Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven | The Best Standard Decks in the Metagame

Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven takes place May 1 to 3 at MagicCon: Las Vegas, and if you are planning to watch the coverage, grind the Standard ladder before the event, or just want to know what the best players in the world are going to be playing this weekend, this is your breakdown.

The metagame data comes from Frank Karsten's official Metagame Mentor analysis on Magic.gg, which analyzed 1,248 successful tournament decks from Magic Online Standard Challenges between March 16 and April 18. Each deck's share of the total winner's metagame blends both popularity and performance, so it is not just what people are playing but what is actually winning.

The short version: Izzet is still running the format. Mono-Green Landfall is the most legitimate challenger. And Dimir Excruciator is lurking in the top four with a combo engine that your opponents will either know how to handle or absolutely will not.

What Is the Best Standard Deck for Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven?

The best Standard deck for Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven is Izzet Prowess, which commands 23.7% of the winner's metagame and has been the format's most dominant archetype for the back half of the Regional Championship season. Mono-Green Landfall is the second-best deck at 15.7%, with Izzet Lessons at 10.2% and Dimir Excruciator at 9.2% rounding out the top four. Together, these four archetypes represent over 58% of the competitive metagame heading into the Pro Tour.

Here is the full top fifteen:

Rank	Archetype	Winner's Metagame Share
1	Izzet Prowess	23.7%
2	Mono-Green Landfall	15.7%
3	Izzet Lessons	10.2%
4	Dimir Excruciator	9.2%
5	Izzet Spellementals	9.2%
6	Bant Rhythm	5.6%
7	Selesnya Rhythm	4.4%
8	Izzet Elementals	4.3%
9	Boros Mobilize	2.5%
10	Dimir Midrange	2.1%
11	Azorius Momo	1.9%
12	Jeskai Control	1.2%
13	Temur Omniscience	1.1%
14	Mono-Red Aggro	0.9%
15	Sultai Reanimator	0.9%

The most played nonland cards across all main decks are Burst Lightning, Stock Up, Opt, and Sleight of Hand, which tells you everything you need to know about how Izzet-flavoured this format is. Llanowar Elves and Badgermole Cub are close behind as the green format pillars.

Izzet Prowess | The Deck to Beat at 23.7%

Izzet Prowess is the unambiguous deck to beat heading into Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven, and it has been for a while. The strategy is built around cheap blue-red spell-slinging creatures that grow with every spell you cast. Land a threat on turn one or two, cast a sequence of cheap cantrips and removal spells to pump it, and attack for a lethal amount of damage before your opponent can stabilise. It sounds simple because it is, and it has been winning consistently enough that 272 of the decks in Karsten's dataset were Izzet Prowess lists.

The core of the deck is Slickshot Show-Off, the flying two-drop that gets Plotted for extra surprise damage, combined with Stormchaser's Talent as the engine enchantment that rewards spellcasting with a steady upgrade track. Stock Up does the heavy lifting in terms of card selection. Burst Lightning is the primary removal and reach spell. Opt and Sleight of Hand keep the hand full. Elusive Otter and Eddymurk Crab round out the creature suite as ways to close the game or grind through disruption.

The deck's strength is its consistency and its ability to win from multiple angles. It can go wide with tokens, go tall with a single Slickshot, or grind through a longer game with Stormchaser's Talent's upgrade track. Opponents who try to answer one angle often leave the other open. The decks that have the most success against Izzet Prowess are the ones that can go bigger in the air or present enough life gain to buy time, which is exactly why Azorius Momo is seeing renewed interest as a counter-metagame choice.

