Daily Deck Tech from Capenna: Standard's Obscura Midrange

Every workday while the Streets of Capenna are new, Insight takes a quick look at another deck featuring the fresh cards! The gangs shook up Standard for good, and a new breed of three-colored decks are posting strong finishes left and right. Take this Obscura midrange list, for instance.

Riveteers and Obscura both brought many good cards, so naturally people started building the corresponding "good stuff" decks. For now, Obscura looks more promising. It's already one of the strongest decks.

Midrange decks need creatures, which Obscura excels at. Its new mechanic, connive, proves to be really good, even though it prefers you discarding nonland cards. Obscura Midrange does not have recursive cards other than Tenacious Underdog, but that's a good one. Its blitz ability, other than mana, costs life, which nicely balances it. The Underdog is even nice as a vanilla 3/2 for just two mana.

Raffine, Scheming Seer is the connive all-star. It's also characteristic as a card that can connive for even more than one. Ward also goes really well with Standard, which usually has slower removal. Its statline may be heavily underwhelming, but it's still a flier. If you choose it as a target for its own connive ability, it can also grow out of hand relatively quickly. Otherwise, you can still discard extra lands, as this list is full of them.

Finally, there's Obscura Interceptor. It's almost too slow even for Standard, but its final ability changes everything. It connives, then just straight up bounces a spell afterward. It sure would have been better if it countered a spell instead, but let's not be too greedy here. It might've been too strong that way, and at least we're getting a lifelinker with flash. 3/1 is a terrible statline for four mana, but 4/2 (and up!) sounds more reasonable.

These three cards and Raffine's Tower just work really well, both with each other and the rest of the cast. Legion Angel preserves your gas, Luminarch Aspirant buffs whatever creature, and all three planeswalkers help protect your threats and establish tempo. The deck may not be overly flashy, but that's for the better. Magic Online pilot Mogged took a list running all these cards to a Challenge and placed fourth. Just one day later, they swapped the second Hermit for a fourth Vanishing Verse and won the very next Challenge!

 

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