Meme or Dream? "I Fell Asleep Building My Sideboard" Shrines (Standard)
A couple of months ago, Wizards started publishing decklists from Magic Arena. To qualify for publication, a deck needs to win at least six matches in a row at platinum rank or better. This sounds simple on its face, but some incredibly janky lists end up being published every time lists are published. This has led to speculation that a bug in the system allows decks that didn't actually win six matches in a row to be published or, for the most tin-foil-hatted crowd, the idea that Wizards just publishes whatever it wants to make the metagame look more diverse than it really is.
However, another possibility exists: maybe the decks really did get six wins in a row due to some combination of luck and perhaps being more competitive than they look on paper. Well, Meme or Dream? is a series where we'll take the meme-iest of the lists Wizards publishes and try them for ourselves. Are they a dream hiding behind a janky external shell, or are they as dysfunctional as they look, falling into the meme category?
This week, we have an interesting build of Shrines for Standard. While going all-in on Sanctum of All and its fellow Shrines is already a pretty jank plan, a few things make today's build of Shrines even more sus. By far the biggest is that the deck has half a sideboard, almost like the person building the deck fell asleep halfway through making it. In the past, we've had some no-sideboard decks on Meme or Dream? but those actually make some amount of sense (it could just be that someone is playing their best-of-one deck in best-of-three for some reason). Half a sideboard is actually more confusing to me since it means the person building the deck knew they were playing it in best-of-three but, for some unknown reason, only managed to get eight cards in their sideboard.
Otherwise, the deck is playing Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, which seems like an odd choice for a Shrine deck. Generally, Ugin, the Spirit Dragon is the card I'm most afraid of playing against with Shrines since it can easily exile all of our Shrines on the turn when it enters the battlefield, which means we probably can't ever –X our own Ugins or else we'll ruin our primary game plan. We're also missing the green Shrine Sanctum of Fruitful Harvest, which seems like the Shrine you might want the most, if you insist on playing Ugin in your Shrine deck, since it can ramp into the eight-mana planeswalker. Finally, we also have Containment Priest in the main deck, despite the only pseudo-synergy being that we're also playing Banishing Light. If we happen to exile a creature with the enchantment and then our opponent blows up Banishing Light, we can flash in Containment Priest to "get 'em," I guess? Basically, the deck is weird on several levels, but is it a meme or a dream? Let's find out!