A typical aggregate list looks like this:

4 Slickshot Show-Off, 4 Elusive Otter, 2 Eddymurk Crab, 4 Stormchaser's Talent, 4 Opt, 4 Sleight of Hand, 4 Burst Lightning, 4 Stock Up, 4 Boomerang Basics, 2 Multiversal Passage, 2 Wild Ride, 2 Bounce Off, 1 Secret Identity, 4 Steam Vents, 4 Spirebluff Canal, 4 Riverpyre Verge, 7 Island

Sideboard: 2 Ral Crackling Wit, 2 Soul-Guide Lantern, 2 Eddymurk Crab, 2 Spell Pierce, 2 Sear, 1 Get Out, 1 Roaring Furnace, 1 Broadside Barrage, 1 Fire Magic, 1 Spell Snare

Mono-Green Landfall | The Biggest Challenger

Mono-Green Landfall is the format's most credible non-Izzet strategy, and it has been steadily building momentum through the Regional Championship season. The deck combines mana acceleration through Llanowar Elves and Badgermole Cub with the Earthbender Ascension plus Mightform Harmonizer engine to produce enormous threats faster than most decks in the format can answer them.

The core gameplay is straightforward: develop your mana base aggressively using fetch lands that trigger Landfall payoffs, get Earthbender Ascension accumulating counters, and use Mightform Harmonizer to convert those land drops into unstoppable combat damage. The truly broken draws involve using the Earthbend mechanic on a fetch land, which returns it to the battlefield and ramps you, meaning a single fetch land can trigger Landfall multiple times in a single turn. Stack that with Mightform Harmonizer and the damage output becomes lethal out of nowhere.

Badgermole Cub is the card that makes the deck's mana curve work. It doubles up mana from certain land interactions and turns the deck's already impressive ramp into something that can present a five or six drop on turn three with a favourable opening hand. Sapling Nursery is the late-game insurance policy that keeps generating Treefolk tokens from every land drop, making the deck almost impossible to overwhelm with removal once it gets established.

The matchup against Izzet Prowess is competitive if the green deck survives the early turns. The deck's biggest vulnerability is aggressive removal sequences targeting its one-drops before the engine pieces come online.

A typical aggregate list:

4 Llanowar Elves, 4 Badgermole Cub, 4 Icetill Explorer, 4 Mightform Harmonizer, 4 Earthbender Ascension, 4 Sazh's Chocobo, 2 Leatherhead Swamp Stalker, 2 Mossborn Hydra, 4 Sapling Nursery, 2 Archdruid's Charm, 2 Ba Sing Se, 4 Fabled Passage, 4 Escape Tunnel, 2 Promising Vein, 13 Forest

Sideboard: 4 Meltstrider's Resolve, 3 Torpor Orb, 2 Mossborn Hydra, 2 Soul-Guide Lantern, 2 Pawpatch Formation, 1 Vivien Reid, 1 Surrak Elusive Hunter

Izzet Lessons | Monument or Bust at 10.2%

Izzet Lessons is the deck that won the 2025 Magic World Championship, and it is still one of the best decks in the format despite the target on its head. This is the format's premier control-combo hybrid. The entire strategy revolves around getting Monument to Endurance onto the battlefield and then activating it repeatedly by discarding cards to draw more cards, generate Treasure tokens, or drain the opponent for three life.

The deck runs almost no creatures. Gran-Gran is the only one that matters, appearing as a full playset. Gran-Gran reduces the cost of your spells when three or more Lesson cards are in your graveyard, which the deck fills rapidly through its dense spell suite and Artist's Talent's discard trigger. The combination of cost reduction from Gran-Gran and an upgraded Artist's Talent makes Monument to Endurance extremely cheap to cast by the mid-game, at which point it starts generating more value than most decks can answer.

The rigid nature of the deck is its main limitation. The synergies between the pieces are so tightly interlocked that modifying the list significantly without understanding the interactions tends to break something important. New pilots who try to cut lands to fit in one extra thing frequently discover why the existing build exists the way it does. Against aggro decks, the primary goal is to survive long enough for Gran-Gran and Monument to come online. Against control, the primary goal is to resolve Monument before they can put up enough countermagic to stop it.

Secrets of Strixhaven brings several new Lesson cards that may upgrade the deck further at the Pro Tour. Teams that have solved the optimal configuration of new Lesson spells alongside the existing core are likely to show up as frontrunners this weekend.

