Meme or Dream? "Oops, I'm Playing My Jeskai Brawl Deck in Standard"
A couple of months ago, Wizards started publishing decklists from Magic Arena. To qualify for publication, a deck needs to win at least six matches in a row at platinum rank or better. This sounds simple on its face, but every time lists are published, some incredibly janky lists end up being published. This has led to speculation that there's a bug in the system that allows decks that didn't actually win six matches in a row to be published, or, for the most tin-foil-hatted crowd, the idea that Wizards just publishes whatever it wants to make the metagame look more diverse than it really is.
However, another possibility exists: maybe the decks really did get six wins in a row due to some combination of luck and perhaps being more competitive than they look on paper. Well, the idea of Meme or Dream? (formerly Jank or Dank?) is a series where we'll take the meme-iest of the list Wizards publishes and try them for ourselves. Are they a dream hiding behind a janky external shell, or are they as dysfunctional as they look, falling into the meme category?
This week, we have a deck that almost defies description. The best I could come up with was "Oops, I'm Playing My Jeskai Brawl Deck in Standard" since the deck is mostly full of seemingly random one-ofs. The deck almost looks like someone set their Arena filters to Jeskai colors and then randomly clicked until they had 60 cards filling their screen, which leaves us with "combos" like two copies of Griffin Aerie with a single one-of Spoils of Adventure that can gain us enough life to make a Griffin token, two Ruin Crabs for no discernible reason outside of slightly powering up a single copy of Anticognition, and Brawl-deck "all-star" Banish into Fable without any artifacts to power it up. Oh yeah, and in keeping with our Meme or Dream? tradition, the deck has no sideboard, even though it apparently won six matches in a row in best-of-three.
Is it really possible that such a strange-looking pile could win six matches in a row? Can it win a single match? Can we make the ever-elusive Griffin token with Griffin Aerie? Let's find out on this week's Meme or Dream?
