by A Cynical Marketing Director

Because the Challenger Deck series has been an absolute hit with our competitive player base, we’ve decided to punch things up for a second round of decks for the 2019 competitive season. We wanted to address multiple formats while continuing to find new ways to make Standard more exciting (creating new, functioning online play software from the ground up has been an unqualified success in getting players to actually play Standard games) and what better way than to address the needs of our most-neglected formats?

These are the first in a new series of Challenger Decks intended to address formats other than Standard. We’re well aware that older formats can be more difficult for new players to break into without having a substantial card base already. By providing these decks with no MSRP, we are allowing retailers to help their local players find the products that best suit their needs, without concern for budget or aftermarket value.

However, when designing these decks, we ran into an obvious problem with no obvious solution: reprinting cards that appear on the Reserved List. With absolutely no way for us to get around this self-imposed restriction, we got a bit creative and made a series of checklist cards that will take the place of these cards in the deck. While this does mean that you will have to acquire copies of these cards on your own. We leave this as a challenge for the players, as we cannot formally acknowledge any third-party vendors. Please contact your local Wizards Play Network store for information on how to obtain singles.

These decks are meant to be competitive once fully built, so get ready to load up TCG Player in a separate tab while you take a look at these deck lists!

Ad Nauseam Tendrils

Ad Nauseam Tendrils combines the blistering speed of zero-mana spells with zero-mana mana artifacts to generate a huge spell count in a short amount of time. Lion’s Eye Diamond is famous for being confusing to play with, degenerate when built around properly, and the only non-land card on the Reserved List in this deck.

Grixis Control

Delver of Secrets has a reputation for being played in almost every format it’s still legal in (and some that it’s not.) Recently it’s been tearing up the tables in Pauper format, which is the only format you’ll be able to afford to play after you complete your play-sets of dual lands.

Lands

Made famous by Jarvis Yu, the world’s most handsome Magic professional, this deck uses a $3,000 card to kill creatures, then wins with a 20/20 flying indestructible creature token. Demoralize your opponents on the battlefield and at the ATM.

Elves

We know you bought this to play at the kitchen table, which is fine by us. We aren’t judging you. We will judge you if you try to purchase a playset of Gaea’s Cradles, however.

Because we expect you to collect four copies of everything, each deck includes 27 checklist cards, one for every card on the Reserved List. Customize your Challenger deck to your heart’s desire, or collect all 2,268 and complete your set! If you have enough checklist cards, you have a Legacy deck.