Pioneering a New Season!

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

Today we’re gonna talk about the Pioneer format, and the upcoming Regional Championship Qualifier (RCQ) season. The last few articles have all been more broad-reaching things about the world of Magic: the Gathering as it pertains to us, but today we’re gonna turn our eyes back to the competitive side of things for a bit.

What we’ll do today is talk about the most popular decks for a bit, why they’re good, and highlight a few things to know about each so that you can either walk into your next RCQ more informed than before or maybe even make a decision as to what deck you should be playing!

So… is this gonna be a tier list, or what?

Nah. While I have made tier lists in the past, I think those never show a complete picture of what the format looks like or even why you should play or avoid a certain deck. So we’ll have a bit more than that in today’s article.

Rakdos Vampires

The first deck we should mention is probably the current best deck in Pioneer, Rakdos Vampires. We did have an entire article describing the deck and why it’s the best new kid on the block (Team Edward and the Pro Tour ), but the gist of it is that this deck takes the Rakdos Midrange shell we know and love (or despise) and ramps it up to 11.

Pros: a highly interactive deck with both hand disruption and removal spells is great when backed by a proactive plan. Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord + Vein Ripper is also a “combo” most decks will have an incredibly hard time dealing with.

Cons: Vampires is one of the most expensive decks in Pioneer, and as the de facto best deck everyone is going to have a gameplan that involves beating your deck in particular.

Izzet Phoenix

Izzet Phoenix is an animal all its own and is usually classified as being a bit of a combo/tempo hybrid. The basic idea is to fill your graveyard with copies of Arclight Phoenix, and then use the other cards in your Graveyard as fuel for copies of Treasure Cruise so that you end up with both an on-board and in-hand advantage over the opponent. Your supporting cast includes Ledger Shredder, which both gets huge and fills your graveyard, Picklock Prankster to both fill the graveyard and provide a much-needed blocker against a lot of decks, and just enough copies of cards like Fiery Impulse and Spell Pierce to make an opponent’s life miserable.

Pros: Phoenix is the most consistent deck in Pioneer, using its 12 “cantrips” to find whatever cards you need when you need them. Treasure Cruise is also the single strongest card allowed in Pioneer, and Phoenix is easily the best Treasure Cruise deck.

Cons: Graveyard hate can be annoying for both your copies of Arclight Phoenix and Treasure Cruise, and the Izzet color combination is notoriously terrible at removing Enchantments like Rest in Peace from the battlefield. Phoenix also happens to be an incredibly hard deck to play well.

Amalia Combo

…and now we come to everyone’s favorite vampire glasses mommy. It’s not really an exaggeration to say she’s kicked aggro decks almost entirely out of the Pioneer format. For anyone who hasn’t seen the deck, your objective is to get one effect that says “when a Creature enters under your control, gain 1 life”, Amalia herself, and a Wildgrowth Walker on the table at the same time. Amalia will explore when you gain life, and the exploring will trigger the Walker to gain life. When the Walker gains life, Amalia will trigger again. Rinse and repeat until Amalia’s at 20 power. When she gets there, she blows up the board, you’re at 70 or so life, and an attack for 20 to end the game is easy-peasy.

Pros: Amalia is absurd against any aggressive deck, resilient against the control decks, and can out-muscle interactive decks by using the threat of the combo to execute a reasonable “fair” plan.

Cons: your matchup spread is all over the place. Because your main combo involves 3 pieces, it’s pretty easy for a prepared opponent to interrupt what you’re doing. Dedicated combo decks can also goldfish just as quickly as you can, except you don’t typically get to bring a lot for what decks like Hidden Strings combo are doing and they do have some room to prepare for you.

Mono-Black Discard

Here we have a deck that people have been trying to make work for about ten years now! Mono-Black Control has been an archetype that players have been trying to make work since way before I started playing Magic, and Waste Not has been a focal point of these decks in casual circles for close to a decade. Now that the Mono-Black deck has great ways to close a game like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, it’s finally gone from cute (derogatory) to being a Top 5 deck in Pioneer!

Pros: Discard is one of the easiest decks in Pioneer to play, and all of the expensive cards go in other decks as well. Not being mentally fatigued in tournament play is a pretty huge deal, and since all of the good cards are *really* good you can always use them as a pivot if you want to play any of the Rakdos decks, Dimir Control, or anything else that features Thoughtseize and Sheoldred.

