In only a few weeks, this deck has gone from a silly little meme deck, to a fun deck to play, to holy crap it’s actually pretty good, to I think this is the best deck in the Bo1 meta! 

Lets discuss why it fits in this meta so well. First, having access to 5 strong 3 mana board wipes for keeping Aggro decks subdued is extremely important. Aggro decks are very popular and effective in a best of one format due to the fact that they are usually not very mana reliant and they can easily push 20 damage before control decks have time to stabilize. That is why when I first started playing Arena my idea was to play midrange in order to combat the slew of Aggro decks I was sure to face. So I ultimately decided to play Golgari Midrange, a deck that is central to the fact that Gates is so good right now. Golgari has all of the answers to deal with this Gates list, it can spot remove the rams, remove colossus from the game and even remove the decks card draw engine guild summit. However, once Allegiance came out most of the Aggro decks got better, mono red got light up the stage and skewer the critics, white weenie got tithe taker and Orzhov, Simic and Rakdos Aggro decks got the land they needed among other tools. This proved to be too much for Golgari to deal with since it got little to no help from allegiance. So now the format was a bit warped due to the absence of a powerful midrange deck. That’s where Gates comes in!

Gates has a way to deal with Aggro strategies of all sorts by wiping the board and playing cards that gain life, but it also features two amazing finishers in the form of gatebreaker ram and gate colossus which are threats that opposing decks need to answer quickly. Another huge plus for this deck is mana consistency with open the gates, growth spiral, circuitous route and merfolk branchwalker. These cards allow you to comfortably keep two land hands (something that I hated doing with Golgari) and gives you the flexibility to play 4 colors rather than 3. Against control, these cards help you get a mana advantage over your opponent and you get the recurring threat of gate colossus. Another key card in this deck is syncopate, it serves many roles, you can counter and remove key spells like nexus of fate and Teferi, you can put out a giant threat and keep it protected by countering your opponents answers or you can even play sort of a tempo strategy early on as you are establishing your board. 

Now let’s talk about results, albeit a small sample size, I have played 3 standard events with this deck over the past few days and have gone 7-0, 7-1, and 7-1 for a combined record of 21-2! Although these numbers look really good, what makes this deck impressive to me is the fact that many of these games were not even close. Many of the Aggro matchups consisted of me wiping the board, drawing a ton of cards, and playing massive creatures for 3 or less mana and eventually just overwhelming the opponent. Even the control matchups never felt out of hand with timely syncopates, Ixalan bindings, and recurring threats. All in all I find this deck to be really strong as it stands today and if you don’t believe me, try it for yourself, it’s incredibly cheap to build and fun to play. Good luck out there!

This deck was based on the deck CRAZY GATES Midrange [Mythic] by Reenzh