Is Standard Bad? It's... Complicated

Disclaimer: this article was written the week prior to what Kazi considers an inevitable Vivi Cauldron banlist on 2025. It now serves as a retrospective on Vivi, its place in the meta, and how decks like it could potentially affect standard formats in the future.

-Also Kazi

 Hey! Your favorite kind of mediocre MTG grinder is back with his annual article to justify his website spend!

 Today will be another thinkpiece/rant on the state of the Standard metagame. I am considering turning this into a series covering Pioneer and Modern as well, so please let us know on social media if you think you want to see those!

 To jump into it, I believe there are two major components any given format needs to have a healthy metagame. The first component is play patterns/depth. This refers to the various matchups within the format's metagame and how they play in to each other. The gameplay in those matchups can be full of meaningful decisions and inflection points, which is the "depth," or the matchups can be more or less solved once players keep their opening hands. Basically, the more impact your in-game decisions can have overall, the better the play patterns are.

 The second component is diversity. Here, diversity doesn't refer to deck or color diversity, but rather the diversity of archetypes, at least in my view. I view most Magic formats as having four major archetypes: Control, Aggro, Midrange, and Combo, and there is often overlap, especially as formats have higher power levels or larger card pools. I'll likely explore this concept of fusing archetypes more if we get to a Modern version of this article, but for now, let's take it as it lies.

 I want to start from the end, which is to say, discussing the format boogeyman, the Vivi Cauldron deck. Vivi Cauldron is one of the most powerful standard decks we have ever seen, combining the abilities of Vivi Ornitier and Agatha's Soul Cauldron with a spread of other UR threats, interaction, and filtering. Before Spider-Man's release as the most recent Standard set, it dominated the meta with a meta share over 30%. Even after Spider-Man's release and significant warping of decks trying to gain an edge over Vivi, it is still the second most popular deck, at time of writing sitting at about 22% meta share on MTGGoldfish.com. Most high-level players who I talk to agree that Vivi is one of two things you should be doing in the format, the other being mono-red, and most other decks which are actively trying to beat it only go about even, regardless of how many concessions they make.

 But why? Well, this question leads into the "unhealthy" part of Vivi; namely that in a relatively low power format, the flexibility and "coverage" of the deck is extreme. Coverage, which I've picked up from my time playing fighting games, refers to a player's ability to counteract what their opponent is doing.  One of my friends Paul Green puts it like this; paraphrased "I like decks that make moves. The more moves you can make, the more room you have to express your skill in any given matchup." Vivi, in its general card selection, builds, tech cards, and flex slots, easily has the ability to "cover" almost any angle it is attacked from. It has the capacity to be an aggro deck, a midrange deck, a control deck, and a combo deck, and while that may just sound like a midrange deck, the Vivi deck differs itself from previous strong midrange decks by not only doing all of things extremely well, but also being able to do all of those things within a single game of Magic. Most of that flexibility is actually OUTSIDE of the combo that it can perform. To give you an example: Marauding Mako is clearly designed to be an aggressive card. It gets big fast and it hits hard when it attacks. It also plays reasonable defense in the midgame if you are being attacked by an aggro deck, or even races their creatures by playing above curve. When you draw it late, it cycles for a new card, or hits the board as a slow, but present threat when you are the control deck. Finally, it happens to be a solid extender for the Vivi combo, allowing for continued mana generation when you have a Vivi under your Cauldron. Looking at the list below, so many of the cards fill multiple roles in the same way:

 Basically, every card that is not Cauldron fulfills at least two of these four archetypal roles. And while that sounds bad - and to an extent IS bad in a standard format where maybe 1/4-1/2 of an average maindeck is filling multiple roles at most - it does lead to gameplay where you feel like your decision-making REALLY matters. I think the problem comes from too many of the modes on your cards in any matchup besides the mirror being too good, and therefore, that option-select is somewhat illusory. That, in turn, comes from the fact that choosing most of the given options will often be good enough because of how synergistic the extra effects the deck construction provides are. This is all ON TOP of the fact that the deck is very very capable of comboing out, and ultimately what makes the games against Vivi Cauldron feel so bad as a non-Vivi opponent, while the Vivi player is taking a lot of time to attempt to meticulously make the right decision even though any of them are likely strong enough to win despite technically being suboptimal. A microcosm of this situation is one you see in the endgame of a lot of Vivi matches: the Vivi player taking 5 minutes in order to go through their moves on a lethal turn only to realize that they don't have to make the BEST decision in order to make one of the many GOOD ENOUGH decisions to close out the game. The game is only about scoring 20 points, not scoring all of them. It ain't basketball.

 Everything said actually leads to a final thought (and a bit of a left turn) as we near the end of my rant. I don't think banning only Cauldron will be enough. I am convinced Cauldron will see a banning on Monday, but I also believe banning Cauldron alone will not be enough. I think, in a post-Cauldron Standard, we see the Counter-Cauldron deck rise up as a legitimate and strong contender. I use that name to describe an archetype we have seen pop up occasionally amongst top lists, the UR midrange/agressive/control deck playing no copies of Vivi or Cauldron, specifically designed to counter the traditional Vivi Cauldron deck seeing as it is pre-boarded for the matchup (the Vivi mirror often includes siding out 6+ pieces of combo in order to play a more fair game as the combo pieces are somewhat clunky). This deck is largely predicated on playing the powerful combined value/aggressive creatures in the Vivi deck and turning them up to eleven with Proft's Eidetic Memory making every nonland card in the deck extremely live in the later stages of the game. This deck is far from Vivi Cauldron levels of broken - it lacks combo outs - but it does feel somewhat similar to the Cori-Steel Cutter deck of the past meta where there is just too much tempo in its draws to reasonably expect to compete with, with the power of Proft's substituting for Cutter (obviously Proft's being much worse, but in context, still extremely powerful). I am far from staking a hard claim on this deck being broken, but I anticipate it being problematic, especially as we go into what could potentially be a full unbroken year of UR tempo dominating competitive Standard.

 So, my last thing: ban Proft's. Ban Cauldron more, obviously, but I think the deck needs another hit in order to reign it in, and also just to definitively shake up the metagame. As much as I love blue and red spells, touching cardboard, and the general tenets of tempo decks, I think that we need something else. As good as the gameplay has been to me and some others who share my opinions, it is so obviously clear that the majority of the Standard playerbase feels Standard has been stagnant and far far too centered around one archetype since the printing of Cori-Steel Cutter. Even I think that I would enjoy playing other decks, and have done so despite Vivi Cauldron being the obvious choice. Metagames this centralized are clearly unpalatable and greatly harm the format in the long term. And in order to make sure that we see the shakeup we need to revive the format, because it is on its last legs both due to being stale and also being significantly oversaturated due to the competitive schedule, we should ban additional cards to ensure we can see different archetypes.

 All that said, I have hope for the upcoming format. I think current Standard's gameplay is really good, and in addition to Vivi having good play patterns, I think plenty of different decks have a lot of potential depth and intricacy. I would like to see a more diverse format where the meta moves beyond either Vivi Cauldron and decks that have been warped to fight Vivi Cauldron. In addition to the upcoming B&R, I see a lot of very cool cards in the upcoming Avatar set. I think we can reasonably expect there to be some new decks built around some of those other cards. Ultimately, I look forward to the upcoming season, and hope that we get to see some of those bans come through to get things moving again. A lot of things in standard are working well, but there are a few really REALLY big issues keeping it from being at the level we saw for the year following Outlaws of Thunder Junction.

#MakeGrixisGreatAgain

(But also fuck Donald Trump type shi)

-Kazi Baker