Astral Slide (2004) vs. Wolf Run Ramp (2011) | Best Standard Deck Ever Top 64

Hello everyone, and welcome to the next match in the Best Standard Deck Ever Tournament! This week, we have Astral Slide, a cycling-based blink deck built to take on the menace of 2004 Standard Affinity, up against the Primeval Titan deck tutoring up Kessig Wolf Run and Inkmoth Nexus in Wolf Run Ramp! Which deck is moving on, and which is going home? Let's get to the video and find out! Oh yeah, you can find all the decklists and the bracket for the Best Standard Deck Ever Tournament here.

Astral Slide (2004) vs. Wolf Run Ramp (2011)

Built as a counter to Affinity, the biggest menace of 2004 Standard, Astral Slide's plan for beating the best deck in Standard was cycling a bunch with its namesake enchantment on the battlefield to blink Viridian Shaman repeatedly and blow up all the artifacts on the battlefield. While the deck might look a bit weird at a glance, it has a ton of inevitability once its engine of Astral Slide and Eternal Witness (to blink and keep returning cycling cards to hand) gets online since it can gain a ton of life with Renewed Faith and repeatedly build a massive board with Decree of Justice. 

While some builds of Astral Slide existed in 2003, its real breakout was Worlds 2004 when 15-year-old Julien Nuijten completed one of the most meteoric rises in Magic's history. Julien played his first major event at Grand Prix Brussels in May 2004, where he managed to run Goblins all the way to the Top 4 before losing to Kai Budde in the semi-finals, which he parlayed into a Top 4 at Dutch Nationals two months later. In turn, this was enough to get him an invite to Worlds in San Francisco, where the teenager defeated a meta full of Affinity players to take home the trophy and become Magic's youngest ever champion, a record that still stands today, 22 years later!

Using Primeval Titan to tutor up Inkmoth Nexus and its namesake land Kessig Wolf Run to potentially (repeatedly) attempt to one-shot kill opponents by making a massive, trampling, and sometimes flying and infectious Voltron threat, Wolf Run Ramp was a very real deck in Standard more or less from the day Innistrad was released. Its breakout performance was at Worlds 2011, where Junya Iyanaga took down a Top 8 overflowing with Tempered Steel players with the ramp deck to take home the trophy. A few months later, at Pro Tour Dark Ascension, the deck would take Brian Kibler to the championship, helping him win a Wolf Run Ramp mirror over Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa in the finals for his fifth and (at least, thus far) last Pro Tour Top 8 finish. While the deck would remain competitive in Standard through rotation, as we moved into the second half of 2012, UW Delver would take its place as the best deck in the format. The rotation of Inkmoth Nexus and some support cards in September 2012 would end the deck for good, moving Primeval Titan on to Modern, where it's still one of the premiere threats today, a rarity for creatures first printed nearly 15 years ago. 

Updated Bracket

You can find the updated bracket here!

Next Week: Ramunap Red (2017) vs. Izzet Cutter (2025)

Next week, the bracket gets aggressive, with two of the premier aggro decks from the past decade facing off: Ramunap Red, which managed to get its namesake land Ramunap Ruins banned back in 2017, against the deck that dominated Pro Tour Final Fantasy last year in Izzet Cutter.