Cons: a wise man once said, “You can’t Thoughtseize the top of the deck”. Memes aside, you will lose (often) to decks that can win off a singular card like Amalia’s Collected Company or Hidden Strings’s Pore Over the Pages. You also have a severe weakness to Enchantments, so decks like Enigmatic Fires and Azorius Spirits can have a field day with you.

Hidden Strings Combo

Hidden Strings is the premiere “true combo deck” of the format. You do have other decks like Amalia and Rakdos Transmogrify that have combos as their primary plan but can win by just attacking for 20, but Hidden Strings is a true combo deck. This means that Hidden Strings attacks (or, more appropriately, doesn’t attack) the format from an angle that’s completely different from every other deck in the format, and you have to bring a dedicated plan if you want to beat Hidden Strings.

Pros: creature removal is almost useless against you. Most decks have between 8 and 15 ways to deal with opposing creatures, meaning they have 8-15 completely dead cards against you in Game 1. You can also win games as early as Turn 3, meaning you’ll have a lot of very free wins against decks that need a few turns to get cooking.

Cons: Hidden Strings is INCREDIBLY hard to play well. Do not take this deck to a tournament without having practiced and playtested with it first. As a pure combo deck, you’re also pretty fragile to a determined opponent so there will just be cards you can’t do much about (Archon of Emeria is a big one, for example).

5-Color Niv to Light

Formerly “the Claudioh” special, this deck has gone from a meme deck that one user on Magic: the Gathering Online consistently performed well with to a real contender in the Pioneer format. 5-Color Niv uses efficient 2-color removal like Abrupt Decay, Vanishing Verse, and now Lightning Helix to control the game long enough to make it to its key 5 mana. As soon as this deck has 5 mana, this deck has some truly absurd options like casting Niv-Mizzet Reborn and drawing a fresh hand of spells and Bring to Light, which can get cards like Supreme Verdict or even Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor!

Pros: this deck has the best removal options of any in Pioneer. Cards like Lightning Helix, Vanishing Verse, and Supreme Verdict are good enough to solve just about any permanent-based problem Pioneer can present. It’s also got some of the best fair game-enders in Pioneer. Niv-Mizzet Reborn is an undercosted 6/6 that draws about 4 cards on average, Bring to Light is one of the best cards in the format, and you never truly know what 75 cards this deck will choose to bring on any given week.

Cons: while Niv’s endgame is absurd against most creature decks, the fact that a lot of its removal costs 2+ mana hinders you against both hyper-aggressive decks like Boros Convoke and Boros Heroic and against any build of Spirits, which has more efficient ways to protect its creatures than your removal. You also don’t fare terribly well against most of the combo decks, as your strong suit is creature removal and some combo decks just don’t have to care about that.

Azorius Control

The Fun Police(™) of the format is still exactly that. Azorius Control’s job has always been to find out what the opponent is having the most fun doing, and then stop them from doing it. The deck itself hasn’t even changed all that much from the inception of the Pioneer format, either! Use your removal spells and counterspells of choice to stop your opponent from killing you, resolve a Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, and then continue to not die until Teferi’s ultimate takes their day from bad to worse. And it still works!

Pros: Azorius Control is the same deck it’s been for the 5 or so years that Pioneer’s existed as a format. The formula isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing, but cards like No More Lies will occasionally drop and give your already-good deck a huge boost. Also, as a control deck, your deck starts off good and only gets better as each season’s metagame gets closer to being “solved”.

Cons: while your individual choices in-game aren’t difficult, every game you win is going to run extremely long and fatigue over the course of a tournament is a real thing. You also need to plan on being on the back foot for the first half of almost every game you play, which can be mentally exhausting if that’s not normally the life you live.

Azorius Spirits

Now here’s a topic I could go on forever about! As your resident Spirit Master(™), I’m of course going to approve of Spirits being a top deck within Pioneer. There are 4 main variants of Spirits decks that see play in Pioneer, and the two that are currently performing the best are Mono-Blue Curious Obsession builds with Ascendant Spirit and a more mid-range Azorius shell featuring Wedding Announcement and Invasion of Gobakhan. The Curious Obsession builds are looking to beat up on spell-based decks like Hidden Strings and Azorius Control, while the mid-range build beats removal-based decks like Izzet Phoenix and any of the 45 Fatal Push decks.