Dimir Excruciator | The Combo Deck at 9.2%

Dimir Excruciator is the format's true combo deck, and it is the one most people are least prepared to face if they have not specifically studied it. The combo involves discarding Doomsday Excruciator to the graveyard early, then using a combination of Kavaero Mind-Bitten and Deceit to copy Doomsday Excruciator and trigger its enters-the-battlefield ability, which forces the opponent to exile cards from the top of their library until they have six or fewer left. From there, Restless Reef attacks to mill the final cards and the game ends.

The deck surrounds this combo with a blue-black control shell of hand disruption through Duress and Cruelclaw's Heist, targeted removal through Requiting Hex and Harvester of Misery, and enough early interaction to survive against aggro decks while setting up the combo pieces. Deceit serves as both a discard outlet and a disruption tool, which can be copied by Kavaero for a two-for-one effect on a single card.

The reason this deck sits at 9.2% of the winner's metagame rather than higher is that prepared opponents can fight the combo with graveyard hate and hand disruption. Soul-Guide Lantern specifically is already a sideboard staple in the format for other reasons and incidentally hates out the Excruciator graveyard setup. The deck rewards deep familiarity with the combo lines and punishes opponents who do not know what they are looking at in game one, which is where a significant portion of its wins come from.

Izzet Spellementals | The Elemental Graveyard Deck

Izzet Spellementals shares its metagame percentage with Dimir Excruciator, but plays a completely different game. This is the format's Elemental tribal and graveyard value strategy, using creatures like Hearth Elemental and Sunderflock to generate value through the graveyard and bounce effects. Sunderflock returns opposing non-Elemental creatures to their owner's hand when it enters the battlefield, which is particularly punishing against creature-heavy strategies that are not running Elementals themselves.

The deck occupies a midrange role between the aggressive Izzet Prowess shell and the more controlling Izzet Lessons strategy. It grinds out opponents with value creatures and graveyard recursion rather than killing them quickly with prowess triggers. The Izzet mana base and cantrip package is shared with other Izzet strategies, meaning the deck has access to the same powerful blue-red filtering tools as the format's dominant deck while pursuing a different endgame.

The matchup against Izzet Prowess is an interesting internal format mirror that depends heavily on whether the Spellementals player can stabilise the board before the Prowess player's pump spells end the game.

The Rest of the Field | What Else to Watch at the Pro Tour

Bant Rhythm and Selesnya Rhythm at 5.6% and 4.4% respectively are the format's Rhythm of the Wild style strategies built around the Rhythm mechanic that prevents creatures from being countered and grants haste. Both decks are legitimate midrange options that attempt to go bigger than the aggressive decks while remaining faster than the control decks. Bant adds blue for additional tempo tools while Selesnya keeps the mana base simple. The Badgermole Cub adoption in Selesnya reflects how much of a format pillar that card has become.

Azorius Momo at 1.9% is the most interesting counter-metagame option in the data. Momo, Friendly Flier reduces the cost of flying creatures, and the deck produces a board of cheap fliers that can race Izzet Prowess in the air while lifegain from Sage of the Skies and Nurturing Pixie buys time in the damage race. This is the deck that has the most favourable game-one matchup against Izzet Prowess, specifically, which makes it worth watching for players who want to specifically target the top of the metagame.

Jeskai Control at 1.2% is the format's traditional control shell with access to white removal, blue countermagic, and red burn. It has historically struggled against Izzet Lessons because the mirror dynamic favours the deck that curves out more efficiently, but it remains a viable option for players who prefer to play a pure control game.

What Does Secrets of Strixhaven Change for the Standard Metagame?

Secrets of Strixhaven was released on April 24, and the Pro Tour is this weekend, which means teams have had exactly three days to test new cards in a live competitive environment. That is not a lot of time, but three days is enough for the best players in the world to identify what is worth sleeving up and what is not.

The two Secrets of Strixhaven cards generating the most serious Standard discussion right now are Emeritus of Ideation and Emeritus of Abundance, and both of them are worth understanding before you watch the Pro Tour coverage.

Emeritus of Ideation is a five-mana 5/5 with flying that enters the battlefield with a copy of Ancestral Recall prepared and ready to cast. Draw three cards for one blue mana off a flying five-five is a rate that is difficult to ignore in any format where you can survive long enough to untap with it. The obvious home is Izzet Lessons, where the deck's control shell is designed to reach five mana safely and where card advantage off Monument to Endurance is already the primary win condition. Emeritus of Ideation gives Izzet Lessons a standalone threat that generates immediate and enormous value the turn it resolves, which is exactly what the deck wants in the mid to late game when Monument has already been answered.

