Nobody is reading this post six months later, but I’m putting my post-rotation list up here in case I ever want to point someone to it.

About
Name Poison Burn

Deck
7 Island
2 Plains
4 Seachrome Coast
3 Floodfarm Verge
3 Adarkar Wastes
3 Mirrex
4 Skrelv, Defector Mite
4 Crawling Chorus
4 Prologue to Phyresis
4 Experimental Augury
4 Serum Snare
4 Bring the Ending
4 Soul Partition
3 Gadwick’s First Duel
4 Distorted Curiosity
3 Arcane Proxy

Sideboard
3 Ephara’s Dispersal
4 Not on My Watch
3 Rest in Peace
3 Annex Sentry
2 Reject Imperfection

The maindeck is very similar. Floodfarm Verge has been a fine addition to the manabase. Soul Partition is a serviceable replacement for Fateful Absence.

I could have condensed the whole match-ups section in the original post down to this, which is still true:

• You are heavily favored against control, especially domain control, which you almost can’t lose to. New in the post-Duskmourn meta is the ability to add time counters to Overlords when you proliferate (Arena doesn’t select them automatically, so remember to click them yourself).
• Midrange and combo decks are an actual challenge.
• Aggro is a very poor match-up. Two thirds of the sideboard is dedicated to fighting red decks, and you’re still not favored against them.

Take out the Arcane Proxies for the Rest in Pieces when facing any deck that makes heavy use of its graveyard – your Helping Hand or Squirming Emergence strategies. It’s not a panacea, because they’ll have stuff like Into the Flood Maw or Tear Asunder, but it should buy you some time. Incidental reanimation like Unstoppable Slasher is not worth diluting your own plan for.

Against base-red aggro decks, bring in the Ephara’s Dispersals, Not on My Watches, and Annex Sentries in exchange for your Proxies, Duels, and two each of Bring the Ending and Distorted Curiosity (I’m still fiddling with the exact balance on those last two). It is rarely safe to block with Sentries, but I run them anyway because the opponent is likely to bring in Urabrask’s Forge, and they’re your best answer to it. You can beat the red decks after sideboarding, just don’t expect it to happen regularly. It’s tough to find a window to get any poison counters on them because you need to be warding off potentially lethal attacks as soon as turn 2. Be very aware of whether your opponent might be able to cast Snakeskin Veil, which can single-handedly ruin your entire defensive strategy. Make them make the first move: if they send an attacker into the damage step with only one power, take it and be glad it wasn’t more.

The Reject Imperfections are catch-all answers for anything you might not be otherwise prepared for. If you suspect your opponent will bring in graveyard hate, use them to replace a couple of your Proxies.

Almost nothing in this deck will survive the 2025 rotation, so enjoy it while you can!

Three unrelated thoughts:

1. Brineborn Cutthroat and Spectral Sailor were at the core of a mono-blue flash deck I played, and enjoyed, in Standard ca. 2019. I will definitely be trying to resurrect it. But power creep has been so bad that I’m not sure it really has chance anymore. Is putting a counter on your 2/1 two-drop every turn still good enough in a world of Emberheart Challengers and Mosswood Dreadknights? I have a deck with Ayara’s Oathsworn in it and even that is kind of underwhelming in the current metagame.

2. I like Llanowar Elves, and it’s an iconic card, but I’m not sure it should ever be in Standard again. Are you ready for turn-two Glissa Sunslayers?

3. This spoiler list is the first time I’ve realized that “Extended Art” and “Borderless” were considered to be different treatments. The difference between them is pretty slight.

This is probably one of those cases where most players were already doing it this way anyhow, because they weren’t aware of the actual rule (which I’d have to say is not intuitive).

The initial shock of Universes Beyond is well behind us at this point.

No, it isn’t.

I could complain about this, or explain why I don’t want it, but what good would it do? The fact that they’re making this announcement means it’s already too late to stop it.

Interesting statistic:

The number of Best-of-One Standard Constructed games ending before turn four has essentially doubled since the release of Duskmourn: House of Horror.

Important to note – wildcards will be given out, but the banning takes effect today, so I don’t know if there’s actually any window to do the “crafting in anticipation of wildcard refunds” thing. (Edit: wildcards have now been given out.)

I’ve saved up some gold for the Kaldheim flashback draft that starts tomorrow; any advice you fine folks may have on that format would be welcome!

“Creatures you control get +10/+10”

I hope this one is called “Bag of Colossus Hammers”.

Artifact Creature – Phyrexian Construct

Let’s assume this is a reprint. Here are the possibilities. What’s your vote?

I haven’t heard that Snow or Poison are going to be in this set, so that rules out some things. I think Zenith Chronicler is likely because it plays well in Commander. Personally I’m rooting for one of my pet cards, Phyrexian Walker. It’s probably a dark horse but I think as zero-cost creatures go it’s one of the fairest.

It crossed that threshold for me a while ago. “Diluted” is the right word. If somebody asked me to describe Magic to them now, I don’t know what I would say.

