More on Reflecting Pool in Standard.

Reflecting Pool Standard: What it means for the metagame, and why you should care.

Hey guys! Are you ready for Reflecting Pool Standard to start? Just four more days before Shards of Alara is released (and Time Spiral block, along with Coldsnap, gets booted from Standard). I know I delved a bit into Reflecting Pool at my last post, but let's speak a bit about WHY it's going to be a big game changer.

Fact: All forms of constructed have been dominated by nonbasic lands, the majority of them being able to either produce two colors of mana or be able to search for them. In Vintage and Legacy, you see the heavy use of the original dual lands (Bayou, Tundra, Badlands, Underground Sea, Taiga, Volcanic Island, etc.) along with the Onslaught fetchlands (Polluted Delta, Flooded Strand, Bloodstained Mire, Wooded Foothills, and Windswept Heath). In Extended, your manabase will almost always contain the Onslaught fetchlands and a ton of Ravnica shocklands (Steam Vents, Godless Shrine, Hallowed Fountain, Breeding Pool, etc.)

This is no different from Standard. In Time Spiral-Lorwyn Standard, we played the likes of Grove of the Burnwillows, Nimbus Maze, Horizon Canopy, Mystic Gate, Sunken Ruins, Gilt-Leaf Palace, Wanderwine Hub, and many many more. When Reflecting Pool was reprinted in Shadowmoor, it simply made a five-color control deck *work*.

Now imagine an entire block whose focus is three-color combinations (and rewarding you heavily for playing all three!). Can you do it alone with just basic lands and the CIPT (comes into play tapped) shardlands from Shards of Alara? Definitely not. Could you do it even with the basic fetchland cycle we've been given? Probably not. Fact is, people are going to be looking back at Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block and looking at the lands there for support. Do we look at the tribelands (Gilt-Leaf Palace, Wanderwine Hub, Secluded Glen, Ancient Amphitheater, Murmuring Bosk, etc.)? Nope. We're going to go with the uncommon Vivid land cycle, which is reminiscent of Gemstone Mine. We will also look past that and focus on the filterland cycles that Shadowmoor and Eventide brought us. These are amazing nonbasic lands that cost one of their two provided colors to activate and give you a combination of either two mana of the same color or one mana of each color. Talk about heavy manafixing.

Now consider this: Reflecting Pool taps to add one mana of any color to your mana pool that any land you control could produce. This means that with Vivid lands that still have at least one counter on them, Reflecting Pool is literally a no-drawback five-color mana provider. Along with that, you have the whacky combination of filterlands that will help you twist and turn your way into whatever combination of colors you need in casting a three-color spell.

Three colors have never been so playable and rewarding as they currently are. I'm not saying that playing Zoo in Extended or Kamigawa-Ravnica Standard isn't rewarding. Extended is all about the crazy mana fixing, and it's great that Standard has the potential to bring on something new and crazy.

We got it with Quick 'n Toast, a five-color control deck that dominated both the Time Spiral-Lorwyn Standard metagame and Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block constructed PTQs this season. That was just a taste.

Of course, why not just play the cool winning block constructed decks? Because in the end, they all fall to the new. When Ravnica-Time Spiral Standard was rampant, the top decks in the format were narrowed down to three by the time rotation was near us: Dragonstorm, Gruul Aggro and Dralnu du Louvre. They were literally rock, paper, scissors. Dragonstorm beat Dralnu, Dralnu beat Gruul, Gruul beat Dragonstorm. When Time Spiral block constructed ran around, people cashed in on a block-oriented version of Dralnu du Louvre simply titled "Teachings". It was the top deck of the season, matched only by Blue-Green beats.

