Yes, a Raccoon Really Can Take Over Magic: The Gathering

One of the perks of getting a total of six main set releases in Magic: The Gathering this year is that the meta keeps evolving and adjusting whenever new cards come out or when players need a different strategy to beat the best decks in their favorite formats. Just yesterday, Wizards of the Coast announced that it's moving the date of the next Banned and Restricted post from November 24 to November 10, which will supposedly include plenty of changes to the state of various Magic: The Gathering formats. Some kind of action is expected for MTG's Vivi Ornitier in Standard, though Wizards is hesitant because new meta decks are emerging, including one that features a raccoon.

Players who have been around for at least one year will most likely be familiar with the concept of raccoons taking over a format, as Magic: The Gathering's Bloomburrow set in August of 2024 came with a plethora of support for raccoon-based decks. All raccoon cards were dedicated to two specific colors, Red and Green, and with the current rotation in Standard, Bloomburrow is very much still legal to play. Now that more decks are trying to outpace Izzet Cauldron, Mono Green is taking center stage with a rather powerful and yet very cute raccoon.

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By Andrea Trama

How Magic: The Gathering Players Can Turn a Raccoon Into a Killing Machine

Recently, a Mono Green deck came in second place on Magic: The Gathering Online, and it's even listed as one of the up-and-coming meta picks for Standard in Wizards of the Coast's ban announcement about Vivi in MTG. This deck, by elvin7, features the following cards:

Creatures:
- 4x Frenzied Baloth
- 4x Hemosymbic Mite
- 4x Keen-Eyed Curator
- 4x Llanowar Elves
- 4x Ouroboroid
- 4x Pawpatch Recruit
- 2x Sentinel of the Nameless City
- 3x Surrak, Elusive Hunter
Enchantments:
- 4x Innkeeper's Talent
Instants:
- 3x Giant Growth
- 2x Royal Treatment
- 2x Tifa's Limit Break
Lands:
- 18x Forest
- 2x Soulstone Sanctuary

This list is likely not the be-all, end-all of Mono Green MTG decks in Standard, but it's a great example of how a simple game plan can disrupt even the strongest of combos. The deck is an aggro one that focuses on making cheap creatures with decently high power and toughness even bigger, and Keen-Eye Curator can be an exceptional card to achieve this. It's a 2-Green 3/3 raccoon creature that can exile a card from a graveyard for just 1 mana, and it gets +4/+4 and trample if there are four or more types of cards exiled this way.

Exiling cards from graveyards can also counter some decks that rely on reanimation or similar effects.

Why MTG's New Mono Green Standard Deck Wins With Big Creatures

The thing is, this applies to all copies of Keen-Eye Curator, so even if one is destroyed after exiling one or more cards from graveyards, the others can reap the benefits. As such, it's not too hard to get a 7/7 raccoon with trample on the field, which can become a massive problem with Giant Growth or Tifa's Limit Break, potentially winning the game on its own if left unattended. MTG's meta Standard decks usually have plenty of removals, though, and that's why the deck can benefit from cards like Surrak, Elusive Hunter, Pawpatch Recruit, or Frenzied Baloth.

Cards like Innkeeper's Talent and Royal Treatment help counter removals, too, as they provide either ward or hexproof to a given creature, which makes it ineligible as a target of spells and abilities from the opponent. With a bit of Magic: The Gathering's ramp in the form of Llanowar Elves, the deck can be a consistent early-game threat with potential to scale later on with a bigger board state. Keen-Eye Curator, in particular, can be a late-game threat when players have enough mana to immediately turn it into a 7/7 when played, meaning it needs to survive the turn to attack later. Aggro decks in Standard are usually pretty common, but a Mono Green variant is interesting to see, and it has the potential to become a new meta threat.

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