Oh my god, they’re doing Omniscience Quick Draft.

For anyone who hasn’t done Omniscience Draft before: I strongly advise against paying currency to play it. (Since I wrote that, they changed the starting hand size to 3, but it didn’t really improve things.)

Arena could really be better about handling large numbers of triggers and/or tokens. There’s no reason why creating 250 tokens needs to be substantially more work than creating 2, and I suspect that the reason why it is is because there’s a lot of redundant stuff – animation, sound effects – that it could be skipping, but isn’t.

This isn’t a complaint, but the memorial sleeve seems like an odd choice. People would use, say, a Sheldon Menery memorial sleeve because they know who he was. But Arena team members are generally not public figures. Fewer people will use this sleeve because there isn’t that connection or context. I feel like a different kind of commemoration might have been more fitting, although I admit I don’t know what else I’d suggest. A free thematic event, maybe?

This week’s Midweek Magic is Brawl where your commander has to be from Duskmourn. Some of those commanders are questionable choices. You can use Altanak but you can’t do the Say Its Name thing, and you’d have to go to some trouble to use its discard ability. You can use Kaito but not its ninjutsu ability.* Again, I’m not complaining, I just think it’s odd.

* What do you think the chances are that ninjutsu will one day receive errata to be usable from the command zone? Affected creatures would be Higure, Ink-Eyes, Nashi, and maybe Yuriko.

For example, you could imagine bracket one has cards that easily can go in any deck, like Swords to Plowshares , Grave Titan , and Cultivate , …

Swords to Plowshares, which is currently banned from Historic and will probably never be printed into Standard again, is in the lowest power bracket? Am I misunderstanding the purpose of these brackets?

I know one-for-one removal isn’t as good in Commander as it is in two-player formats, but even so. Adding Swords or Grave Titan would noticeably raise the power level of every Commander deck I’ve ever built. Apparently my decks are in bracket zero.

It’s this one:

I’d assume the problem was with my computer or my connection if it were happening all the time, but it seems to be limited to games with this backdrop.

I’m sympathetic to this complaint, but COVID-19 is what took me away from paper Magic. I was out of the game for three years and I’m only back now because of Arena.

I agree with most of this.

Regarding the speed/balance issues – I really just want to play Magic with a much, much lower power level than anything that is currently supported, but WotC has been pushing the power level for so long that I don’t even know if we can get back there. I would be open to playing something like Standard Pauper or Standard Artisan, but even that is probably way beyond where I really want to be. I want to turn the clock back 15 or 20 years to when 2R got you a Goblin Chariot instead of a Screaming Nemesis.

Regarding the Arena interface – I turned off voice lines and background music, changed my graphics settings to Low, and set my default pet to none, all within about a month of starting Arena. And then after a while I just started leaving my headphones off anyway. I put up with emotes for over a year, but broke down and disabled them within the past month or so. It’s been an improvement. I feel bad that I might be missing the occasional sincere “Nice” or “Thinking”, but not as bad as I used to feel about getting a premature “Good game” or a “Your Go” during a complex turn. I would love a setting to disable non-essential animations. Sleeves, pets, ripple effects in the background. I play Arena despite those things, not because of them. And the card highlighting! I realize it actually provides information but I’d still shut it off in a second.

As for sitting through combos… Arena really needs more sophisticated skipping controls. MTGO has had “Pass until end of turn” and “Pass until next turn” for two decades.

I would like to see Sol Ring banned, partly because it’s an obviously overpowered card and partly because it reduces space in your deck. Your options are to accept that the real deck construction rules are “Sol Ring plus 98 cards”, or to accept that you’re voluntarily building an underpowered deck, neither of which are satisfactory IMO.

That said, I think it’s interesting that their logic for not banning Sol Ring echoes the reason why I thought Gush shouldn’t have been banned from Pauper: it’s “the iconic card of the format”, and telling people that they’ll get to play it is a good advertisement for the format.

Give me your Zendikar Rising draft tips! It runs for a week starting tomorrow and I’ve saved up some gold to play it. I’ve never drafted it before but I’ve been practicing a bit on Draftsim, and what I’ve got so far is that W/G landfall and U/B Rogues seem good. What about Wizards, is that a viable archetype?

Reminiscent of Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia (which, to my dismay, I’ve never been able to work out a good shell for).

Both sides of this just have unlock triggers; the card doesn’t do anything as it sits on the battlefield. There’s no reason for this to be an enchantment except that they were trying to shoehorn some stuff into the set’s marquee mechanic.

Same with Meat Locker // Drowned Diner and maybe some others that I missed. If they couldn’t come up with enough actual-enchantment effects, that might be a sign that there wasn’t enough design space and they should have abandoned this mechanic or narrowed its scope. Like, maybe they could just have printed a few Rooms at rare/mythic and skipped the meta-mechanics that care about when you unlock rooms or how many unlocked rooms you have.