Standard Showdown 2018-11-18

Just a quick Standard post today.  We didn't have enough to play a tournament, but I got my freebie pack and a few games with my updated deck.

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the old list, but it was based around Traxos and Phylactery Lich, with lots of artifacts to power them both.  The problem with the Lich is that while it is strong, it also requires playing artifacts that aren't easy to kill.  That meant that I had to have a fair number of non-creature artifacts, including cards like Fountain of Renewal that don't ever do much and in some matchups are practically blank cards.

I've been very lucky opening Doom Whisperers in Guilds of Ravnica limited, and after getting a third copy, I decided to just ditch the Liches completely and try to build stronger synergies around Traxos with other finishers.  I traded for a copy of Josu Vess as a difficult-to-beat mana sink for the late game that is also historic for Traxos.

After making these changes, I felt pretty good about the deck, but then I noticed something: without Phylactery Lich, I could replace the bad artifacts with artifact creatures because I don't need the artifacts to stick around on the battlefield forever.  They would still synergize with Traxos and survive Act II of Phyrexian Scriptures.  But what artifact creatures to use?  There aren't very many good cheap artifact creatures in the format right now, mostly just commons from Dominaria.

After a bit of searching, I found Chamber Sentry, the "fixed" Walking Ballista.  I'm not playing 5 colors to make it huge or bring it back from the graveyard, although Treasure Map does theoretically make those things possible.  But mostly Chamber Sentry is just a 2/2 that can cause trouble for aggro decks and occasionally gains a +1/+1 counter from Scriptures.  And another little sweet thing about Chamber Sentry is that I can cast it for 0 if I really need to untap Traxos.  Anyway, here's my deck now:

https://www.mtgvault.com/nathangw/decks/standard-wb-traxoscombo-cs/

Another thing you'll notice is 1 Dragonskull Summit as a practically free way to occasionally add an extra counter to Chamber Sentry.  It's also cute to mislead opponents about my deck.  I would add a random black-blue and black-green check or shock land as well if I luck into them.

So today I played 1 match against a Selesnya Tokens deck using Emmara, March of the Multitudes, and a bunch of token makers.  He made a critical error in the first game after not reading Phyrexian Scriptures.  He made a ton of tokens on the turn before Act II killed them all, and he used Conclave Tribunal on my Traxos instead of on Scriptures.  All his stuff died, and I won easily after the momentum swing.

I sided out Cast Down, 1 Duress, 2 Spyglass, and 1 Swamp to put in 4 Knight of Malice and 1 Plague Mare.  Second game I Freebooted his Conclave Tribunal and we were both slow on board, but Treasure Map got a quick flip with the help of Voltaic Servant to let me use it twice in the same turn cycle, and I cast Josu Vess with kicker on turn 6 using all the treasure tokens.  Easy win, but I think things went pretty well for me.

As a bonus, the store guy offered a game with his Standard deck.  He was running several other tournaments, so we had some breaks in the play, but it was a fun and interesting game.  His deck was a ton of ramp leading into Star of Extinction, Zacama, Pelakka Wurm, etc.  I was able to get a few threats on board early, but none of the big ones, and he eventually got a bunch of card advantage engines and mana.  I handled the Pelakka Wurm but couldn't find a way through Zacama.  He kind of did what I am trying to do -- go bigger than the other guy -- but his bigger was bigger than my bigger.

Oh, and here's my Showdown pack.  Not bad, especially for free.  Check out the cute cat in Goblin Cratermaker.