Meme or Dream? "What if I Play More Dinosaurs and Battles Than Lands?!?" (Standard)
It's been a while since we've had a Meme or Dream? episode, mostly because Wizards stopped publishing decklists from Magic Arena for a while, and when they returned, they were mostly just top-tier lists like Grixis and Esper. But something changed in just the past couple of weeks, and the head-scratching jank is back, which means Meme or Dream? is back too!
If you don't remember the series, the idea is simple: Wizards publishes lists on Magic.gg that they say got at least six wins in a row at Platinum rank or better in best-of-three on Magic Arena. But some of them are super janky, to the point where it's hard to figure out how they could possibly string together six wins in a row. We put these decks to the test and try to find out if they are a meme and just as janky as they look, or if they are a dream and actually at least somewhat competitive!
We've got a wild deck today. It's basically Gruul Dinosaur-and-battle tribal, with an absurd number of expensive cards (I actually mathed it out, and the average mana value of a nonland card in the deck is 4.02, which is higher than some Commander decks!) and just 21 lands. Actually, the deck almost manages to play more 5+ drops (17, or 19 if you count Green Sun's Twilight, which is at its best if cast for more than five mana) than it does lands, which is something I don't think I've ever seen before. Even beyond the curve, the deck has a lot of weirdness, like single copies of Curse of Shaken Faith, City on Fire, and Wrenn and Realmbreaker, along with a bunch of Dinosaurs like Rampaging Geoderm, Ravenous Sailback, and Tyrranax Atrocity that I sort of forgot existed because I've never seen anyone play them before. In classic Meme or Dream? fashion, we're also a bit light on sideboard cards, with a total of 13, including a full playset of Foreboding Statue and multiple Swords. Basically, while I could see a Gruul Dinosaur deck with some battles being decent enough in Standard, it's hard to see how this specific build could win six matches in a row, which is why we put it to the test—to find out if it's a meme or dream.
In the end, it's pretty safe to say that the deck is a meme. We ended up going 1-5 with the deck, although we did manage to pick up a couple of additional game wins along the way. Our worries—the curve being too high, too few lands, a bunch of random one-ofs, and such—ended up playing out in practice. The deck felt pretty powerful when we actually hit our land drops and drew our good cards, but that just didn't happen consistently enough because of the absurdly high curve and lack of lands.
While going 1-5 certainly qualifies the deck as a meme, I can imagine the deck going 6-0, so I think it's likely that it probably did happen. As I mentioned a moment ago, the deck actually felt pretty powerful when it ran hot. It doesn't seem like a stretch that someone managed to string together six games in a row where they hit their land drops and ramp spells and the big Dinosaurs did the rest. That said, I imagine a six-game win streak is probably the 99th percentile outcome for this deck. If you play 100 sets of six games, I think you might go 6-0 once, with the average being more like 2-4 or even 1-5.
The good news is that the archetype showed enough potential that it is probably worth fixing, which is a pretty straightforward process. We basically need to do three things: add more lands, drop the curve, and increase the deck's consistency. Oh yeah, and we also want to maintain the Dinos-and-battles theme. While the deck might be better if we cut most of the Dinosaurs and just played generic good cards, it would also lose most of its charm, so as we update the deck, we're going to do our best to not cut too many Dinosaurs or battles.
Step one: We add three more lands, getting us up to a respectable 24. While playing 25 or 26 might be correct considering how expensive some of our cards are, we need room for our Dinosaurs, so 24 it is.
Step two is to add consistency. The most powerful thing our deck did in the matches we played was to curve Topiary Stomper into Invasion of Zendikar, which gave us enough mana to start dropping huge Dinosaurs on Turn 5. The problem is that the original build only has one Topiary Stomper and three Invasion of Zendikars, so this didn't happen all that often. So, we'll go up to four copies of each to maximize our odds of pulling off this devastating sequence. While it feels a bit dirty, we'll also add in a playset of Fable of the Mirror-Breaker—the ultimate consistency adder in Standard. Fable is perfect for what our deck is trying to do. The Treasure token ramps us. If we don't have lands, we can discard expensive cards to find them. If we do have lands, we can discard extras to find our big Dinosaurs. And Fable often eats one or two removal spells, increasing the odds of our random T-Rexes sticking on the battlefield.
Finally, step three is dropping expensive cards that don't really fit the deck's theme. Chandra, Hope's Beacon is a really strong card, but we're only playing five instants or sorceries, so we can't really take advantage of its power. City on Fire is cool but not really necessary. Our creatures are so big that we're going to win in a couple of attacks anyway if we can actually get them on the battlefield, so tripling their damage just isn't needed. Plus, we don't have cheap creatures to use for convoke. Zopandrel is also a fun finisher, but it's not a Dinosaur, so it gets the axe so we can stay as on-theme as possible. This leaves us with something like this:
Oh yeah, I didn't want to harp on this too much because I'm mostly just thankful that we have a Meme or Dream? deck that was playing almost the full 15 cards in the sideboard, and playing anything is the sideboard is better than playing an empty sideboard, but I tuned that up a bit too. If you're thinking about building a sideboard for Standard, you are basically looking for three things: cards good against aggro (often removal, in this case Strangle and Brotherhood's End), cards that are good against grindy midrange and control decks (often cards that generate card advantage, in this case Reckoner Bankbuster), and graveyard hate for people trying to reanimate Atraxa (we go with Unlicensed Hearse). If you focus on those three things, your sideboards should turn out functional, at the very least!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's our Meme or Dream? for today! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
