Dissension: Azorius Ascendant Review (Part 2 of 2)
Sam decided to operate a little out of her element and pilot Rakdos Bloodsport, the hyper-aggressive Red/Black deck against my Azorius Ascendant. Azorius was something of a trip through nostalgia-land for me, not because I was active in the game during Dissension (I wasn’t), but because my first decks at the dawn of the game tended to be White/Blue. Not so much the White/Blue Control archetype that we know today, but one that sought to enclose itself in an impregnable defense: Blessing, Moat, Circles of Protection, Farmstead and Ivory Tower were mainstays from White, paired with mainstays like Ancestral Recall, Counterspell, and Mana Short. Decks shamelessly ran past 100 cards, and constructing the perfect defense from which to hide behind and mess with my enemies was the crowning achievement of any game I was involved in.
Times have changed, and the closest I get to the Control archetype was with a Grixis/Cruel Ultimatum build. These days I’m most fond of Red and Black aggro builds. But from our analysis, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was about to step back through time, after a fashion. Here are our notes.
Dissension: Azorius Ascendant Review (Part 1 of 2)
For our next visit to the city of Ravnica, we’ll be looking today at the ruling body of the city- the Azorius Senate. Naturally, a city needs a governing body to function, and the Azorius guild is Guildpact-bound to maintain that duty. They don’t enforce the laws (that’s the job of the Red/White Boros Legion), but they do legislate them. To the Azorius, they are all that stand between Ravnica and sheer lawlessness and societal breakdown. To the common Ravnican, they are pompous windbags stuffed to bursting with overinflated self-importance.
Ertai's Lament 