The Most Important Standard Cards for 2025

It’s the season when we as writers often take a step back and review the most exciting beats of the year just gone. But from a Standard perspective, it feels like most of the year was just a buildup to the excitement of the last few months.

The first rotation in years has been exactly the kind of watershed players had hoped for, dislodging or at least shaking up most of the entrenched archetypes. Then we’ve followed it up with a string of impactful sets which have helped fill those gaps in the metagame with new and interesting options. 

The sheer size of Foundations in particular means we’re still only seeing the first wave of reactions to its appearance. All this upheaval has been a blast for players who have been in the Standard trenches all year to get new toys, but it also makes this a great time for anyone who was taking time away from the format to look for a way back in. So this week we’re going to tell the story so far by looking to the chapter ahead, and highlight which cards are poised to play the most important roles in the new year.

NEW SEASON, NEW(?) MAIN CHARACTERS

Deep-Cavern Bat

When you think about the cards which really define a metagame, there’s two distinct kinds. First, there’s the top tier build-arounds: the fearsome signature spells that you know are guaranteed to see play because your entire archetype is set up to enable them.

Then there’s the Deep-Cavern Bats of the world, the cards which provide best-in-class versions of a universally helpful effect. You know the Bat is guaranteed to see play because you can’t imagine a black deck that wouldn’t want to run it.

Discard spells with unrestricted targeting are simply overpowered against Standard decks which tend to struggle with uneven card quality and inconsistent draws. Even if tying your Thoughtseize to a fragile 1/1 body does place some subtle limitations on its power, there’s a lot more interactions where having that body – one with flying and lifelink – works out in your favor.

Whether it’s evolving the Bat into a threat with Innkeeper’s Talent, using it to access UB’s various “unblocked attacker” payoffs, or simply buying you an extra turn against a massive Demon token, this cavern critter has too high a floor to ever fall out of fashion.

Caretaker’s Talent

I already wrote a full article on this card when it first broke out into the metagame, and based on its performance since then I doubt anybody has been able to forget about it during the interim. So I’ll spare you a lengthy repeat of my analysis, and just say that Caretaker’s Talent is still on the upswing. 

If you’re looking for a combination of upside and flexibility, there’s no other build-around that’s this future-proof. There’s never going to be a new set without tokens, and it’s difficult to imagine a world where white gets multiple new draw engines so potent they dislodge Caretaker’s from its lofty perch. It may get some competition from cards over the next year, but anyone who has invested in their Wx token control deck can look forward without a care in the world.

Screaming Nemesis

Somehow, this one card is simultaneously a solid maindeck filler, high-leverage sideboard tech, and crowd-pleasing janky combo enabler. It takes a lot of finesse to create that many use cases for a relatively simple aggro card, but the Nemesis has already seen enough success that I’m confident in its future. 

My only question is whether competitive deckbuilders will find the tools to exploit its damage-redirection effect, the way Callous Sell-Sword unexpectedly got a Fling strategy into the metagame thanks to Heartfire Hero. For now, players haven’t gone much further than turning Witchstalker Frenzy into an undercosted Lava Axe. But I’d love to see a new Star of Extinction or Blasphemous Act type effect drop in 2025 that opens up some more highlight-reel plays for this screamer.

Enduring Curiosity

Duskmourn really is starting to look like an all-time set for quality card designs. As the standout from a good cycle, Enduring Curiosity has already seen some play in different archetypes, but I think its true home is still yet to materialize.

Ux Flash is a rising force in Standard right now, and if we’re using the dominant M20 incarnation of that deck as a blueprint, then a decent-sized four-drop flash threat with some sticky value-generating potential is the most crucial piece for success. It doesn’t have quite as much board impact as Nightpack Ambusher, but I think Enduring Curiosity does enough to fill that role if you build to optimize it with small evasive guys.

It might be stretching to tell readers to go back and look up my old strategy articles on the topic, but to summarize: very few decks can do more damage with the kind of steady bonus draws Enduring Curiosity provides.

Atraxa, Grand Unifier

I wanted SO badly to leave this design mistake off the list – not just because I’m sick of looking at her (though I am), but because I really don’t think there’s anything interesting left to say about it. 

The Grand Unifier is the #1 choice (or at least #1A) for any situation where you can cheat a creature into play – for ANY Constructed format, let alone Standard. The giant flying lifelink vigilant body immediately stabilizes you against all but the most absurd boardstates and then starts running away with the game if not immediately answered. But it’s not even that important whether or not you can kill Atraxa, because merely getting her into play immediately nets your opponent a double or triple Dig Through Time.

It’s a shame she’s so omnipresent, because there are enablers like Squirming Emergence that I’d love to put in this spot and get excited about for their 2025 potential. But until she rotates at the end of NEXT year, there’s no real hope of using those spells to cheat out anything except this overtuned blunt instrument of a creature.

Sheltered By Ghosts

With one-mana hexproof creatures a thing of the past, the only auras people want to play in 2025 are those that frontload all their value on ETB, or which replace themselves on death. That says to me that players cannot accept giving opponents the chance to blow them out with removal on the enchanted creature before they get their value, and the removal is just far too good these days to believe that won’t happen.

