Building around Atheros: B/W Midrange with JOU and How to Build a Midrange Deck

Hey, its been a while!  I'm mostly writing again because there have been a series of very popular posts on various magic subreddits talking about B/W... all of which involved significant amounts of bad information, horrible lists, and upvoted bad explanations.  I'm just gonna step in and talk about B/W for a bit and try to whittle away a bit of the ignorance :)

Let us start from the bottom here:  Do we want to be Aggro, Midrange, or Control?

I'm going to be very hyperbolic for a second and claim that B/W control in this format is ALWAYS going to be a bad Esper control.  So i'm not even going to discuss that - it is a completely different deck, and is much easier to build.  So let's figure out how aggressive we want to be.

Right now in Standard our Gauntlet is something like this: (numbers from MTGgoldfish)

This is obviously going to change very quickly with the new set, but it is a solid stepping stone to get us to the right metagame.  The main changes I can see are U Devotion getting a little worse due to the printing of Deicide and Esper getting a little better for the same reason.  R/G/x Monsters is seeing a disproportionately low amount of play for how good its results are, so people will likely return to it.

Against decks like R/G and U Devotion, I definitely want to be a little bit more aggressive.  R/G has a slew of card advantage tools that can put the game out of reach quickly for us, and the more pressure they have on them, the worse their cards are.  U Devotion has Thassa and her Bident to finish games against slower decks, and often the best way to combat this is to just be faster with a few disruption spells.

For the rest of the format, namely Mono-B, Esper, and Burn, I really want to be a Midrange deck jam-packed with hard to answer threats, hand disruption, and efficient removal.

So our plan is going to be this:  For game 1, we target the higher % of the meta and stick with a Midrange strategy.  For Games 2 and 3, if we can find enough amazing cards against G/R and U, we stick with our game 1 plan.  Otherwise, we will side into a more aggressive deck.

So now that we know we want to be a bit slower, lets start our list with the obvious:

4 Thoughtseize

There is no way to justify not playing 4 of this card unless you truly don't care what your opponent is doing.  Even then, the information it provides is often worth more than the card it takes.  For B/W we are incredibly dependent on this card because we need to find a plan of attack in every game that the opponent simply cannot answer - this will craft that opening.

5-10 Removal Spells

This is metagame dependent, but right now I think we want more because we get so many high-utility removal spells which are never dead.  I think this is how we want to arrange them:

3 Hero's Downfall
2 Banishing Light
2 Ultimate Price
2 Deicide

Honestly, this is incredibly likely to be just wrong as the metagame shifts.  But it will be useful to take this moment to discuss Banishing Light.   This card is good.  It hits everything.  Unfortunately, now that there are so many great enchantments in the format, Banishing Light included, enchantment removal is not just main deckable, but easily 4 slots main for most decks.  Banishing Light can only be considered a temporary answer because of this.  That said, it is still good enough that we should be running it to hit the really hard-to-kill threats like Chandra's Phoenix.

Let's just estimate that we want 25 lands right now, which will leave us with 22 creatures.  Let's start with the easy includes:

4 Soldier of the Pantheon
4 Desecration Demon
4 Obzedat, Ghost Council

This mostly comes down to the absolute most basic here - we need to actually win the game.  These are the cards that will most consistently do that on their own.  One of the most important aspects of the most successful midrange decks in the past is that they all have had multiple very hard to answer threats with enough power to close games quickly.  I'm going to create some handy charts to compare some threats to explain this better - so let's get started:


Soldier of the Pantheon

Soldier is simply the best one-drop in Standard right now.  He hits hard, is hard to block, comes down early, and blocks a lot of the largest threats without dying.  While he certainly is lacking in the utility department, his power is above average and we are getting way more than we pay for.  There is no way I'm running less than 4.

Desecration Demon

Desecration Demon is, in my opinion, one of the most overplayed cards in Standard.  I find it to be very win-more in most situations, and very one-dimensional.  But when you need a four mana creature that hits like a freight train, this is a pretty good place to be.  Alms Beast is certainly a consideration, but I think that flying is very important right now.

Obzedat, Ghost Council

This is the reason we are able to even play this deck.  This card is stupid powerful.  If Desecration Demon is a freight train, this is a tactical nuke.  Extra utility comes from the life gain and protecting itself from sorcery speed removal.

What I'm really trying to illustrate here is that the threats we want to play are efficient, big, and hard to deal with.  Once those are in place, we can fill in the gaps with more utility creatures.

The last 10 slots are basically flex slots which should be adapted to the metagame.  In my opinion they should look about like this:

4 Cartel Aristocrat
4 Brimaz, King of Oreskos or Master of the Feast
2 Atheros, God of Passage

 Master of the Feast is just another freight train, and I think it is a bit worse than our other threats, but it really comes down to how much removal is going to be played.  It is going to be very good against R/G, but very weak against Mono-B.  If the metagame isn't in that spot, then Brimaz is the man to go to: He can come down after a Wrath and win the game on his own, or shut down an opposing aggro deck by himself.

Cartel Aristocrat is really... not that good here.  But we really want a two that can provide some utility and I feel like providing a bit of inevitability is great.  Our other choices for this slot are Brain Maggot (which just doesn't attack well enough for my liking right now) and Underworld Coinsmith, which is solid, but I feel will be worse in most matchups.

Atheros is kind of questionable here - his ability is very mediocre and without Obzedat, he will rarely turn on.  That said, the matchups where he does turn on - R/G, the mirror, sometimes control - he is going to be a powerhouse.  I want to play this card, but I don't really want to play more than 2 main.

There is also one more card which might deserve a place: Elspeth, Sun's Champion.  I think Elspeth is a little slower than what we want right now, but she is going to be extremely important in the mirror.


For reference, here is the list I am going to start off the format playing:

4 Soldier of the Pantheon
4 Cartel Aristocrat
4 Brimaz, King of Oreskos
4 Desecration Demon
4 Obzedat, Ghost Council
2 Atheros, God of Passage

4 Thoughtseize
3 Hero's Downfall
2 Banishing Light
2 Ultimate Price
2 Deicide
4 Godless Shrine
4 Temple of Silence
4 Mana Confluence
7 Plains
6 Swamp

Let me know what you think!  Thanks for reading.