Much Abrew: Five-Color Allies (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to our new Standard format to play one of my favorite tribes: Allies! I've loved Allies ever since they were first printed 15 years ago in Zendikar. And now, thanks to Avatar, I think we just might have enough Allies in Standard to make a super-fun and potentially super-powerful deck! How good are Allies in the Avatar format? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: 5C Allies
The Deck
If you look over the decklist, you'll probably notice that our deck is 100% Allies (and lands to cast them), with zero non-creature spells and zero non-Ally creatures. You are probably wondering why you'd play exclusively Allies in a deck. Well, there are actually several powerful payoffs for playing a ton of Allies. Here they are, roughly in order of how important they are to the deck.
- Great Divide Guide is absurd. It's essentially Gemhide Sliver or Manaweft Sliver but for Allies and with a much better body. Turning all our Allies into Birds of Paradise leads to some absurdly explosive turns where we can quickly dump our hand of creatures and build an overwhelming board.
- South Pole Voyager is one of our best card-advantage engines. It's a Soul Warden for Allies that also draws us a card the second time its ability triggers each turn. Since our deck is really good at playing multiple Allies each turn, we can typically draw at least one card each turn once we stick a South Pole Voyager. And in the late game, we sometimes can draw two cards each turn thanks to our flash Allies.
- Katara, the Fearless gives us a Panharmonicon for Allies, which doesn't do anything on its own but supercharges our other cards. It's also great with South Pole Voyager since it means it only takes one creature each turn to trigger the card-draw mode (while also gaining us a ridiculous amount of life).
- Earth Kingdom Protectors and Hakoda, Selfless Commander give us ways to protect our most important Allies, while Hakoda also offers a bit of card advantage by letting us play Allies from the top of our deck.
- Boiling Rock Rioter is one of my favorite designs from the entire set. The three-drop lets us tap an Ally to exile a card from a graveyard; then, when it attacks, we can cast an Ally that we've exiled with it. It gives us some main-deck graveyard hate, which doesn't matter in most matchups but is incredibly important when we run into a graveyard deck. If Boiling Rock Rioter only hated on our opponent's graveyard, it wouldn't be good enough for our deck. But the ability to exile our own Allies and recast them makes it worth a slot. This gives us a way to pseudo-protect our most important creatures, reuse our enters triggers, and also offer a soft protection lock with something like Hakoda, Selfless Commander, which we can sacrifice to give our team indestructible and then exile to Boiling Rock Rioter to recast and repeat the process.
Next, we have Aang Tron, which is the core of the deck. Beating down with various Aangs is our most common way to win the game. First, we have Aang, Swift Savior, which is similar to a Spell Queller, giving us a flashy three-drop flier that airbends something when it enters. Airbending is way stronger than I expected (see the airbending combo deck from last week). But even played fairly, Aang is a strong tempo play. In theory, we can flip it by waterbending 8, but this rarely happens in practice.
Avatar Aang almost never flips. While we technically can waterbend, airbend, earthbend, and firebend all in the same turn, it's super difficult to pull off in practice. Thankfully, this doesn't matter because the front side of the card is great, as a 4/4 flier that draws a card whenever we bend, which it does itself when it attacks. Once we get Katara, the Fearless down, Avatar Aang generates a ton of card advantage, which snowballs with the mana Great Divide Guide makes to let us build a massive board of Allies.
Finally, Aang, at the Crossroads is just a great value play, as a five-mana 3/3 flier that comes along with a creature of mana value four or less from our top five cards, which means it typically adds a ton of power and toughness to the battlefield. It's also the easiest Aang to flip—all we need is any other creature to leave the battlefield, and we get to flip Aang during the next upkeep. But its backside isn't especially strong, as a 4/4 flier that earthbends 2 each turn.
Rounding out the deck, we have...a bunch more Allies. Cards like Earthen Ally and Invasion Reinforcements help fill out our curve, Ty Lee, Chi Blocker gives us some flash removal, and Appa, Steadfast Guardian is insane, as a way to protect our team with airbending and make Ally tokens. Suki, Courageous Rescuer and Katara, Water Tribe's Hope give us ways to pump our team so we can close out the game quickly once we build a big board.
Maybe the funniest part of the deck is that our five-color mana base is actually better than some of the two- and three-color mana bases we've played recently. By playing all Allies, we get to play cards like Cavern of Souls, Jasmine Dragon Tea Shop, and Secluded Courtyard with zero downside. Toss in Starting Town, and we have 16 five-color lands plus Multiversal Passage, which is sort of a five-color land at home. Even though we're full-on five colors, we almost never have issues casting our spells.
Wrap-Up
Overall, 5C Allies felt pretty strong. The deck reminds me a little bit of a Standard version of the old five-color Humans deck that was at the top of Modern a few years ago. Allies can do pretty much everything, with card draw, lifegain, removal, ramp, and protection. The cards snowball pretty impressively if we can stick a few pieces on the battlefield. That said, we were playing the deck during early-access day (thanks to Wizards for hooking us up with the account), so I don't want to read too much into the deck's performance. Early-access day tends to have less removal and aggro than real Standard, so I really want to test the deck more once the set is released before deciding how good it actually is. It feels powerful, but if a bunch of removal-heavy decks are running around that can just kill our important pieces, like Great Divide Guide, it might not be quite as easy to build up a massive Ally snowfall. But my initial impression is that Allies might actually be pretty good in Avatar 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.
