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Wizards Announces Challenger Decks – "Magic: The Gathering"

This weekend is a solid one for competitive Magic: The Gathering. Between Worlds XXVI and various other tournaments occurring concurrently, it's fairly safe to say that competitive Magic has never been stronger on a professional level.

With this in mind, Wizards of the Coast has announced the decklists for the newest batch of Challenger Decks, decks geared towards playing competitively in a stronger Standard meta for events such as Friday Night Magic.

Wizards Announces Challenger Decks - "Magic: The Gathering"
Source: Wizards of the Coast

The decklists for the  Challenger Decks, including sideboards, can be found here at the end of Wizards of the Coast's announcement blurb.

From that very same blurb:

Available April 3, 2020, the new Challenger Decks offer an excellent entry point for jumping into Standard events at your local game store!

These four individual 75-card decks are geared toward Standard play for the Friday Night Magic player and forged out of some of the most recognizable strategies in Standard.

Each Challenger Deck comes with a complete 60-card main deck and a 15-card sideboard, intended to be playable and competitive at a local level right out of the box. All cards will have been previously printed in Standard and are Standard-legal.

These decks will be available worldwide in English, with Japanese available in Japan.

The four different deck archetypes explored in these Challenger Decks, in short, are:

Wizards Announces Challenger Decks - "Magic: The Gathering"
Source: Wizards of the Coast
  • Golgari (black-green) Adventures, with a substantial Knight subtheme
  • Mono-red Cavalcade of Calamity burn, with some choices to make it mono-red Aggro as well
Wizards Announces Challenger Decks - "Magic: The Gathering"
Source: Wizards of the Coast
  • Simic (blue-green) Flash, utilizing a Control/Aggro strategy to win
Wizards Announces Challenger Decks - "Magic: The Gathering"
Source: Wizards of the Coast

What are your thoughts on this release? Are you excited for these decks to come out on April 3rd of this year? Do these decks have a place in the meta as-is, or are there presently ways to improve them? Let us know what you think!


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Joshua NelsonAbout Joshua Nelson

Josh Nelson is a Magic: The Gathering deckbuilding savant, a self-proclaimed scholar of all things Sweeney Todd, and, of course, a writer for Bleeding Cool. In their downtime, Josh can be found painting models, playing Magic, or possibly preaching about the horrors and merits of anthropophagy. You can find them on Twitter at @Burning_Inquiry for all your burning inquiries.
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