Caw Blade (2011) vs Vivi Cauldron (2025) | Best Standard Deck Ever Top 64
Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of the Best Standard Deck Ever Tournament! We built a bracket with 64 of the most iconic Standard decks in Magic's history, with each full year of Magic getting at least one deck, and most years getting two, and over the coming months Richard and I are going to play through the bracket with paper cards to find the best Standard deck ever! (You can read more about the tournament and see the bracket and all the decklists here.) We kick things off with a good one: the Jace, the Mind Sculptor fueled Caw Blade from 2011 against one of the decks that broke last year's Standard in Vivi Cauldron!
Vivi Cauldron doesn't need much of an introduction. Wizards decided to make Universes Beyond sets Standard legal. The first of these sets was Final Fantasy and Vivi Ornitier was the chase card from the set, thanks to Wizards removing some safety valves (like requiring it to tap to make mana) in an effort to make an exciting card. Just a few weeks after Final Fantasy dropped players added Agatha's Soul Cauldron to their Vivi Ornitier decks, and the resulting Vivi Cauldron deck proceeded to break Standard for the next several months, to the point where Wizards pre-announced they would likely be banning Vivi Ornitier in September 2025, but not until November. Once November came Wizards banned Vivi Ornitier and Proft's Eidetic Memory to kill the deck, although the Izzet color combination was so strong it remained at the top of the format even without its best card.
Meanwhile Caw Blade did something similar to Vivi Cauldron, but way back in 2011. At the time planeswalkers were a new card type, and when Jace, the Mind Sculptor was printed in Worldwake its four abilities quickly made it the greatest planeswalker of all time, to the point where pros were literally making rap songs about it. The Caw Blade deck emerged at Pro Tour Paris in 2011, combining Jace with Squadron Hawk (the "Caw") and Stoneforge Mystic to find various Swords (like Sword of Feast and Famine) and Batterskull (the "Blade") to create a dominant control deck. Over the next few months Standard devolved into a one-deck meta with Caw Blade as the one real deck in the format. By mid-2011 things had gotten so bad that Wizards banned both Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic from Standard back during an era when Standard bannings happened once a decade rather than once every few months, for the first round of Standard bannings since the last Affinity cards were banned in 2005.
Next Week: Power 9 Control (1994) vs. Simic Oko (2019)
Next week we have a good one: the oldest deck in the format, Black Lotus Control, which won Magic's first ever World Championship way back in 1994 takes on Simic Oko, fueled by Oko, Thief of Crowns, which would unseat Jace, the Mind Sculptor for the title of best planeswalker of all time almost immediately after it was printed in 2019's Throne of Eldraine. Will Black Lotus and the rest of the Power 9 prevail or simply end up 3/3 Elks? Come back next Monday to find out!
