The 2008 City Champs competitive series has started. You can read about it at the Wizards site by clicking here. Although I’m not angling for the ultimate win at the end — an invite to Nationals 2008 — I am looking forward to some Standard Constructed tournaments in our area. I was originally thinking I’d take a WBG Rock-ish deck to the first Constructed City Champs event, but I’m now angling toward the W/B build in the extended. Along with that one, I have an R/G “mana ramp” style build that’s also fun — and its ability to consistently kill off my WBG build convinced me to ditch that one in favor of the W/B.
On a random note, I’m entertained to see that the Los Angeles City Champs series includes not only area game stores and a couple from San Diego, but also a store in Hawaii and one in Saipan. Are the store winners from those islands really going to make the trip to LA? That’s an expensive city championship.
Decklists in the extended.

Heavy Metal

I coined this one “Heavy Metal” because it has Deathrender in it, and because so many of the elements feel like they “go to eleven.” In practice, the goal here is to play out Searches, Walls, and Radhas (often plural because the first one dies to removal), then start slapping down gigantic threats. The Krakow build from which this is derived has Siege-Gang Commanders, but I don’t, so they’re not in there. I’ve instead upped the Hostility count by one, and put in two Akromas to plow through mono-blue control. A resolved Hostility is a serious beating for most opposition as well. The sideboard is basically entirely geared for the control matchup, which may be excessive. That said, I have no idea what the local metagame looks like, since I so rarely participate in it (and since there’s a general lack of constructed games going on).
DA

This evolution of the original Rock-ish build goes entirely into white and black, and goes all-in on the Liliana engine. The basic idea here is to disrupt, disrupt, and then drop Liliana and either keep disrupting or start pulling up solutions and threats. One thing I realized in looking at this build is that if Liliana sticks around, you can start doing bad things with the Beacons, due to their “shuffle me back into your library” effect. Consider:
Drop Liliana, tutor for Beacon of Immortality
Beacon, shuffle in, tutor for Beacon
Beacon, shuffle in, force discard
Tutor for beacon…etc, etc.
The sideboard for DA is more multifaceted than the Heavy Metal sideboard. The four Riftwatchers can come in against aggro, whereas the Specters and Muses come in against control. The remaining cards are one-ofs, to be put in and tutored for with Liliana as appropriate.
This will be the first time I’ve really gone heavily into a planeswalker plan, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.