Much Abrew: Bant Teleportation Circle (Standard)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Streets of New Capenna is here, and today, we're jumping into our new Standard format to see how many Rhinos we can make with Titan of Industry and Teleportation Circle! In a lot of ways, Bant Teleportation Circle is basically a Panharmonicon-style deck, with Teleportation Circle being a watered-down Panharmonicon that only works once each turn. Our deck is overloaded with creatures that either ramp or draw cards with their enters-the-battlefield triggers, which help us work toward our two big finishers—Titan of Industry and Sanctuary Warden. Both have the power to take over the game quickly, and doubly so if we have Teleportation Circle to blink them on our end step. How many Rhinos can we make? What does Streets of New Capenna Standard look like? Let's get to the video and find out on this week's Much Abrew About Nothing!
Oh yeah, one other quick note. Today's video was recorded during early-access day, so shout-out to Wizards for the invite and for hooking us up with a full account to explore the new format!
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Much Abrew: Bant Teleportation Circle
Discussion
- Record-wise, I played a bunch of games with Bant Teleportation Circle and ended with right around a 50% win rate, although personally, I take the record with a grain of salt because early-access day is only best-of-one, and I'm not sure that best-of-one is a great judge of a deck's true power. Sometimes, you lose the roll, keep a slightly slow hand and get run over by aggro without doing much of anything. This can happen in best-of-three as well, but in best-of-three, you can then bring in sideboard cards to help improve the matchup. All this is to say that the deck felt solid, and I think it's fairly competitive, but I'll want to jam some games in best-of-three before really making any bold proclamations about its potential.
- The goal is pretty simple: generate value with enters-the-battlefield triggers, play Teleportation Circle to generate even more value with enters-the-battlefield triggers, and then ramp into Titan of Industry and Sanctuary Warden to close out the game. The biggest problem we ran into with the deck is that we'll occasionally get slow draws and get run over by aggro before we get our value engine going (which makes sense, considering the same thing can happen with Panharmonicon decks—it's the downside of building around a four-mana permanent that doesn't do anything right away). On the other hand, if we can get to the late game, Bant Teleportation Circle can generate an overwhelming amount of value against pretty much any deck in the format.
- I should also mention that this is mostly a viewer-submitted deck from Cashmoneymisplay, although I did make a few small changes. The initial build had more copies of Spara's Adjudicators, which does have a decent, removal-ish enters-the-battlefield trigger, although, at five mana, it's a bit expensive for what it does, especially since paying two mana to turn a land into a Triome isn't all that exciting in Standard. I trimmed down on the five-drop for another Sanctuary Warden and Inspiring Overseer. The deck also has a few too many channel lands for my taste (I ran into some issues with drawing multiples and missing land drops because they are legendary), so I cut down to one Boseiju, Who Endures and one Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire and replaced them with some Pathways. Otherwise, the deck is very similar to what Cashmoneymisplay sent in.
- As far as the new cards in the deck, here's a quick breakdown...
- Titan of Industry is busted. It's the best finisher in our deck and really the reason to play Bant Teleportation Circle. It's so good that I think we should probably add in the fourth copy, because the biggest problem we had with Titan of Industry was that we didn't always draw a copy. Its double enters-the-battlefield trigger is absurd. We almost always make a 4/4 Rhino, and then the second mode really depends on the matchups. Standard has a lot of popular and powerful artifacts and enchantments (Reckoner Bankbuster, Wedding Announcement, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Circle of Confinement, The Restoration of Eiganjo, etc.), so the Naturalize mode was powerful in a lot of matchups, although gaining life is great as a way to stabilize against aggro, and the shield counter is helpful against control, allowing us to dodge a non-Farewell sweeper. I fully expect that Titan of Industry will see a lot of play in Standard in ramp or reanimator decks, and it will probably get even better after rotation, when cards like Koma, Cosmos Serpent rotate.
- Sanctuary Warden was also super impressive. Its enters-the-battlefield trigger of drawing a card and making a 1/1 token works incredibly well with Teleportation Circle (since we can keep resetting the shield counters and reusing the ability). The shield counter is sort of high variance as a way to protect Sanctuary Warden. It's great in some matchups, making the opponent use multiple removal spells to kill it, although we also ran into cards like Vanishing Verse that don't really care about a shield counter at all. While I don't think Sanctuary Warden fits in every white deck, it seems very playable in Standard if you can blink it or have a counters theme.
- Lagrella, the Magpie was fine. Being able to hit our own creature and have it come back bigger (and hopefully reuse its enters-the-battlefield ability) is nice, either to punish our opponent for killing Lagrella to get their creature back or synergizing with Teleportation Circle, although I'm not sure this upside is enough to make it better than Skyclave Apparition.
- Topiary Stomper is weird. It's not great if you think of it as a creature. Many of our games ended before we got seven lands on the battlefield. On the other hand, it's great as a three-mana ramp spell that works with blink effects. It's as easy four-of in the deck—just don't expect it to save you against aggro. It's basically a smaller Beanstalk Giant that doesn't cost mana to become a creature in the late game.
- Spara's Adjudicators was pretty bad. As removal, it's worse than something like Skyclave Apparition since it's so much more expensive, and it's even worse as fixing. I don't think the cycle is especially playable outside of limited, and getting to play with Spara's Adjudicators didn't change my mind.
- So, should you play Bant Teleportation Circle in Standard? I think the answer is yes, if you like Panharmonicon-style blinky value decks, although as I mentioned before, I don't really put much weight in results from early-access day, in part because it's best of one and in part because people are trying out new things. Could Bant Teleportation Circle stand up to the top decks in the meta in best-of-three? Only time will tell, but I think the power of Titan of Industry and Sanctuary Warden (combined with good ramp and removal) will give it a chance. Either way, the deck is super fun to play. If you're a Panharmonicon fan, this is about as close as you can get to playing a Panharmonicon deck in Streets of New Capenna Standard!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all 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.
