Deathrite Shaman has been banished to the netherworld for nearly two weeks now and the legacy meta game has become the Wild West while players figure out which decks will be the next big thing in a post DRS world. In a discussion with a few other Australian content creators, we spoke about which strategies would become stronger and which would become weaker and an interesting point came up: “A lot decks that relied on mana denial was un-done by a one mana 1/2”. Deathrite was for the most part a black mana dork and provided non green decks the benefit of “turn one Birds, turn two 3 drop” without having to ever play a green mana source. Lines like these tended to make Wasteland a much harder card to optimise because if used at the wrong time could stand to put you in a extreme tempo disadvantage while also giving your opponents DRS two lands in the graveyard for a tasty snack.

Without the presence of the Golgari elf looming over the format, another couple of decks have seemingly rose to the top. With both decks devoting eight slots to mana denial, welcome back RUG Delver and Goblins.

When playing “Universe Brain” decks like Goblins you have to make sure to get a lot if practice because there is a real possibility you will time out and lose to shocking your own Siege-Gang Commander. Don’t let my poor performance with Goblins last Sunday fool you, the deck has been making some serious progress post ban. In fact Andrea Mengucci had a much better time nearly hitting at 5-0 mark.

Went 4-1 in a crazy fashion with Goblins! Deck is good and will get better once Goblin Trashmaster will be legal! #Legacy https://t.co/gs7bjZpodu — Andrea Mengucci (@Mengu09) July 6, 2018

RUG Delver and Goblins getting popular will mean while we can’t be certain about what’s coming next for the meta there is something that we can be sure of: watch out for your nonbasic lands! Four colour decks took a huge hit from not being able to play DRS and now the mono coloured decks will prevail! At least while the format settles and people adjust to the constant mana denial. Hopefully we can capitalise on this sweet spot in the meta with Mono Red Painter.

This may not be a permanent fixture in the format after everything settles in the meta but I love any excuse to play a Stompy deck. Painter’s Stone as a combo has had a tough time recovering from the Sensei’s Divining Top ban in 24th April last year but in this short time where everyone is wanting to punish greedy manabases, the 1/3 scarecrow will be able to paint the town blue.

Once again, we will be Streaming Mono Red Painter at 7pm Australian EST Sunday 15th July on twitch.tv/cbrmtg at 7pm Aus EST. Tune in and we will catch up then.

Angus McKay

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