Since the shocking ban announcement on August 10th, the Standard metagame has experienced some notable shifts. Strategies like Dimir Midrange have reemerged as top contenders, while entirely new brews, like this wild Five-Color Legends deck, have put up strong results. With 179 competitors in the field, this unique deck is well worth watching.
Legendary and Human Themes Unite
At its core, this deck, from MTGO player burnet7, aims to include the strongest tempo creatures available in Standard under one roof. Cecil, Dark Knight is the perfect card to put immediate pressure on the opponent, as it’s incredibly hard to block effectively. When followed up by hard-hitting two-drops like Spectacular Spider-Man and Miles Morales, your opponent risks immediately falling behind.
Once the opponent is on the backfoot, disruptive threats like Wondrous Wasp and Aang, Swift Savior help keep problematic blockers off the board. Arachne, Psionic Weaver and The Queen of Dale can help you further, punishing opposing noncreature spells. When you’re in a position to capitalize on a tempo disadvantage, Lightning, Army of One can deal tons of damage to close the game.
While these Legends are individually quite powerful, the inability to play two copies at the same time is a massive dowside, but Key to the Side-Door helps this. On top of smoothing your draws, Key can play a similar role to Lightning, finishing off a low-health opponent by making a creature unblockable.
If that weren’t enough, this deck’s Legend focus also unlocks Serah Farron as a massive buff effect once transformed. With tons of protective Legends like Jennifer Walters and Zack Fair, setting up a window to transform this creature isn’t difficult. Plus, the once-per-turn discount to your legends synergizes perfectly with this deck’s array of Flash creatures.
While all these Legends can play well together, the real key to this Legends deck is its Human Typal nature, unlocking an extremely powerful manabase. Cavern of Souls and Secluded Courtyard do tons of heavy lifting here, ensuring your Legends can come down on curve despite their colors. If that weren’t enough Celestial Reunion is a small cherry on top, finding the perfect Human Legend to any situation.
An Unorthodox but Strong Gameplan
Ultimately, while this deck has a lot going on, the versatility of its creatures gives the deck game against a variety of top tier strategies. Versus slower decks like Jeskai Control and Dimir Excruciator, Five-Color Legends does a good job applying early pressure and staving off board wipes with Aang and Spectacular Spider-Man.
At the same time, having access to so many three-toughness creatures like Cecil is a big deal against the red decks packing four copies of Burst Lightning. Being able to tap down Hasty threats like Slickshot Show-Off with Wondrous Wasp also helps ensure you don’t get run over.
Unfortunately, this deck’s lack of hard removal does come at a cost against Mono-Green Landfall, which can set up one-shot Trampling kills out of nowhere. Keeping up with fast draws from Azorius Tempo involving Momo, Friendly Flier is similarly quite difficult.
Even with this in mind, the deck’s powerful suite of cards has what it takes to compete at Standard’s top tables, for now at least. While Standard is beginning to settle, the format is far from stable, suggesting there may be many adjustments in the future. While this deck seems decently positioned now, its long-term viability will depend on how the metagame develops.
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