5 MTG Decks for Day 1 of Wilds of Eldraine

Wilds of Eldraine looks otterly exciting for Standard, here’s why.

Wilds of Eldraine is no Throne of Eldraine, but that’s a good thing. The power level outliers aren’t as ridiculous as Oko, Thief of Crowns and the removal Adventure spells are still present but attached to worse permanents or with higher costs. Notably, Edgewall Innkeeper and Lucky Clover did not see a reprint. This time around these cards are good, just not format-warping. This Standard format looks incredible, and there are even some cards for Pioneer and Modern!ARTICLE SPOTLIGHT50+ MTG Decks for Wilds of EldraineHere’s (at least) 50 ways to Syr-round your opponents.Yoman58/28/2023

I built fifty-four decks for Standard, Modern, and Pioneer, and I’ve got my five favorites in this article. If you want to see all of ’em, check out that article here!

Along this journey, I learned a few things about the upcoming Standard format to inform your brewing and tuning.

Everyone will have an abundance of cards, and flooding will rarely be an issue. As such, you should be playing plenty of Lands to take advantage of your card economy and avoid manascrew. This also means that trying to win on card advantage will be more challenging than usual, and you should be aiming to actually close out the game proactively.

That said, The End will punish you for overly relying on specific threats to win the game. Four copies of Sheoldred, the Apocalypse are no longer sufficient to win games. If they extract all copies of your best threat, there has to be a backup option. Especially in the absence of Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and Reckoner Bankbuster, the second string threats in current Standard decks won’t cut it.

On the flip side, The End is rather expensive unless you’re about to die. Protection spells like Royal Treatment and cheap countermagic like Make Disappear are going to be pretty strong in The End matchups. Trading up on mana to keep your current threat and all future copies is a really backbreaking deal.

The mana in Standard is good, but lopsided for macro archetypes. Allied colors get Fast Lands and enemy colors get Restless (Creature) Lands. Trying to build Boros Aggro is challenging if you’re trying to play more than one color of one drop, and Azorius Control won’t get as much out of its mana base unless you splash a third color.

Market Price: $22.46

There are some incredibly powerful Bargain cards, but Bargain is an interesting mechanic. You very specifically can’t sacrifice creatures (unless they’re Artifacts or Enchantments) so you need to work in natural fodder that either replaces itself or has additional value. If you’re sacrificing a full card (or a Treasure) for the effect you’re not getting a good deal (heh).

Because of this, there are a lot of great enablers for Bargain in the expansion that also pay you off in other ways. However, many of the Food cards synergize with artifact matters cards already in the format. Up the Beanstalk can grant you multiple cards before eventually becoming Bargain fodder. Lord Skitter, Sewer King is just a Good Card™. You don’t have to play bad cards to enable Bargain, you need to look for the enablers that work well in your deck. Scrapwork Mutt, in particular is powerful for any of the graveyard-centric Bargain cards.

There are also a bunch of existing cards that have seen niche play but lacked the surrounding card pool to shine. Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival suddenly has a bunch of Adventures to play with. Kayla’s Reconstruction gets Glass Casket, The Irencrag, Werefox Bodyguard, and a host of great artifacts and enter-the-battlefield Creatures. Fight Rigging has some great new enablers like Devouring Sugarmaw. Storm the Festival will always get more powerful, but Adventure creatures allow you to sneak spells into your permanent-only deck and interact more.

So, with all those lessons learned, here are my five favorite decks out of the 50+ I cooked up over the last week:

Rakdos Pact (Pioneer)

Market Price:$593.46

Maindeck, 60 cards

Sortsort deckCreature (6)

• 2Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
• 4Bloodtithe Harvester

Sorcery (10)

• 1Harmless Offering
• 4Beseech the Mirror
• 1Extinction Event
• 4Thoughtseize

Instant (4)

• 4Fatal Push

Artifact (6)

• 2Reckoner Bankbuster
• 4The Irencrag

Enchantment (10)

• 4Demonic Pact
• 4Fable of the Mirror-Breaker
• 2Trial of Ambition

Land (24)

• 4Blood Crypt
• 3Swamp
• 1Mountain
• 3Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1Sulfurous Springs
• 2Hive of the Eye Tyrant
• 4Blightstep Pathway
• 4Haunted Ridge
• 1Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance

Market Price: $22.46

Market Price: $80.56

Beseech the Mirror is most impressive when you can get high-impact four drops — or combo kills. Demonic Pact is not only a high-impact card and a combo piece with Harmless Offering, Bargain naturally offers you a way to sacrifice it before it kills you.

Market Price: $27.08

The rest of the deck is pretty normal Rakdos Midrange. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Bloodtithe Harvester, and Reckoner Bankbuster are all great cards that happen to be incredible at fueling Bargain to get your engine set up. The only real oddball here is Trial of Ambition over the usual Go for the Throat, as you still need to be able to kill larger creatures while fueling Bargain reliably enough.

Jund Conquest (Standard)

Market Price:$189.33

Maindeck, 60 cards

Sortsort deckCreature (24)

• 4Tough Cookie
• 4Cityscape Leveler
• 4Arbalest Engineers
• 4Scrapwork Mutt
• 4Junkyard Genius
• 4Titan of Industry

Sorcery (4)

• 4Lich-Knights’ Conquest

Enchantment (8)

• 4Teachings of the Kirin
• 4Cemetery Tampering

Land (24)

• 4Restless Cottage
• 1Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
• 4Deathcap Glade
• 1Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1Boseiju, Who Endures
• 1Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance
• 4Copperline Gorge
• 4Rockfall Vale
• 4Sulfurous Springs

Lich-Knights’ Conquest is a hell of a reanimation spell and Cemetery Tampering is Bargain fodder that fuels the yard and offers an alternate cheat condition. Teachings of the Kirin and Scrapwork Mutt are the best possible two drops to enable this strategy and both are bargainable.

