Origins G/W Collected Company by MICHAEL MAJORS 6/24/15 Star City Games writer (Standard)

The Origins Of A New Standard
MICHAEL MAJORS

That wonderful time of the quarter is here! Spoiler season is upon us and despite it being early in the Magic Origins revealing process, we've already got some spicy cards to be excited about. Let's jump right in to exploring a few of my favorites so far.
So what's at work here? On the surface, Kytheon is an aggressively-costed creature that rewards you for attacking by turning into a resilient threat that synergizes with having an additional board presence. The Gideon side accomplishes this both by allowing those creatures to protect your newly-flipped 'walker with his +1 ability, but also by eating your opponent's creatures with his +2. Due to the fact that there are now a surplus of one-mana two-power-options unlike we've ever seen in Magic before, I could see a strong incentive to try to build a deck that is capable of having three creatures in play and attacking by the third turn with three mana available to ensure Kytheon doesn't die in combat, allowing him to flip. While I suspect that this is a perfectly viable strategy, my natural inclination is to utilize the new planeswalker as yet another resilient cog in what was already a deck chock full of hard-to-answer threats.

According to this data, G/W Company is the best-performing deck in Standard, and Kytheon is going to make it better.