Friday means it is time for me to show off some of the neat decks I’ve found over the last week, and this is an interesting one because it’ll be the last one that features no cards from Duskmourn, which is almost going to throw out a lot of my options for over the weekend and early next week as well. I’ll still go through them but next week will almost certainly mostly try and feature what people are doing with the new cards. 

Standard

I was treated with great news this week, as we once again have standard decks! I still haven’t found a better outlet for lists other than MTGO but thankfully, the Standard players brought some spice to MTGO this week. 

Our first Standard entry is this Dimir Rats deck. I thought initially this was going to be a situation where someone, in this case MTGO user Unagieel, named a deck after a creature type but only had like 10 creatures of that type in their deck. But I am happy to say that is not the case here! This is a true and honest Rats typal deck featuring 23 of the critters. 

Lord Skitter and Karumonix give you an incredibly potent three-drop suite and Wren is a nice Kalitas-esque card. My only wish for this deck is that it had a good enough one drop but the card quality here is good enough. This list is also from a Challenge last Saturday, where Unagieel finished 14th with a 4-2 record.

Munkeemanometal’s spice is a pretty cool dredge-style deck, trying to turbo out cards like Hollow Marauder on the back of Souls of the Lost, Urborg Lhurgoyf and Cruel Samnophage giving pilots some early game beater options. I’m also a sucker for the card Seed of Hope so any list with that card registered earns bonus points from me. 

Munkeemanometal piloted this list to seventh place in a super qualifier with an 8-2 record. Props to them for that finish. 

Pioneer

Pioneer is once again where most of the neat-ness lies. It definitely feels like the most open format of all of them, with a big enough card pool to increase deck variety but without explicitly powerful cards printed for the format specifically like Modern has (note: I love the Modern Horizons sets). 

TnTmthos has blessed us with an honest to god Superfriends list. I cannot tell you how long it has been since I’ve seen a Superfriends list, outside of the Mono Green Nicol Bolas lists from a few years back. 

In true Pioneer fashion, this deck has to have a combo finish, which is provided by Level 3 of Innkeeper’s Talent, which lets Bolas or Vraska come down and use their ultimate ability immediately. Without that, this is a value Midrange deck that can grind with the best of them. 

Wrenn and Realmbreaker is one of my absolute favorite cards printed in recent sets, a statement that is also applicable to the Wandering Emperor. I’ve also always had a soft spot for Mila as well and when was the last time anyone saw Ral Zarek in any list? I love everything about this deck and the archetype even existing is enjoyable as well. 

The Gwenna-Acererack combo has been around for a while but it’s so sparse on the deck dumps that I feel the need to point it out. 

I’ll be honest, I personally despise this deck but it does still fall into the category of neat. The whole point of this deck is to continuously loop casting Acererack, but not going through the Tomb of Annihilation. Rather, you loop through the Lost Mine of Phandelver to drain your opponent for one. You end up casting Acererack about 1,375 times (do not check the math on this) in one turn in order to win the game, thanks to Gwenna untapping when Acererack enters. And for good measure, Togget, the pilot of this list, opted for a couple copies of Atraxa just for some kind of Plan B. I hope to never play against this but it does still qualify as neat, so it is here. 

Our next Pioneer deck is another archetype that will be featured in these articles a lot because of how much of a hero card Insidious Roots is. 

There has been a lot of different experimentation with how to make Insidious Roots work and ipecin’s list is one that’s been tried before. I like the addition of Cache Grab to this archetype and Tyvar is of course a must. Anytime I’ve tried Insidious Roots out, I have felt like I needed Witch’s Oven and Cauldron Familiar in the deck but I understand opting to forego them. 

If you ever want to be featured on Neat-Decking, simply 5-0 with Insidious Roots. You’ll probably end up here. 

Our last Pioneer deck is the concoction of a mad scientist, and in this case the scientist is Scipios. 

This plays sort of like a UW Control deck but, as I always say, you have to have some kind of combo in Pioneer, and this combo is donating Nine Lives with Covered Falcon when it becomes low on counters so that your opponent loses.

I found out the hard way playing against this deck in explorer that you can use the pain lands to make yourself lose life and, with the Nine Lives trigger on the stack, flip Falcon to donate it right away. That was some absolutely diabolical stuff. Watch out for this one if you’re minding your own business on ladder, it caught me off guard and I don’t want it to do the same to you.

Modern

I have a couple Modern lists to talk about, and they both fall into a relatively similar category of “decks we used to see a long time ago and now just show up sporadically.” I’m not going to spend a ton of time on them because none of them are new concepts, but they’re still neat because of the scarcity of which we see them. 

I made a promise to a reader on the Pioneer subreddit that if I saw an Elves list, I’d include it on here, and while this isn’t Pioneer, I want to make good on that promise. 

This is good old fashioned GW Elves, courtesy of Musagete, with an MH3 power boost thanks to the new Eldamri. Other than that it plays a lot of classic Elves cards all together, also with the help of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron to make any of your elves into a mana dork from your bin. You can also generate infinite mana with Devoted Druid and Vizier of Remedies, so that’s something to keep an eye on as well. 

Our next one is another classic, in the form of Taddy99’s Lantern Control deck here. This is what a stock Lantern list looks like now, you just do not see them much anymore. It’s been so long in fact that I’d wager some of you learned about the deck from the recent video Rhystic Studies did on it. 

Go ask some of the long time modern players at your LGS how they feel about Lantern Control. Surely someone there will have some stories of playing with or against it. I do appreciate it for just how unique a deck it is and how much it really is stronger than the sum of its parts. 

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And that’ll do it for another edition of Neat-Decking. As always, if anyone wants to make any suggestions, please feel free to find me in TheGathering.gg’s discord and ping me @adolce95. 

I also want to say thank you to everyone who has commented on the Reddit posts as well. There has been a lot of positive feedback so far, and I am very appreciative of that. I read every comment on the Reddit posts and try to respond when I can. The reddit posts are a great place to leave suggestions as well, it is guaranteed I will at least see the comments there. 

Either way, I’m looking forward to trying some stuff out from Duskmourn and also seeing what everyone else is trying out as well.