A Clash of Eras: The Deck (1995) vs. Dimir Midrange (2024) in Standard

Hello everyone, and welcome to the next match in the Best Standard Deck Ever Tournament! This week, we have a matchup of decks separated by nearly 30 years of Magic's history as the influential The Deck from 1995 battles the 2024 version of Dimir Midrange, a deck that still exists in Standard today despite the loss of Sheoldred, the Apocalypse at the last Standard rotation. Which deck is going home and which is moving on? Let's get to the video and find out!

An early precursor to modern control decks, The Deck might be one of the most influential decks in the history of Magic, being credited for innovations like card advantage and play sequencing, which we take for granted today, but weren't part of Magic theory in the game's early days.

While The Deck gets to play many of the strongest cards in Magic's history, including an entire set of the Power 9, some of the individual card choices look a bit weird today thanks to rules changes over the years. Take the deck's finisher, Mirror Universe, for example. The artifact lets you swap life totals with your opponent during your upkeep, which today is more or less a weird lifegain spell, but back in the early 90's it took advantage of two rules at the time. The first is mana burn, which would damage you equal to the number of unused mana you had floating in your mana pool when a phase ends. This was intended to be a drawback, but with Mirror Universe, mana burn could be used offensively. You could tap all of your lands on your opponent's end step, intentionally let the mana go to waste, and then take a bunch of damage to power up Mirror Universe.

But it gets even better than that. There was also a rule at the time that said that even once your life total hit zero, you wouldn't die until the end of the next phase. As such, the actual plan of the deck was to get its life total low thanks to mana burn and then use City of Brass to get your life total to zero during your upkeep. Then you could use Mirror Universe to swap life with your opponent, making them die at the end of the phase rather than you! Because of how important these rules are to The Deck functioning the way it did back in 1995, we'll be using both of them for today's game!

Lead by Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, a card that was dismissed during spoiler season due to a lack of an enters trigger, which went on to become the most played creature in Standard and shoot up to $100 a copy, Dimir Midrange was at or near the top of Standard for much of 2024. After putting two players into the top eight of World Championship 30, the deck continues to be a top tier option in Standard to this day despite losing Sheoldred, Faerie Mastermind and many of its best removal spells to the last Standard rotation.