Howdy! Welcome to Daily Arena. I’m Joe, and today I’ll be briefly talking about the latest “non-Meta” Standard deck I’ve been messing around with, “Haphazard Ramp”. I’ll start with a link to the deck, the deck list, and some gameplay videos, followed by some thoughts about my experience with the deck.

You can find a description of the deck over on mtggoldfish.com:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/budget-magic-80-25-tix-haphazard-ramp-standard. I’ve been playing with the “budget” version of the deck, though I will do the more “competitive” version later, as well.

Here is the deck list:



Haphazard Ramp

And here are some game play videos:

vs. W/B Vampires



vs. B/G Hapatra Counters



vs. B/R Pirates



vs. Esper Tokens



The videos above are all from Ladder games. Here is a video from a Best of Three match against W/U Control, showing off the sideboard to some extent:

vs. W/U Control (BO3)



Before sideboarding the deck plays well against aggro and go-wide strategies, leveraging Hour of Devastation and Star of Extinction, as well as Zombie tokens from Hour of Promise to keep the board state under control until you can power out a Sifter Wurm or use the Aftermath side of Cut // Ribbons to finish off the opponent. When going up against a more controlling deck, Carnage Tyrant is irreplaceable, and part of the strategy is to bring in Negate, and be patient to set up turns where you can cast something and protect it, casting two spells and letting one get countered, if necessary. The control match-up can end up in very grindy games, although they go a lot faster if you are able to get the land destruction package on line early enough, or get out an early Carnage Tyrant and beat the opponent down before they can get their legs back under them.

This particular deck does not perform consistently well against the top decks in the meta, but it does often enough (especially with sideboarding), and it can lead to some very satisfying wins.

And that’s about it. This deck was a lot of fun to play, and comes at the game from a different enough angle that it can keep it from feeling stale. I will be trying out the more competitive Sifter Wurm Ramp deck leading up to the M19 release next week.

As always, feel free to contact me with any criticisms, comments, etc., either here, on Reddit, on Twitter via @DailyArena, or on Facebook via the @DailyArenaMTG page.

Peace.

Joseph Eddy is a Father, Husband, Son, Brother, Software Developer, and Gamer. Magic is his favorite hobby, and he’s looking forward to seeing you all on Arena. He streams Magic Arena on a weekly basis (or more), but currently is unable to keep to a set schedule.