Frontier Spotlight: Combo Leaking?

The 2nd week of Weekly Frontier at Fusion Gaming yielded new and exciting results as different players and completely different archetypes rose to the top!

I’m Austen from Pauper Ponderings and I’m back to talk about some of the interesting and competitive brews we saw this week.

Mono Blue Control by Colby Kitchur

This innovative Mono Blue control deck by Colby looks to control the board using Thing in the Ice, Engulf the Shores and Aether Revolt stand-out Baral, Chief of Compliance, then mop things up with Torrential Gearhulk. I love the addition of Prism Ring acting as a low priority way to keep your life total high vs Atarka Red. Colby obviously values the exile clauses on Void Shatter and Spell Shrivel over the versatility of a card like disallow. This must be a meta-game call as a card like disallow plays much better in a mono blue strategy than a taxing counterspell like spell shrivel.

I can see this list running into issues with a deck like Atarka Red or even Abzan, where even 1 or 2 unanswered threats are capable of closing a game in a few turns.

The absense of Dig Through Time also puzzles me, but Colby must have realized a card like Glimmer of Genius was far more consistent on 4 mana than Dig in a mono colour strategy. Would love to see a way to use the energy generated by glimmer though. Something like a shielded aether thief could be a consideration in a list like this.

Jeskai Tokens by Kevin Trieu

Kevin makes another appearance on Frontier Spotlight this week piloting a much more aggressive build than his UB Control deck from last week.

Jeskai Ascendancy has always been known as a powerful engine, Modern and Legacy have both known this to be true.

Getting to pair this over powered enchantment with one of the most broken cards they’ve printed in some time, is a match made in Frontier heaven. I don’t have many more things to say about this list other than Sram’s Expertise is a welcome addition being able to add to the board for a relatively low cost.

I think their is something here, has Kevin found the perfect 75? Probably not, but he has paired two of the more powerful tools together to form a very large potential threat. Keep an eye on this one.

Saheeli Black by Joey Hayes

Joey was the eventual winner this week with his take on Jeskai black. Adding the standard combo of Saheeli Rai and Felidar Guardian to an already potent strategy. This seems to be the evolution of this deck, adding a very capable 1-2 combo like this to a control strategy in an unknown format like Frontier is a huge boon. It’s very difficult to predict everything your opponents are going to throw at you, especially in a format like this one.

Having this “I win” button gives you an edge in all sorts of match-ups, winning out of nowhere and forcing your opponent to hedge vs the combo is something rarely seen in competitive magic these days.

Expect this deck to show up big time with the release of Aether Revolt.

Where is Frontier headed? I have no idea, but I’m excited to follow along. Stop by next week for another installment of Frontier Spotlight!