Revolution, September, 2025

The first tournament of Revolution’s fifteenth rotation concluded this past month at Grand Prix Dawnbloom Grove. With this new rotation comes a new set: Zangy's Exalts of Twiltrie! Featuring a balanced set of 2-color factions that complements the color pairs supported in last rotation's Kitsuo: Dusk of Time, EOT brings with it scheming warlocks, tricksy fae, and all manner of interesting designs to support a host of strategies, both new and returning!

Twenty-four players brought a total of twenty-one unique decks to court, showcasing hyped new cards like Huskforger Acolyte (Rev's first-ever one-mana dork without restrictions!), which brought explosive strength and lategame resilience to a variety of decks, from old favorites like Sultai Golems or RG Discard-Stompy to new hotness like GB Graveyard-Midrange. We also saw the appearance of the newly-synthesized Looter-Stompy deck, and a UR deck that uses the card selection from oodles of looters (and a couple of different ways of generating value from the grave) to press an early advantage and keep the enemy off-balance.

However, none of these strategies ultimately made it to the final round: instead, our last match featured two brand-new brews. Coming in undefeated as the top seed, Lih brought a fascinating Wg control deck. Building off the mono-white control decks of last rotation, Lih introduced some innovative tech by upping the deck's creature count and including a suite of cards featuring the Reprieve mechanic from Twiltrie. These cards allow you to bounce one of your own creatures for value, allowing the deck to reuse valuable ETB effects over and over to grind the opponent into dust. To keep control of the game, the deck uses Banishing Light effects in combination with lifegain to blunt aggro's advance. The deck is an eclectic combination of a bunch of different pieces, but they all help shore up the deck's weaknesses and build towards a powerful late game focusing on extracting as much value as possible.

In the other corner, coming in at the lowest seed, was RickyRister. No longer able to pilot their beloved Grand Consonance thanks to rotation, Ricky brought a unique RB Midrange-Reanimator deck. Making using of some of of the red tools that helped the UR Looter-Stompy deck keep up card flow (such as Shigane Manor Burns and Ignited Soul), the deck trades out the consistency and permission of blue for an explosive reanimator package featuring Reclaim the Fallen and Privilege Escalation. Thanks to these cards, the deck has the potential to reanimate an 11/13 with menace on turn 3 while keeping up early game pressure. And thanks to a robust suite of treasure-makers, the deck is even capable of casting its reanimator targets if the game goes long enough. Taken together, these cards create a potent hammer-and-anvil strategy that forces the opponent to shut down its early game, then close things out quickly lest they be overrun.