Market Price: $13.00

Big bodies and haste enablers. This may be too cute and we don’t have to actually win the turn we cast Lich-Knights’ Conquest, but getting an attack out of Cityscape Leveler that turn is a huge deal. Given the existence of The End it might be correct to play a few Etali, Primal Conqueror as well to ensure we don’t get all of our endgame threats extracted.

Gruul Thunderous Debut (Standard)

Market Price:$241.33

Maindeck, 60 cards

Sortsort deckCreature (16)

• 3Titan of Industry
• 4Bramble Familiar// 
• 3Atraxa, Grand Unifier
• 2Atsushi, the Blazing Sky
• 4Etali, Primal Conqueror

Sorcery (8)

• 4Thunderous Debut
• 4Return from the Wilds

Instant (4)

• 4Big Score

Artifact (4)

• 4The Irencrag

Enchantment (4)

• 4Up the Beanstalk

Land (24)

• 1Ziatora’s Proving Ground
• 4Rockfall Vale
• 3Mountain
• 1Jetmir’s Garden
• 4Karplusan Forest
• 4Copperline Gorge
• 2Plaza of Heroes
• 1Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance
• 1Boseiju, Who Endures
• 3Forest

Thunderous Debut is a hell of a card even if it does require Bargain. Bramble Familiar is an amazing accelerant that also mitigates flood late game. The Irencrag is powerful as we have not been allowed to have two-mana mana rocks in Standard in a long, long time. Return from the Wilds is tame compared to these other ramp options, but it very importantly fuels bargain with either a 1/1 token or a harder-to-remove Food.

We do need to be able to play “normal” games of Magic: The Gathering now and then, and these cards do that while also making sure we can get to our big mana turns. While the seven drops are what we really want to hit off Thunderous Debut, we also need to be able to eventually cast them. Up the Beanstalk in particular, has looked really impressive as a way to fight through countermagic and spot removal unless the opponent is simultaneously pressuring your life total.

Jund Midrange (Standard)

Market Price:$486.00

Maindeck, 60 cards

Sortsort deckCreature (20)

• 4Decadent Dragon// 
• 4Ruby, Daring Tracker
• 4Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
• 4Mosswood Dreadknight// 
• 4Questing Druid// 

Sorcery (4)

• 4Strangle

Instant (8)

• 4Royal Treatment
• 4Go for the Throat

Artifact (4)

• 4The Irencrag

Land (24)

• 4Blackcleave Cliffs
• 3Plaza of Heroes
• 2Rockfall Vale
• 1Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
• 2Haunted Ridge
• 2Sulfurous Springs
• 4Restless Cottage
• 2Deathcap Glade
• 4Copperline Gorge

Market Price: $7.23

What if all of our threats were three-for-ones? All of these creatures come with insane card advantage, and their stats are no joke either. I think this core of cards is probably the peak of Midrange in Standard and it should be nearly impossible to ever flood out in this deck.

That said, we still want to be efficient and we want to develop our mana quickly so that we can chain adventures together. Ruby, Daring Tracker and The Irencrag both can tap for mana immediately, and Ruby in particular can instantly cast Strangle to pull ahead on tempo or protect herself with Royal Treatment. Protecting cards like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, or Mosswood Dreadknight from The End is a big deal, and we should maybe consider a few The End of our own. 

Temur Prowess (Standard)

Market Price:$113.73

Maindeck, 60 cards

Sortsort deckCreature (18)

• 4Elusive Otter// 
• 4Hearth Elemental// 
• 4Questing Druid// 
• 4Monastery Swiftspear
• 2Scalding Viper// 

Sorcery (4)

• 4Ancestral Anger

Instant (16)

• 4Lightning Strike
• 4Play with Fire
• 4Consider
• 4Royal Treatment

Land (22)

• 1Mountain
• 2Yavimaya Coast
• 3Dreamroot Cascade
• 4Copperline Gorge
• 4Restless Spire
• 4Shivan Reef
• 1Rockfall Vale
• 2Karplusan Forest
• 1Otawara, Soaring City

This deck is my favorite of the whole Wilds of Eldraine release.

Market Price: $8.33

The Prowess/Adventure hybrid shell looks incredibly strong to me. You have Prowess creatures and a brutally low curve with the ability to go long, and your best “reactive” spell in Royal Treatment is also a fine proactive play because of the Ward 1 on the Royal Role.

All of this is backed up with a pile of cantrips and burn spells, and we’re not even playing all the options in Standard. Sleight of Hand got a reprint, and I could see playing it over Scalding Viper or even a few copies of Hearth Elemental. I think Consider is the better cantrip here, especially for instant speed interaction and prowess surprises, but there’s definitely room for both.

You’re just going to be able to curve out cleanly and consistently, and the Adventure halves of your best creatures ensure that you don’t get simply outscaled, especially Elusive Otter, which will be nearly impossible to block come late.

***

Wilds of Eldraine Standard looks like a ton of fun, where Pioneer and Modern both have some goodies (and we’re not going to talk about how degenerate Beseech the Mirror looks in Vintage). The set is a flavor home run, and the designs are all cool as hell. Really hoping Wizards of the Coast shows us their Organized Play plans for Standard soon because this format seems incredible, and I don’t want it to go to waste.

Prereleases have already happened, and the scramble to get cards in time for early format RCQs (Regional Championship Qualfiier) and locals has begun, make sure to snipe your preorders before the price spikes and get ready for Wilds of Eldraine’s impact on Standard, Pioneer, and even Modern with all our other content on TCGPlayer Infinite!