Standard: 5 Decks with Spider-Man (Through the Omenpaths) to try out!

Spider-Man is coming. Whether it's the Prerelease on September 19th, or the totally non-Spider-Man release on Magic Arena and Magic Online with the expansion Through the Omenpaths on the 23rd, players will be able to experience the collaboration's new features at the tabletop and in ranked matches.

Despite the unexpected changes this set brought with different names and the same abilities, we're still talking about an expansion for competitive formats with the potential to bring changes to the Metagame with some of its key cards. And in this article, we explore Spider-Man's potential for Standard, with five lists to try out!

Azorius Web-Slinging

The Web-Slinging ability is an excellent way to reuse the effects of your creatures' ETBs, especially when combined with means to tap them outside combat, such as vehicles, spacecrafts, or Warden of the Inner Sky, which already has a solid base of cards along with Spyglass Siren and Novice Inspector.

In this list, we use Arachne, Psionic Weaver as a complement to Nurturing Pixie to cast two spells in one turn and trigger Cosmogrand Zenith or to extract value from low-cost creatures while drawing cards with Haliya, Guided by Light. Arachne also offers hand disruption to delay opponents' turns long enough to take over the game.

On the more reactive side, we have Spider-Sense as another stack interaction tool that can have its cost consistently reduced with Warden of the Inner Sky. In addition to dealing with removal and counterspells, the new card also responds to triggered abilities like Proft's Eidetic Memory or the extra combat from Fear of Missing Out.

Naya Bounce

Naya Bounce combines Selesnya Gearhulk with some red cards to take advantage of Scarlet Spider, Ben Reilly. Unlike the above version, this one relies on more impactful ETB effects from cards with higher mana values, as we want to take advantage of their costs to increase Scarlet's power when it enters.

The ideal interaction for this list involves Nova Hellkite, but Brightglass Gearhulk's toolbox is also an excellent way to repurpose ETBs with the new Web-Slinging creatures, and even returning a Tersa Lightshatter after combat can make a major difference in filtering your hand.

Simic Jackal

Jackal, Genius Geneticist is one of the best build-around cards in Spider-Man, and I'm sure many variants of it will appear in the first few weeks of the format (it's also possibly the card with the greatest potential to break something). Copying any creature you cast with the sole "price" of establishing a growing mana curve in your list is no problem for most decks.

In this list, we leveraged the Simic Midrange shell, which boasts an excellent distribution of drops in costs one to four, to experiment with Jackal. A first-turn Llanowar Elves opens up space to play it on the second turn, accompanied by another one-drop that will be copied. From that point on, it's up to the opponent to respond to the new creature, or each subsequent drop will be an even bigger problem.

We complemented this lineup with the already well-known Genemorph Imago interaction to turn Jackal into a 3/3 even without having increased its power with a one-drop. And if we get at least one creature in play beforehand, we'll have a 4/4 that can copy Enduring Curiosity, Ouroboroid, or even the new Lizard, Connors's Curse, which also permanently alters a creature's power.

Parker Luck

Parker Luck is one of the most fun cards to bring to competitive formats, and building a deck around the enchantment is easy with the current Standard card availability: Rooms counts both mana values ​​when revealed by the card, dealing damage equal to the sum of those values. For example, Unholy Annex costs a total of eight mana to unlock both rooms and, therefore, deals eight damage to the opponent when revealed.

Insatiable Avarice allows you to place any card on top, guaranteeing an 11-damage combo with Funeral Room, totaling half the opponent's life. If we have a Bloodletter of Aclazotz, the opponent will lose a total of 22 life, a potential combo-kill.

Since we're already on the Bloodletter of Aclazotz wagon, it's also worth including Unstoppable Slasher, whose combo with the demon guarantees another instant win line on a different front than Parker Luck, complemented by a classic Midrange shell

Grixis Monument

With the potential ban of Agatha's Soul Cauldron and/or Vivi Ornitier, the core "Izzet Discard" remains in Standard as an archetype with competitive potential. In this list, we capitalize on this strategy by using some new Spider-Man cards.

The main one, Hobgoblin, Mantled Marauder, ensures a more aggressive line for the archetype, typically attacking for six damage when followed by Tersa Lightshatter or Winternight Stories. We also include Carnage, Crimson Chaos, whose ETB and Mayhem ability guarantee card advantage with looting effects.

We've included Three Steps Ahead as a way to trigger Monument to Endurance on your opponent's turn while also allowing you to copy the artifact to stack more triggers with discards.

Bonus: Five-Color Spideys

The name speaks for itself: just as when Final Fantasy came out, I created a deck focused on playing as many of the set's legends as possible.

In essence, this is a Spider deck: we have Spider-Punk and Spider-Ham, Peter Porker for creature-type interactions, plus Roaming Throne to double our cards' triggers—a key mechanic considering that Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy, and Miles Morales have ETB effects and triggers that can be doubled.

Among the non-legendary creatures, we have Radioactive Spider, which can search any Spider-Verse character, as well as Spinner of Souls, whose ability provides more substance in maintaining our resources considering we have virtually no source of card advantage.

Of all the lists, this is the one I least recommend crafting because I believe it's far from optimized and would be quite costly financially and/or costly in wildcards to build this deck. However, if you happen to want to play Spider-Man in a dedicated deck, this version can serve as a starting point.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!