M:tG Cribbs #46: Bant Midrange in Standard

Posted on May 26, 2014 by RYANCRABBS

This week Cribbs pilots a Bant Midrange deck, featuring a Horizon Chimera-Fathom Mage-Archangel of Thune combo, into Standard matches.





You can find Ryan on Twitter @mtgcribbs.

 

  1. Seems top heavy. More mana accel creatures and less plainswalkers would be good imo. Cool deck though.

  2. Pretty entertaining deck! Had real fun watching these vids and seeing the combo doing really “stupid” stuffs xD

    I agree with the first comment, maybe not all the planeswalker are that required. Mostly thinking about Elspeth, wondering if she couldn’t be replaced some more elvish mystics and sided instead, or if maybe by some more kiora’s – I guess Elspeth is mostly there to handle threats like stormbreath dragon or such things, but Kiora could do this (a bit less good, i’ll admit) while providing better acceleration and/or triggering parts of the combo through card drawing.

    Well, not sure at all anyway, i guess you probably had many tests (and/or, if this is not an original list of yours, the person that made it had many occasions to test it again and again), so there is probably experience backing up that choice :)

    Cool vid in any case!

  3. Thanks for the vids, looks like a fun deck. Just one comment:

    This situation came up more than once, but it was particularly glaring in round 4 around the 14:00 mark. You suspected (correctly) the opponent had celestial flare based on his earlier plays and he attacked into you with the eidelon of blossoms. You decided to block only with sylvan caryatid which he forced you to sack – but there was really no reason not to additionally block with the 3/5 courser and guarantee killing his eidelon since you have the choice of which blocker to sacrifice.

  4. Thanks for the comments everyone. To burt, at first I was playing a whole playset of Elvish Mystic but I wanted to make room for main deck Detention Spheres Banishing Lights and that is what I decided to cut. I could easily see switching a Kiora or an Elspeth for a third Mystic though. To magikado, I am glad you enjoyed the videos, I had a blast recording them :). It is my own list, I wasn’t able to come across any competitive lists when the combo to try out so I just made my own version. The reason behind the the Kioras and the Elspeths is, even though they don’t actually help you with the combo, they are fine by themselves and give you a strong back up plan in the face of a lot of disruption. And to Rich, you are totally right about the double block. I could have easily picked off his Eidolon there. I thought he wouldn’t waste the flare on my Caryatid but instead he would use it to protect his Elspeth from the Courser, which he could have but didn’t.