Standard: 5 Decks with Secrets of Strixhaven

Next Tuesday, Secrets of Strixhaven arrives on digital platforms, bringing with it a new Standard season for us to evaluate how the return to the magic school will affect the competitive environment of Magic: The Gathering.

The new expansion features dozens of new cards with the potential to impact the Metagame, and many still need to find homes or prove themselves efficient enough against the current best competitive decks.

In this article, we present five Standard decklists based on some of the set's main cards or built around some of the expansion's key mechanics!

Resonating Lute Control

Resonating Lute is potentially broken. The artifact fixes and doubles mana for instants and sorceries, making it easier to sequence removal and card advantage sources or to cast bombs like Jeskai Revelation early.

In this list, we blend the core of the well-known Four-Color Control with the artifact, also taking advantage of the addition of Great Hall of the Biblioplex, which generates mana of any color for instants and sorceries and can even turn into a win condition once we've exhausted the opponent's resources.

To maximize powerful interactions with Jeskai Revelation, we chose The Dawning Archaic as the win condition. Besides costing less for each spell in the graveyard, the new legend can reuse them for free each attack, burying the opponent in card advantage.

Abzan Lifegain

Witherbloom provided quite a bit of support and payoff for lifegain outside the usual color for that strategy. Adding green now grants a significant power boost to all your creatures with Comforting Counsel, while black brings the new Moseo, Vein's New Dean as two life-gain triggers in a single card when we have one of the one-drops on the board and a powerful recursion tool each turn it stays in play.

Silverquill Repartee

Cards with Repartee promote a playstyle similar to Heroic but more focused on going wide due to the potential of Stirring Hopesinger and Informed Inkwright to dominate the game when they're together on the board. The new ability also counts for the opponent's creatures, so we can interact with the board while triggering our payoffs.

Our plan involves running cards like Honor and Killian's Confidence to get at least one trigger per turn, and with so many cheap spells, it's common for us to trigger our creatures twice each turn—a factor that rewards complementing the threats with Cosmogrand Zenith.

Lorehold Ponza

Between an increasingly greedy mana base for some decks and the release of another nonbasic land hate card in Standard with Maelstrom Artisan, it seems like a good time to assess whether we can play Ponza in Standard.

The strategy in this list involves using the well-known package of Momo, Friendly Flier with Starfield Shepherd and Springleaf Drum to cast Krenko's Buzzcrusher and Magmatic Hellkite earlier, forcing the opponent to search for basic lands until they have none left in their deck.

Witherbloom Demons

The Witherbloom/Golgari combination gained several new tools that could motivate a revisit to Midrange lists. Tragedy Feaster is an excellent payoff for Unholy Annex and a powerful threat on its own. To support its conditions without relying solely on the enchantment, a full set of Qarsi Revenant helps hold off Aggro decks, and if we need to sacrifice it, we can use the Renew ability to have Feaster fuel its own condition.

Witherbloom Command offers a way to get rid of Feaster at inconvenient times, but it also deals with cheap permanents at an efficient cost, and Professor Dellian Fel guarantees life gain, board control, and card advantage all in the same slot.

That's all for today!

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

Thanks for reading!