With the shake up that is Alchemy cards, Historic has been a very interesting place. While we have seen a good number of cards make headway in the format, players are looking to some old top decks to take advantage of the metagame. We’re seeing Selesnya Humans, Life Gain Combo, Control, even Sacrifice still show up to play on the ladder. One deck that has floated around the fringes is looking to be very well positioned in the meta right now.
Boros Tokens
Boros Tokens, a deck that may seem too linear on paper is honestly quite a strong strategy right now.
This is comes to us from one of my friends, JohnRamosMTG. He’s been piloting the deck on the ladder and reached top 500 Mythic with the deck in December. The deck aims to take advantage of a meta full of control and aggro decks. Let’s break down the deck a bit and talk about why this deck is doing so well.
How We Win
One of our Game 1 win conditions is Transmogrify into Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite. Often times, an Elesh Norn is enough to win a game by itself, but having one on turn 4 is backbreaking for a lot of decks. Nearly all of the aggro decks in the format right now are all comprised of small creatures, so Elesh Norn can keep the board clean.
Our other methods for winning the game is through flooding the board with tokens. Legion’s Landing is our earliest form of token generation, and one that’s consistent. It also puts us up a land a which can allow us to play a bunch of spells in a turn.
Next up, our instant speed token generation comes in the form of Raise the Alarm and You See a Pair of Goblins. We’re usually not playing these proactively on our turn, we’re playing these spells at the end of our opponent’s turn. They can also be combat tricks where necessary.
Forbidden Friendship and Heroic Reinforcements are sorcery speed spells but are helpful for building our board proactively and pushing damage. Wedding Announcement has been an over performer in this deck. Giving us a free token each turn, or cards if we are attacking just helps this deck so much. On the back, it’s an anthem which does help.
Support Cards
We have a few supporting cards here. First off Portable Hole is carrying a lot of weight here. One of the cards that we struggle with is Esper Sentinel. Since we don’t have a clean way to kill it otherwise, it’d gain a ton of cards for our opponents, so it’s a must go. This can also do well against some key cards such as lords, Soul Warden, Ravenous Squirrel and more.
Intangible Virtue is fantastic for our deck since we make so many tokens. Beefing up the team and allowing them to attack and block is great. Chandra doesn’t really play any specific role in the deck, but she can do a lot. She’s often times removing a threat with her -3, but she can give us cards or mana where needed.
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Sideboard
Our sideboard is tailored to beat a few decks.
Against Control:
- – 3 Portable Hole
- – 4 Transmogrify
- – 2 Elesh Norn
- + 4 Paladin Class
- + 3 Adanto Vanguard
- + 2 Adeline, Resplendent Cathar
—
Against Aggro / Midrange
- – 2 Heroic Reinforcements
- +2 Justice Strike
—
Against Graveyard Decks
- – 2 Chandra
- – 1 Wedding Announcement
- – 2 Heroic Reinforcements
- – 1 Intangible Virtue
- +2 Rest in Peace
- +2 Relic of Progenitus
- +2 Justice Strike
—
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This deck is a ton of fun, and doesn’t even require any Alchemy cards. Definitely give this one a shot and thanks to John for the deck!