Emeritus of Abundance is the green entry, a creature that enters with a copy of Regrowth prepared. Return any card from your graveyard to your hand off a creature body in Mono-Green Landfall is potentially significant because it gives the deck recursion it has never had before. The most obvious application is recovering a key piece like Earthbender Ascension or Mightform Harmonizer after removal, which has historically been one of the deck's main vulnerability points. Whether the five mana cost fits cleanly into a deck that wants to be doing more threatening things at that point on the curve is the open question competitive teams have been wrestling with this week.

Beyond the Emeritus cycle, Prismari Charm has been flagged as a flexible new tool for Izzet Prowess builds looking for a cantrip that also functions as removal, and new Lesson cards across multiple colleges are likely to appear in Izzet Lessons sideboards as pro teams optimize which specific Lessons fill the graveyard most efficiently.

The honest answer is that nobody outside the Pro Tour testing teams knows exactly what the Strixhaven-updated decklists look like right now. The three-day window between set release and Pro Tour day one is precisely the window where the biggest surprises get cooked up in secret. A new archetype enabled by the Prepared mechanic, a Displacer Kitten combo shell, or an unexpected Emeritus build could show up in the top eight this weekend and completely reframe how the format is understood going forward. That is the part of Pro Tour weekend nobody can predict but everyone shows up to see.

Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven runs May 1 to 3 at MagicCon: Las Vegas. Coverage streams at twitch.tv/magic and youtube.com/@Play_MTG. Follow the action with the hashtag #PTSOS.

Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven Standard FAQ

What decks are being played at Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven? The top Standard decks at Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven are Izzet Prowess at 23.7% of the winner's metagame, Mono-Green Landfall at 15.7%, Izzet Lessons at 10.2%, and Dimir Excruciator and Izzet Spellementals both at 9.2%. These five archetypes represent over 68% of the competitive metagame heading into the event.

When is Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven? Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven takes place May 1 to 3, 2026, at MagicCon: Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada. The formats are Secrets of Strixhaven Booster Draft and Standard Constructed. The prize pool is $500,000, and the event is invitation-only for the world's top competitive Magic players.

Where can I watch Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven? Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven coverage streams live at twitch.tv/magic and youtube.com/@Play_MTG all three days of the event. Follow the hashtag #PTSOS on social media for player updates and match results.

Is Izzet Prowess the best deck in Secrets of Strixhaven Standard? Izzet Prowess is currently the best-performing Standard deck by winner's metagame share, commanding 23.7% of competitive results in the month before the Pro Tour. The deck has maintained dominance throughout the Regional Championship season and remains the primary target for teams preparing for Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven.

What is Dimir Excruciator and how does it win? Dimir Excruciator is a combo-control Standard deck that wins by discarding Doomsday Excruciator to the graveyard and then copying it with Kavaero Mind-Bitten to trigger its library exile ability, reducing the opponent to six or fewer cards in their library. Restless Reef then attacks to mill the remaining cards and win the game. The deck wraps this combo in a blue-black disruption and removal shell to survive until the combo is ready to execute.

What is the Mono-Green Landfall deck in Secrets of Strixhaven Standard? Mono-Green Landfall is a ramp-combo archetype built around Earthbender Ascension and Mightform Harmonizer. The deck uses Llanowar Elves and Badgermole Cub to accelerate mana, fetch lands to trigger multiple Landfall events per turn, and Earthbender Ascension to convert those land drops into large creature attacks with the help of Mightform Harmonizer's damage amplification. It is the second most successful Standard deck in the Pre-Pro Tour metagame at 15.7% of winners' results.

What format is Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven? Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven uses Secrets of Strixhaven Booster Draft on Friday and Saturday alongside Standard Constructed in all rounds. The Top 8 playoff on Sunday is Standard Constructed only, with best-of-five matches in each elimination round.