I think Wizards understand this perfectly well, and that’s why Sheltered By Ghosts feels so pushed compared to the auras of yesteryear. Granting Ward on top of already valuable effects at least reassures the caster that they’re going to come out ahead on tempo/mana against removal, and aggro decks are always ok to give up cards in trade for that.

Aggressive decks are also best suited to capitalize on a potentially small window while your opponent’s permanent is exiled and run away with the game. Sheltered By Ghosts is a card that will be in the 75 of every white creature deck next year: if you can guarantee it resolves (with ward creatures or Shardmage’s Rescue), then it should be a 4-of in the main.

Eddymurk Crab

Flash is back, baby! If you’re a Constructed player who just skims the rares and mythics in set spoilers you could well have missed this under-the-radar gem from Bloomburrow, but big Eddy has just the right traits to edge out his more highly-decorated competition.

Overall card quality is irrelevant to a deck which is 100% reliant on playing on the opponent’s turn and out-tempoing them through mana efficiency. By those skewed expectations, Eddy’s built-in mana discount and ability to impact the board on ETB is the ideal package for a finisher.

It’s a pretty strong package in general, and there’s some potential to see the big crab out of control and combo sideboards when the instant and sorcery count is high enough. But I’m mostly excited to see Eddy paired with other under-costed and/or instant-speed beasties like Tolarian Terror and Enduring Curiosity in the kind of deck that will lead Standard in “forced ragequits”.

Ancient Cornucopia

Here’s another pick that’s got more to do with future potential than current dominance, but you can’t call the Cornucopia a complete unknown either. It might be a little expensive for a mana rock, but with even a mild bit of deckbuilding effort the potential lifegain from this card puts immense pressure on conventional aggro decks to try and go for the win immediately. 

If they can’t (or if you use the mana from the Cornucopia to cast something cheap and disrupt their attempt) then there’s every chance the mana ramp leads to an early board wipe – after which the continued lifegain can bury their hopes even if the Cornucopia player lacks a real haymaker to follow up.

The ability to stack multiple copies and/or trigger lifegain on both your own turn and the opponent’s is just diabolical, and I think that the card is flying a little under the radar right now. If more ramp/control shells do gain momentum in 2025 then aggro decks might have to really lean hard on Screaming Nemesis to nullify the problem, because there’s no way as the beatdown player that you’ll enjoy wasting time and resources to answer a mana rock!

Monstrous Rage

The red counterpart to Deep-Cavern Bat, this is simply one of the best one-mana pump spells ever printed. It does everything you could ask of a red spell other than grant haste, which is easily ignored by playing more haste creatures. It’s simply an excellent rate and reliable return of damage against anything but instant-speed removal – and pairing red with blue, green or white will immediately unlock equally efficient defensive tools that will cripple anyone who tries it.

To top it all off, Monstrous Rage is perfectly aligned with the meta mechanics heading into 2025: it targets to trigger the Valiant mice from Bloomburrow, it’s an instant for Prowess and Threshold and Spell Mastery, it creates an enchantment token to trigger Eerie or Celebration and fuel Bargain. What more could you possibly ask for a single red mana?

Agatha’s Soul Cauldron

It may not have quite the eye-watering power level of Atraxa, but I’m equally confident that this multi-format staple will retain that status no matter what we see printed over the next 12 months. It has that heady mix of easy consistency, valued utility and game-changing potential I mentioned for Screaming Nemesis, but more so and for less mana.

If you haven’t seen the Cauldron in action yet and the card isn’t jumping off the page at you, imagine the efficient board presence and graveyard hosing of a Scavenging Ooze, but with the broad potential to create infinite combos in your creature deck while sacrificing barely any aggro power.

That’s what we’re dealing with here, and I expect the actual combo kills will only get more scary as the Standard card pool grows through 2025. There are enough comparable options for graveyard hate that this will probably only see play when such a combo is available, but the results Cauldron has posted in Pioneer and beyond – plus the huge free value it unlocks in any +1/+1 counter shell – should prove that those combos are worth building towards.

TIME TO SEE HOW WELL THIS AGES

Predictions are difficult in a system as complicated and chaotic as the Standard metagame. If I was truly certain about what cards or decks were poised to dominate the next year of tournaments, I’d probably be out there trying to speculate on key singles, or at least get my reps in to try and sweep qualifier season. That said, we do have enough data on most of these cards – and the themes of upcoming sets – to be reasonably sure about the biggest hits.

Obviously there’s also a handful of honorable-mention type cards that I couldn’t fully put on the same level as S-tier bombs like Atraxa. Perhaps that should be its own follow-up article for exciting but unknown pieces. Cards like Cursed Recording are only ever one extra turn spell away from becoming dominant, while Essence Channeler and the other Bloomburrow bats have posted enough intermittent results to have me believing in them with just a slightly larger selection of lifegain-themed effects.

We can even look ahead to the limited spoilers we have for 2025 expansion to understand which areas benefit. The vehicular bias of Aetherdrift, for instance, will give us a real chance to test the capabilities of overlooked rares like Wylie Duke, Astor, Bearer of Blades, and the various Survivors of Duskmourn. These attempts at prophecy always leave me energized for things to come, and 2025 Standard will certainly have a ton of potential to build on.