Standard Super League Episode 1 Recap

Standard Super League made its debut last week and it was a rousing success. Owen Turtenwald took the early lead in the standings, using an Abzan Aggro deck to crush all comers.

Watch archives of previous Standard Super League episodes here.

Read more about Standard Super League here.

View last week's decklists here.

Several players brought some interesting brews to the table last week. Andrew Cuneo, perhaps knowing that his first round opponent (Owen) would chose an aggressive deck—believing that Cuneo would be on control—decided to zig instead of zag and showed up with a Temur Ramp deck sporting a full four copies of Sarkhan Unbroken. Things didn’t work out for him versus Owen, but this is still an interesting deck you might want to check out if you’ve been looking for an excuse to play with the new Sarkhan.

Josh Utter-Leyton also brought an experimental Esper Mentor deck that had all the control elements of a typical Esper deck, but instead of any of the Dragons (or Dragon-matters cards) he was instead planning to win with the Monks generated by Monastery Mentor plus the card advantage he could generate from Soulfire Grandmaster.

It will be really interesting to see what folks bring to the table this week. Will they shy away from experimenting given that Josh and Andrew both lost in the first round, or will players feel a little more comfortable now that they have a week under their belt and show up with spicy new tech prepared to turn the metagame on its head?

Watch twitch.tv/magic Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time (UTC-7) and we’ll find out together! Check MTGO.com at the same time to see the decklists that players will be using in tonight's episode.