​GO BLANKING THE COMPETITION AT NRG CHAMPS

Hello everyone! It has been a very exciting month for me recently, as I was able to finally qualify for my third Pro Tour via winning NRG champs a few weeks ago, as well as splitting a local RCQ this weekend to qualify for RC Dallas using UB midrange in standard. I owe a large amount of thanks to my testing partners Cris Smith, Kyle Gonzalez, Raja Suleiman, and Derrick Davis for helping me get ready leading up to the wvent and preparing me for top level competition. I could talk about all sorts of things involved with this event, but in this article I am going to focus on why I made the choices I did in pioneer, which was a huge factor in me winning the tournament.

This was my list a few hours before submitting my pioneer deck. For this event, I ended up cutting the second Hidetsugu Consumes all in the sideboard because I expected almost zero aggro decks in our field of 16 players. I will go through and discuss each of my individual card choices, unique for this event, and why I made them; starting with the main deck. The first big innovation, which started at the RC in Atlanta with Inti Rakdos, was one Raja came up with that I think more rakdos decks should potentially move to. This being three main deck Hive of the Eye Tyrant as opposed to two Hive and one Den of the Bugbear. Den of the Bugbear is just a significantly worse man-land in the format for many reasons. Graveyard relevance is at an all-time high in pioneer, with cards such as Memory Deluge, Arclight Phoenix, Kroxa Titan of Death's Hunger, and Return to the Ranks being crucial cards in the format. This means that the trigger on Hive is a huge deal. Cutting the Den also means that you add a mountain and trim on a swamp, which in some cases leads to Field of Ruin being less of an issue when facing decks such as UW because you don't get cut off of your red mana if you don't want to. Den also has some huge weaknesses in the fact that it only has two toughness which means it always dies to cards like Torch of Defiance, Fiery Impulse, and Stomp. Everything else with the mana base is fairly stock so I won't go into further details there.

I already alluded to the importance of graveyard hate in this format, which is why I decided a main deck Go Blank made sense, especially into this room given that I suspected 4-6 players would play UW Control, 2-4 would play Phoenix, 1 would play Amalia Combo, and 1 would play Lotus Field. I like Go blank in all of these match-ups, which meant that go blank was going to be very good in at least 50% of my matches. Typically, only about 30% of any given room will be playing these decks, so the main deck Go Blank was much more rewarding than it would be in other events. I have enjoyed two Duress in the main deck for quite some time, as it is very applicable in most matchups and I have played four in my 75 for about a year, so the second copy main freed up a sb slot. In a room full of UW and Phoenix, this seemed even better than usual. I never play less than three Reckoner Bankbuster because I feel it is the most important card in roughly 50% of match-ups. It is very bad in multiples at times, especially vs aggro decks, but since I thought there would be none of those in the room, maining four Busters was an easy choice. For this same reason, I only main decked two 2-mana kill spells and two Bonecrusher Giant. Bonecrusher Giant is awful into Phoneix and is good but not great vs UW. It Really shines vs aggro decks and in Rakdos mirrors. I expected some amount of Rakdos which is why I had the third Bonecrusher in the side.

The Archfiend of the dross over the third Sheoldred is another nod to Phoenix, as a 6/6 is significantly better than an X/5. Sometimes you get the upside of having two very impactful 4-drops in play when both are in your deck as well. Third Trespasser is a bit different than some lists but that again was a nod to Phoenix, as well as it being a better threat into UW due to dodging potential Change the Equations, eating Deluge, punishing draw-go turns, as well as punishing targeted removal.

The last big thing to talk about with this list is the two sideboard Lilianas. I typically think Liliana is a fine card in Rakdos Midrange but don't love her at the moment. I knew I needed her in this event because most UW lists play some number of Dream Trawler in their sideboard. This was my check to that, as well as it just being generically good in the match-up anyways.

Those are the brief explanations of some of the cards that may have seemed a bit out of place in my build from NRG Champs. Because I knew the format was going to be heavily tilted towards UW and Phoenix I knew I could get away with some wild deck choices ( a trick I learned from Oliver Tomaiko and Issac Bullwinkle in our playing for ante series) which I would not recommend into a larger open field. Overall I think my Rakdos deck was the most interesting of my three decks and I think I had a good read on the meta and things broke my way when I needed them to. I am excited for the next few events and hope that anyone reading this has found it informative and helpful for how to build rakdos into expected metas!