I was watching the coverage of the two Players Tour events last weekend in particular the decks being played as I try to be more familiar with the metagame. The PT Events were in Brussels and Nagoya. In the latter, there was one deck that caught my attention was the one played by Japanese Pro Ken Yukihiro. He is well known to play an unpopular deck and also do his own brews. On that tournament, he played a deck that I was also longing to try in the Standard format.

The deck was the Black White Auras deck with Sram, Senior Edificer as the star creature. Almost half of the deck consists of cards from the recent two sets of Magic: the Gathering and it was interesting to see the other card components that had worked and synergized well in the deck.

Check out his decklist below.

20 LANDS
4 Caves of Koilos
4 Concealed Courtyard
4 Godless Shrine
1 Mana Confluence
6 Plains
1 Swamp

17 CREATURES
4 Alseid of Life’s Bounty
3 Aphemia, the Cacophony
2 Favored Hoplite
4 Hateful Eidolon
4 Sram, Senior Edificer

4 INSTANTS and SORC.
4 Karametra’s Blessing

19 OTHER SPELLS
4 All That Glitters
4 Cartouche of Solidarity
4 Ethereal Armor
3 Gryff’s Boon
4 Sentinel’s Eyes

Sideboard
3 Apostle of Purifying Light
2 Baffling End
3 Brain Maggot
2 Dead Weight
2 Gideon of the Trials
1 Grafdigger’s Cage
2 Thoughtseize

Later on, I found out that he finished 2nd in the tournament. That is one great achievement on an unpopular and brew deck in Pioneer. That gave me more motivation to build the deck and try it in our own local Pioneer tournaments. Hopefully soon.