R/W Aggro Danny Goldstein - 2nd Place at StarCityGames.com Standard Open on 1/24/2015 (Standard)

Danny Goldstein, Gerard's opponent in the finals, was playing a deck that looks a bit more familiar, but looks can be deceiving. Sam Black has been championing a R/W Aggro deck for a while now, and Sam Pardee had success with a similar strategy at Grand Prix Denver, but Danny's deck is actually quite a bit different from either one.

While the Sams were playing R/W Aggro in large part to leverage the power of cards like Chained to the Rocks and Wingmate Roc, Danny's deck has neither Chains nor Rocs. Instead, he focused very heavily on the token plan, using Monastery Mentor alongside a huge number of spells to increase the size of his swarm. He even played Collateral Damage, which was surprising to me at first but made tons of sense once I thought about it more. Both Monastery Mentor and Goblin Rabblemaster work very well with cheap removal spells, the former because they help generate more creatures (and more prowess!) and the latter because it helps break through blockers and hit the opponent really hard. Collateral Damage uses whatever tokens Danny might have lying around as fuel to pick off opposing creatures and let his tokens continue their assault.

Danny also played Valorous Stance, which is one of the cards from the new set that has already gotten a lot of attention. Removal spells are always a problem for aggressive decks, because playing too few of them can leave you in a rough spot against opposing creature decks, but playing too many reactive cards can leave you with dead draws against control. Valorous Stance isn't itself proactive, so a draw full of them still isn't great, but the fact that it can be used to protect your own creatures as well as remove your opponent's creatures makes it much better than something like Path to Exile. Here, Danny can use it to keep his Monastery Mentors and Goblin Rabblemasters alive, either of which can potentially win the game on its own.

The most interesting card in Danny's deck to me though, is Outpost Siege. When I first looked at Outpost Siege, I pretty much assumed that it would only ever really see use for its Khans ability, as a kind of Elkin Bottle or pseudo-Chandra effect. But this deck uses every part of the buffalo, so to speak. With the ability to generate so many token creatures, the Dragons ability - dealing one damage whenever one of your creatures leaves play - is no joke. Not only can you threaten to deal huge amounts of damage to an opponent who clears your board, but you can also use your tokens to trade up with larger opposing creatures. Not bad for a card that flew under pretty much everyone's radar.