Kaldheim season is here and the new cards have already started to make an impact. While the early winners are the new Snow Duals, Behold the Multiverse and Jaspera Sentinel both made waves this past weekend. Behold the Multiverse is a potent card draw spell and had enough obvious power to make an impression. Jaspera Sentinel was a card I missed but it makes perfect sense. In Elves it serves as another suite of Birchlore Rangers, albeit one that has a cap on how often it can be used.
This is all well and good but at the end of Sunday, it was clear that at the macro level not much had changed.
This is a breakdown of the first two Kaldheim Challenges and the format has returned to its resting state. Tron might have entered this weekend behind Dimir Faeries in the Power Rankings but that doesn’t mean the deck missed a step. Tron is also a deck that rarely has to fully reconfigure itself and can instead focus on marginal upgrades. Compare this to the other decks in the format – many of which had to adjust to new mana bases in the span of a few days. While Tron likely would have had a great weekend regardless, there is something left to wonder about how potent the various Spellstutter Sprite decks would be with the proper mana bases. I fully expect these decks to settle on more stable mana bases this week while other builds start to exploring what they can do with the new dual lands.
So where does the format go from here? It is pretty clear that Tron and Spellstutter Sprite are the name of the game. It would follow suit that Elves remains a good choice moving forward. It also would not surprise me to see Bogles adopt Arctic Treeline as an improvement in their lands. Finally, I think if anyone can crack a Pestilence deck that has a good sideboard against Tron they’ll be well positioned.
NerdtotheCore 