Rotation is coming up. Well, it is actually over a month away, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t started thinking about it already.

The thing is, since (like I’ve mentioned in the past) I play monocolored decks, the card pool might just lose too many cards for this to be a viable option. My current monogreen will be completely neutered with the loss of key cards such as [scryfall]Rancor[/scryfall], [scryfall]Predator Ooze[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Ulvenwald Tracker[/scryfall], not to mention [scryfall]Strangleroot Geist[/scryfall], [scryfall]Wolfir Avenger[/scryfall], [scryfall]Wolfir Silverheart[/scryfall], [scryfall]Yeva, Nature’s Herald[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Garruk Relentless[/scryfall]. I even played a [scryfall]Vorapede[/scryfall], which was always too much for my opponents to deal with.

What’s left? You don’t get very far with a [scryfall]Scavenging Ooze[/scryfall], [scryfall]Ranger’s Guile[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Deadbridge Goliath[/scryfall], no matter how good they are (although Ranger’s Guile was much better with Tracker).

But hey… Right now the new Standard will basically be Return to Ravnica with some additions from M14 and Theros, right? Not exactly, but monocolored decks have historically been more popular in the Block Constructed Pro Tours. For example, although I didn’t know it while putting it together, my current green deck is pretty much a descendant of a deck from Pro Tour Avacyn Restored (the block PT for Innistrad):

He went 8-1-1 with the deck.

So looking back to Pro Tour Dragon’s Maze (which was block constructed), we see that the only color with its own decks is red.

Based on those, the decklist pretty much writes itself. There are three monored decks, all of which have exactly 19 lands and they share 32 exactly same creatures. Of the 9 cards left, they all have [scryfall]Dynacharge[/scryfall]s and then depending on whether they like to have some control over the board, they have either some or no removal.

Obviously, I’m not going to bring any of these decks as they are into standard, even with the current limited card pool, but on the other hand, any of those lists would probably work pretty well. Besides some sideboard options and perhaps some removal, M14 doesn’t actually bring anything to the mix on top of those cards.

A lot does depend on Theros. Now I’m somewhat disappointed that I didn’t try Big Red at any point of the current standard since right now we have [scryfall]Thundermaw Hellkite[/scryfall] which would be a great basis for such a deck. However M14 does have [scryfall]Burning Earth[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Awaken the Ancient[/scryfall]. So, if we get some good red mass removal in Theros (although [scryfall]Mizzium Mortars[/scryfall] is definitely a good option), maybe this could be the way to go. [scryfall]Mindsparker[/scryfall], [scryfall]Chandra’s Phoenix[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Chandra, Pyromaster[/scryfall] definitely don’t hurt either. With the aforementioned [scryfall]Boros Reckoner[/scryfall]s, this could actually work. Maybe.