Friday night was meant to be our second Casual Magic the Gathering session for Fenland Gamers.

However no one showed up. Not even the people that had asked we put these sessions on. Which meant I spent over an hour sitting in The Luxe at a table with MtG play mats on, shuffling decks, and looking like Billy no mates.

To say I was not happy was an understatement.

But Saturday I was back at my FLGS The Hobbit Hole for the MtG Open House.

Thankfully I got to try my two new decks. You’ll find the first deck list below, with the second to follow in another post.

The nice thing about this testing was that playing against Michael and Kar-Fai I was going up against decks that I will be facing in the final season of Standard Showdown.

Michaels burn deck is very fast. Too fast for the Simic Ascendancy deck. But my Orzhov deck just edged it. But they were close games.

Kat-Fai also tried out two deck ideas. One of them I think will be the one he goes with for the Standard Showdown. Once again the Simic Ascendancy deck did the worst out of the two.

I knew before hand that the Simic deck would need more work. I’ll discuss those thoughts below. But I was very happy how well the Orzhov deck seemed to do.

I got to see another deck that will be in the Standard Showdown. It’s one of the dinosaur aggro decks with one or two new additions. These decks are lightning fast also.

So here is the first draft of the Simic Ascendancy deck I’ve put together.

Creatures:29

3 Hydroid Krasis
3 Incubation Druid
4 Merfolk Skydiver
3 Pollenbright Druid
2 Evolution Sage
3 Guildpact Informant
3 Frilled Mystic
2 Zegana, Utopian Speaker
2 Biogenic Ooze
2 God-Eternal Rhonas
2 Roalesk, Apex Hybrid

Spells:9

2 Bond of Flourishing
3 Simic Ascendancy
1 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
2 Wilderness Reclamation
1 Vivien Reid

Lands:22

3 Breeding Pool
12 Forest
3 Hinterland Harbor
4 Island

Sideboard:15

1 Incubation Druid
1 Pollenbright Druid
1 Evolution Sage
1 Guildpact Informant
1 Thrashing Brontodon
4 Essence Capture
1 Finale of Devastation
1 Simic Ascendancy
2 Vivien’s Arkbow
2 Planewide Celebration

Ok here are the stats. I usually put this before the deck list. But thought I’d try and shake things up and try it here.

The sideboard definitely needs a lot of work. My current thinking is that this should be mainly counter spells.

I do like the new Vivien, Champion of the Wilds. That on going ability of giving creatures flash is nice. So a second of her would be good.

Adjusting the Forest/Island ratio I think needs to be done, so that it takes into account sideboarding counter spells in.

The deck needs to be faster. Of if I can’t get it faster, work on a way to stay alive long enough to implement the plan.