard Aggro
Posted on April 23, 2013 by thegreatdustini
thegreatdustini The_Great_Dustini, aka Dustin Faeder, is an attorney and philosopher whose Magic successes include three Pro Tour Top 64 finishes, a 3rd-place finish at GP Toronto, and winning two MTGO PTQs.
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Great analysis of the current aggro scene, Dustin!
I have lived in Murfreesboro for about three years. I work for Vanderbilt, though, so am in Nashville itself very often. Unfortunately, I have a crowd of children that makes it tough to get out to IRL Magic. I played seriously about 10 years ago, when I lived out West. These days, I play on MTGO several times a week (user name: beardo). With the ridiculous number of hours that I work each week, I have not been able to keep up with Standard for several years, just sticking to Limited. All of that said, I have been wanting to venture back out, just needing a play group. Maybe we’ll bump into each other?
Great analysis of this archetype. I usually don’t bother with standard because so much research is involved and the decks are pretty expensive but this looks interesting. Maybe I give it a spin.
Great Article! I also live in Murfreesboro but almost exclusively play on MODO. Here is the Facebook page of a group of guys that live in the midstate that seem to play a lot in IRL https://www.facebook.com/groups/mtgpeeps. I hope this helps and welcome back to TN.
Great article as always, a lot of insight, and the thougths you give are very clear and well argumented. Guess it comes with the job.
Now, as to Red, the strength of this deck is pretty obvious through it’s popularity on MTGO, i could swear that 40% of the matches i played lately was against MonoRed or very aggresive gruul (so really a mono red) variants. Ppl start to realise that – I’ve seen monoRed maindecking Volcanic Strenght.
Myself, testing Zegana Bant now I was surprised how effective can this deck be against 4 thragtusk, 4 restos, 4 Smitters, 3 azorious charms, 3 verdicts, 3 revelations. After some absurd loses i had to find space in sideboard to hate it out specificly and only now im able to crush it as i would like to with a deck dedicated to that purpose (about 80% match won against it now).
It all being said, deck is VERY good, but also players hate losing to it so they might overhate it and it will have hard time wining even more (this tendency killed blitz).
I think your assessment of Firefist Striker being bad is a bit unreasonable (at least, with the way you present it). In your example of attacking into an Augur of Bolas with Ash Zealot, Firefist Striker, and Stromkirk Noble, you say you have a chance of getting blown out by Restoration Angel, to which I respond, wouldn’t you get blown out by Angel anyway? If you make the Striker into an Ash Zealot/any other 2 drop, then Restoration Angel still gets you, right?
That’s fair Marcos. I haven’t tested with Striker and he could be better than I realize. However, in the situation you mention, the Augur is then also able to block, so you lose 2 guys. The Striker will run into Augur, and the Angel will eat another creature. 2/2′s don’t have that problem because they just bounce off Augur. In this situation, if Striker were a different creature, Angel would still hurt you, but might not blow you out.