It’s Pro Tour Time again, and this time it’s shaping up to be one to remember. With Felidar Guardian banned in standard, the format is wide open for brewing – or at the very least, the return of a few important decks that Saheeli was keeping suppressed.

As always, nobody knows what’s been happening behind the closed doors of the teams’ testing houses, but here are a few things you should expect to see at Pro Tour Amonkhet.

The Safe Bet For A Strong Performance: Mardu Vehicles

With the Saheeli combo now banned, many players have turned their attention back to the other major contender for best deck in the format, Mardu Vehicles.

With the exception of Glorybringer, there aren’t a huge number of new tools for Mardu in Amonkhet, but this really isn’t a deck that needs more help to compete. Without having to worry about stopping a copycat combo on turn 4, Mardu is in a great position to do well again at this Pro Tour.

Because this deck is proven, it will likely be one of the default choices for competitors who haven’t been able to test extensively for the Pro Tour. The only thing that’s likely to push people away from this deck would be fear that they’re going to run into a lot of marvel decks – something Mardu struggles to keep pace with in the late game.

A Marvelous Return To Form

Another deck that you should expect to see pop back up is Aetherworks Marvel. This pseudo-combo deck took a back seat to Saheeli in recent months, but with her precious cat gone, it’s poised for a comeback.

The Temur-based lists of months gone by are a good starting point for anyone looking to dust off their marvels, but this is an archetype with a lot of room for innovation. Some interesting lists have already been showing up on Magic Online, including a really exciting Sultai list built to exploit Amonkhet’s own Liliana, Death’s Majesty.

Ulamog the Ceaseless Hunger is still probably the best thing you can hit on a Marvel activation in most situations, but throughout the Pro Tour I’d expect to see Lilianas, Ishkanahs, Gearhulks being cheated into play a lot.

Permission Denied

Another impact of Felidar Guardian’s removal from the format is that generally, much fairer things are going to be happening in the midgame. Instead of winning the game on turn 4, the format will simply return to tapping out for Gideons and Marvels instead.

So, when people are doing fair things in the midgame, that opens up space for a pure control deck to really excel. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen strong showings from UR control decks playing the standard suite of counterspells and Glimmer of Genius alongside Torrential Gearhulk.

A few nice tools in Amonkhet have really helped push blue control archetypes over the edge by suring up some of their tough matchups. Cards like Magma Spray and Essence Scatter help the deck compete against Mardu for example – something previous iterations have struggled with. Censor also looks like a great addition.

UR looks like a strong control core heading into the PT, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the colours stretch to URW primarily for Cast Out and possibly some number of Gideon of the Trials.

Is There Room To Go Under It All?

If you’ve been following coverage of Amonkhet limited, you’ll know that a lot of pros think it’s a very aggressive format. I’m personally very excited to see if anyone has come up with an extremely aggressive deck that can go underneath the entrenched midrange decks of the standard format using Amonkhet’s new tools.

White humans decks have some potential, and most of the pieces seem to be present for a traditional red sligh deck too. Those decks may be strong on paper, but it really depends on how well they face up against the expected meta in testing.

With lots of decks already packing cheap removal like magma spray to help fight Mardu, hyper- aggressive decks may get shut down by too many cards that are just incidentally strong against them.

Time For A Few Bold Predictions

Now, I’ll attempt to quench your thirst for sweeping and unjustified predictions.

Deck to win the Pro Tour: Some iteration of Aetherworks Marvel

Most played card in the Top 8: Gideon, Ally of Zendikar (seems safe, right?)

Most played card in the Top 8 from Amonkhet: Censor or Magma Spray

Player to win the Pro Tour: Brian Braun-Duin

Most played god from Amonkhet: Rhonas (but my heart wants to scream Kefnet!)

P.S. Before someone says I forgot about zombies, I didn’t! They’re around, they might be good, we’ll see.