Two days shy of the next batch of PTQs, DeckCheck serves us up a set of decks from two PTQ top eights in Italy, one in Rome, the other in Milan, both ostensibly having 100 players each.
Looking across these sixteen decks, we find some updates for Tron, Elves, All-in Red, and Bant. Click through to the extended entry for links and commentary.
Fabio Boffelli won the PTQ in Milan with this five-color Tron deck. Five color? Check the dual lands - we have one each of Breeding Pool, Hallowed Fountain, Steam Vents, and Watery Grave. The sole purpose behind these duals is ramping up to full Sunburst power on the four copies of Engineered Explosives in the main deck; otherwise, this is basically mono-blue Tron. The finishing package here is Mindslaver, Platinum Angel, Sundering Titan, and Triskelion. Boffelli's sideboard is especially interesting, with four copies of Threads, two Sowers, and an Aeon Chronicler, along with some other random trivia. The Chronicler I find particularly engaging, as I've been going back and forth over the idea of having a Chronicler as a sideboard card, as it's a sort of pseudo-Future Sight that's uncounterable. A Tron deck may well be the optimal place for this card, as once it achieves Tron, it can tap out for minimally four turns of extra cards (that could happen on turn 4, if you luck into the right draw).
These two top eights saw a small horde of Elf decks, which you can see here, here, here, here, and here. The notable point in these Elves decks is that each one packs two combo win conditions. An Elves deck can always go for the mass of dudes beatdown kill, but this combination of two combo kills in each deck suggests that the solution to a lot of anti-Elf hate has been adding a third axis of victory on top of the default two. Here are the combination kills as they've been paired in these decks:
Mirror Entity + Brain Freeze
Mirror Entity + Grapeshot
Predator Dragon + Grapeshot
Predator Dragon + Mirror Entity
Predator Dragon + Brain Freeze
Note how all the pairings here include orthogonal wincons. I think my favorite here is some combination of a storm condition and a big critter condition. Certainly, having orthogonal win conditions helps defend against some of the potential hate. I'm a little surprised that Dragon is still around, since having your soopa Dragon Pathed would suck, but perhaps you then just come over the top with a Brain Freeze and giggle wildly.
Claudio Ponzo's Bant deck tilts the archetype even more into aggro and away from midrange, tapping into red to power out some fully fueled Wild Nacatls and a foursome of Lightning Helixes (Helices?). Effectively, it's sort of Bant-pseudo-Zoo, with Hierarchs and Nacatls in the one-drop position. I imagine it suffers the "starting at 14" effect of a Zoo deck as well, but it should, at least, be fun to play, as early beaters give way to mid-range bigger beaters backed up by the best equipment in the game.
We'll close out our Italian tour with a look at Riccardo Scrocca's somewhat misnamed All-in Red. I say "misnamed" because it includes, you know, white. Also, this deck eschews many of the basic concepts of conventional AIR, ditching the Warrens threat, and having more reach-over-time via persist and unearth critters. It's really more of a hybridization of the red deck from recent Standard with the classic AIR. Certainly, I could see this screwing someone up who tries to sideboard for pure AIR, but I think the manabase alone would alert you that something funny is up in game one.