Pros: as the true tempo deck of the format, Spirits actively punishes anyone who is either trying to assemble a combo or take time to set up their own plan. You also get to choose between Mono-Blue, Azorius with Curious Obsession, Azorius mid-range, or Bant Spirits!

Cons: all versions of Spirits hate seeing hyper-aggressive decks. Mono-Red Aggro, Boros Heroic, and Boros Convoke are all very real problems. It doesn’t help that Rending Volley is one of the most-played cards in all of Pioneer, and every single creature in every form of Spirits dies to Rending Volley.

Izzet Ensoul Artifact

I love running with scissors! Er, I mean I love playing with the Ensoul Artifact deck. It has an exact set of tools that allows it to not just be kicked out of the format by Vampires and Amalia simply existing (RIP Gruul Sagas). Most aggro decks tend to have a real problem with card selection/advantage, but the Ensoul deck gets to play each of Inti, Seneschal of the Sun, Smuggler’s Copter, and Cryptic Coat in the main deck!

(Please never actually run with scissors.)

Pros: Darksteel Citadel + Ensoul Artifact is super-hard to deal with, you have tons of ways to churn through your deck, and you’re one of the few decks in the format that can actually finish an opponent “out of nowhere” thanks to Shrapnel Blast.

Cons: aside from a couple of Spell Pierce and some potential sideboard slots, you can be a dog to spell-based combo decks like Hidden Strings or any variation of Indomitable Creativity. Also, as an aggro deck you don’t necessarily appreciate the existence of Vampires and Amalia being at the top of the format even if you do have some tools to deal with both.

Rakdos Transmogrify

Rounding out our top ten decks in Pioneer is Rakdos Transmogrify, the newest iteration of an archetype that’s existed for some time but is now solidly a tiered deck thanks to the new Case of the Stashed Skeleton. This deck does normal Rakdos things like Fatal Push, Thoughtseize, and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, and these have proven to be some of the most effective cards in all of Pioneer. When you get to those things and put a copy of Atraxa, Grand Unifier on the table as soon as Turn 4, you’ve got a very real threat on your hands.

Pros: Rakdos cards are good. While Midrange isn’t exactly a huge player anymore, the best deck in the format right now is Rakdos Vampires and you share all of the “good cards” with that deck. Most of the aggressive decks in the format are also byes for you. Combining Fatal Push with a 7/7 creature with Lifelink and Vigilance is a great way to make sure a deck like Mono-White Humans can pretty much never do anything to you.

Cons: Because you’re running a Transmogrify package, your “fair plan” of just attacking for 20 in case your combo doesn’t get to combo… is anemic, putting it politely. As far as won conditions go, attacking with 2/2’s from Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and Skeleton tokens isn’t exactly scaring anybody. You’re also the only Black deck in the format that doesn’t get to play Sheoldred, which is one of the primary reasons to play that color in Pioneer in the first place.

So what should I actually play?

If you’re coming to the Pioneer format on straight-up zero reps and don’t have a ton of time on your hands, here’s how I would currently group the decks:

• Stay FAR away from Hidden Strings and Izzet Phoenix. Both of these decks are very good but require a lot of tight decision-making that you just won’t have the knowledge to win with until you get some reps under your belt.
• Watch some content on Azorius Spirits, Azorius Control, and Amalia Combo. These decks all have a solid game plan, but also come with some exploitable weak spots. You’ll want to know how to navigate the format before sleeving these up.
• Play a couple of matches with Rakdos Transmogrify, Izzet Ensoul Artifact, and Niv to Light. These decks are all relatively straightforward but have enough decision-making involved in playing them that you don’t want to just pull up to an event without practicing a little.
• You can honestly be handed a Rakdos Vampires or a Mono-Black Discard deck and know that most of the work has been done for you when you have the deck built. You will want to know basic things like which cards to prioritize when casting Thoughtseize and Duress, but other than that these are both decks that you should be able to navigate pretty easily if you just plain ol’ play a good amount of tournament Magic.

…and there we have it! Now that you know which decks are the best in Pioneer and why, hopefully you can enter this Regional Championship Qualifier season a lot more prepared than before. I, of course, will be bringing my favorite Azorius Spirits deck, but I’d love to see someone who’s reading this have success with their deck of choice. Good luck, and I’ll see y’all on the next one!