When Lorwyn was unleashed on Standard, we saw an unstable metagame for roughly three months. Here was Teachings and Pickles attempting to struggle for survival, along with a whacky three-color Momentary Blink deck that built off of the tempo that Blue-Green beats had in block cosntructed. The chase rares at the time were Gaddock Teeg, Thoughtseize, Cryptic Command, and Garruk Wildspeaker. Can you guess which one is worth just a dollar now? At the StarCityGames $1,000 Standard Open, Elves dominated. Here was a Lorwyn archetype, from a set that had just been released that weekend, dominating this unknown metagame. The trend continued. A slew of new decks came out eventually: UW Pickles, an "update" from its blue-black counterpart, won Paul Cheon a Grand Prix. Red-Green Mana Ramp from block constructed was actually seeing a lot of progress (and is one of the only decks from Time Spiral that stood the test of time), people began discovering the amazing interaction between Epochrasite and Makeshift Mannequin. Faeries and Merfolk were easily brushed to the side at the time.

At the World Championships, Patrick Chapin along with his teammates Gabriel Nassif and Mark Herberholz took a new rendition of Dragonstorm that utilized the new Hideaway-enabled lands from Lorwyn and created something called Spinerock Storm. With everybody gearing up to defeat the likes of Elves and Mana Ramp, Spinerock Storm came out of nowhere and ran to a second-place finish at the World Championships courtesy of Chapin. If you were curious, Elves won Worlds with a new twist: splash white for Doran, the Siege Tower. It was, however, a fad. Once people began recognizing the threat to Spinerock Storm, the entire metagame began to hate on it. It's reminiscent of the huge hype that surrounded Dredge when Bridge From Below was printed in Future Sight. That card spiked up to over twenty-five dollars a piece. It was sure to "win regionals". The rest of the metagame didn't even give Dredge a chance. It retaliated with Tormod's Crypt and Withered Wretch.

Anyways, around a month or so later Morningtide was released. Now things were getting interesting. When Morningtide came out, a slew of new decks burst with life. One of them was Bitterblossom Control, a midrange control deck that didn't really get anywhere but raise Bitterblossom's price from $3 to a solid $7. This wasn't for long though, as Bitterblossom dropped back to the status of "okay rare" at $4. Mutavault was all the craze. They came out strong at roughly sixty a set, an obvious chase rare. In total, Mutavault was basically the only thing people really wanted to pull during Morningtide's release. Mannequin began utilizing Siege-Gang Commander (strange, I know!). Otherwise, Standard was headed towards City Champs finals. During this time, somebody put two and two together and realized: Hey, Faeries are INSANE! Bitterblossom blocks Tarmogoyf ALL FREAKIN DAY, you can Champion it with Mistbind Clique if it's about to kill you, and you have the ability to even Champion an animated Mutavault! Boom. Bitterblossom shoots up to one hundred dollars a set.

Then... Shadowmoor came out. Standard at Regionals was dominated by Quick 'n Toast, a brand-new Guilamme Wafo-Tapa concoction that brought him to a near-Top 8 finish at Pro Tour - Hollywood in May, along with a revitalized Snow-based build of Mana Ramp (which incorporated Skred) and the seemingly unstoppable Merfolk. Faeries showed up in droves. Elves turned out to be the consistent winner yet again. You can't help but think: What happened to the new Dragonstorm? How about Pickles? Teachings? UGW Blink? All of those were still legal. They didn't change. The metagame did.

That's exactly why you simply cannot rely on the strategies of the past in order to deal with the current Standard. With access to all five colors a necessity, there is no doubt in my mind that a revamped version of Quick 'n Toast is going to quickly place a stranglehold on the game early on. Red Deck Wins might pose a threat as well, along with Faeries. In the end though, it is the promising new archetypes brought on by the five Shards in Alara (Bant, Esper, Naya, Jund, Grixis) that are going to end up dominating this metagame with bold new decktypes and strategies. And when Conflux (The second set in the Shards of Alara block) hits early next year, we will gear up for another metagame-warping state.

There is only one recommendation I make for all of you who look forward to playing Standard: Stock up on Reflecting Pool, and do it fast.