Benchmarking Creatures in MtG Standard (early 2020)

Wow, no posts this year. Well, not to worry, there will be plenty soon, as I’ve had a bigger project going on since summer.

Anyhow, in his book, Next Level Deckbuilding, Patrick Chapin talked about benchmarking creatures. He didn’t actually use the word ‘benchmark’, but that’s what I’m using. Well, that was 2013, so quite a few things have changed since then, so perhaps it’s time to update that.

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THB Brews, pt. 1 – Ashiok

Spoilers for new Theros started yesterday. There were leaks before, but I’m going to be boring and join the no-leaks crowd. This means that we only have three cards to play with at this point. Not sure there was anything Standard playable anyhow. (Although there might have been, I just don’t remember.)

But let’s start with this.

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Ravnica Allegiance Brews, pt. 1 – Orzhov Knights

“What?”, you might be asking right now. Obviously, right now, I don’t really know what will be good when the set comes out, but what I can do is speculate. I mean, we do know the rest of the shocks are coming up, so that’s a start. It’ll give us the crucial [scryfall]Godless Shrine[/scryfall]. Actually, the shocks are going to enable a lot of decks. There are already GR-decks without [scryfall]Stomping Grounds[/scryfall].

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Guilds of Ravnica Brews, pt. 6 – Monoblack Aggro

We already had quite enough 1-drops to make this work (at least a bit), so maybe…

The problem is more with the 2-drops, but Guilds does give this deck some long game… and [scryfall]Dead Weight[/scryfall]. Granted, it’s no [scryfall]Fatal Push[/scryfall], but cheap removal is extremely important in a deck like this, especially since you have no usable discard.

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