Last updated on July 25, 2025
Raffine, Scheming Seer | Illustration by Véronique Meignaud
Since Raffine, Scheming Seer was printed in Streets of New Capenna, Esper Midrange has dominated tournament Standard play. And midrange decks, like Jund () or “The Rock” have had moments of domination across MTG history.
Okay, but what are these midrange decks? That’s a good question, and we’re going to explore what they are, how to build these decks, and best of all, how to win with them.
What Is a Midrange Deck?
Faerie Mastermind | Illustration by Joshua Raphael
A midrange deck in MTG is a good deck that isn’t aggro, control, or combo.
Midrange is a Magic function, a placeholder for a deck that exists in the space in the middle, seeking to answer everything in the meta if it can, but more realistically preying on the most popular, most powerful, or most consistent decks. In short, midrange is about adaptability, and we either love that or hate that, largely depending on whether the cards of the era support tactical flexibility.
Part of the reason midrange has been dominant recently is that cards are increasingly flexible, and card draw is stapled to just about everything, meaning it’s easier than ever to find the pieces that you need for a matchup.
Let’s look at the elements of a midrange deck to be able to focus on the strategy and tactics here.
Elements of a Midrange Deck
A midrange deck seeks a flexible balance of offense and defense, and so the best decks often have cards that play both sides of that.
Interaction
Midrange needs to stop aggro decks and fast combo decks, so you need to pack enough interaction to do that. You have many options here, depending on your colors, the format, and the meta, but we’re generally talking about some items from this menu:
- counterspells
- hand disruption (effects like Thoughtseize)
- hard removal
- soft removal
- flash creatures
Obviously, if you’re in blue, counterspells are easier to come by than hard removal. In Jund colors (), you have the opposite. In current Standard’s Esper () midrange, we have:
- Hand disruption in Deep-Cavern Bat,
- Hard removal in Cut Down, Go for the Throat, and The Wandering Emperor,
- A counterspell in No More Lies, and
- Creatures that can flash in to block and trade with an opposing creature in The Wandering Emperor, Faerie Mastermind, and Virtue of Loyalty.
In what was arguably the first “real” midrange deck to win the Magic World Championship, Uri Peleg’s “Doran Rock” deck in 2007, much of the interaction is super flexible, with both Shriekmaw and Profane Command serving as removal, an addition to the board, or both.
In Commander, midrange is really hard to pull off, largely because 1 for 1 interaction leaves you down a card to the other two players. Even a three for one is often still not enough. Of course, in EDH you’ll usually pack interaction in any deck, but often you’ll have a Cyclonic Rift for when things are lost or a Chaos Warp for an emergency solution. You don’t expect to go up on those interactions, merely avoid losing. But midrange wants to slowly eke out value with its interactions. This means EDH midrange is really much closer to the control side, packing more board wipes or even (boo! hiss!) stax pieces in order to slow the game down enough to allow you to pivot to your wincons. It’s like playing Liliana of the Veil in 60-card formats. Your goal is a resource-poor, perhaps topdecking, environment where you eke out an advantage.
Creatures
Creatures in midrange serve multiple functions. They can be card draw, with Faerie Mastermind and Raffine, Scheming Seer, lifegain with Dennick, Pious Apprentice (especially with +1/+1 counters from Raffine), Deep-Cavern Bat, and Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal, and in the classic midrange function, ever-growing value as the game goes longer, whether tall like whatever Raffine is pumping, or wide, with a card like Wedding Announcement.
Card Advantage
From the days of Dark Confidant in old school Jund, midrange decks have preferred their card draw on creatures or in value machines like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker as opposed to control decks’ big card draw spells to fill a hand with answers. The more value you get from a card like Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, the less overt card draw you need. Or think about Fable. Left unchecked, it’s more than a three for one.
Card advantage can include graveyard recursion. You can see this firmly in perhaps the premiere EDH midrange commander, Meren of Clan Nel Toth. This Golgari commander helps your plan to sacrifice things and recur things, escalating into a Birthing Pod structure where you grab whatever you need.
Wincons
There are different versions of a top-end wincon in different midrange decks. The most flexible have various wincons. In Esper Midrange, for example, Wedding Announcement gives ever increasing value if it sticks, providing blockers against aggro and inevitability against control decks that can’t find their sweepers. Add a Virtue of Loyalty and you’re cooking with gas. Raffine churns through the deck, looking for answers, all while growing something into a tall beater. In old school Jund and Peleg’s Rock, you’re controlling the board and growing your Tarmogoyf.
You Commander wincons are often your very own commander, and sometimes very little else!
How to Play Midrange Decks
Carefully!
I’m only mostly kidding there, but it’s a hint to the appeal of these decks. Years ago I was watching Ali Eldrazi’s stream and he was tilting a bit against a control deck that was ruining his baroque combo deck’s fun. He vented that control decks aren’t about being smart. In high power games you mostly just have to counter everything you can. The old days when we called those decks “permission” decks were long gone.
But for midrange, with fewer answers than control decks, the idea of permission is real. You have to decide when to act and when to wait, and you also have to decide when to let your opponent act and when to hold back your answers, especially because some of those answers, like Profane Command, could have very different uses for you.
The Beatdown Turning Point Against Aggro
In Mike Flores’s key article from 25 years ago (!), “Who’s the Beatdown,” the game is reduced to who’s acting like aggro and who’s acting like control. Midrange decks, as the most flexible builds, are prepared to take either role from the opening shuffle.
First, that means understanding whether you’re acting as control in the early game, which is more complex in midrange versus midrange battles. Sometimes it’s just about who gets on board more solidly early, especially in mirror matches.
But the biggest issue is understanding what I’m calling the “Beatdown Turning Point,” which isn’t exclusively a midrange deck concern, but is the heart of the midrange experience. Usually this is when you’re playing against aggro and thus are in the control role from the outset. Understanding when their attack is authentically out of gas is key. A wily aggro player understands this moment as well and is waiting for you to drop shields and drop a creature or two only to respond with the final push.
Midrange vs. Combo and Control: Key Factors
It’s easier to know what to counter or kill or what to Thoughtseize against combo. There are red flag wincons you have to manage, like Show and Tell or Reanimate or Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord or Simulacrum Synthesizer.
Against control, I often find myself playing creatures out as one for one targets. I’m asking them to counter or Eliminate my Deathrite Shaman. My goal is to get rid of their hand by any means necessary, and making them play out their counters and removal is key. What’s important are their massive card draw spells like Dig Through Time or planeswalkers that bury you in an avalanche of value, like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. I need to remove them from their hand, counter them, or delay them until I’ve already achieved a winning advantage. Depending on my colors, I have different tools for this, often out of the sideboard, and I need to know what options I have against the cards that will pull them out of range of my weapons.
Understand Your Wincon
You usually have a variety of wincons, only some of which are viable in any given match. Sometimes it’s a Deathrite Shaman pecking away with life loss over many turns. Other times it’s a huge Raffine, Scheming Seer or Tarmogoyf swinging for the fences. And sometimes it’s the one card that is overwhelming value if you can just get it to fire under the right conditions, like Dance of the Manse.
How to Mulligan With a Midrange Deck
In best-of-one on MTG Arena, these questions are simpler in some ways. You need something to do early in the game. You’d love a suite of cheap creatures and interaction, but going down to six cards is a real cost in a value-oriented deck, so as long as you can do things early, it’s enough.
When you know the matchup, it’s different.
Against aggro, your goal is to survive past turn 4. Will your hand do that? Do you have early plays? If your creatures only chump against their attackers and you don’t have removal, you need to mulligan. Do they usually have early targets for your Go for the Throat? Will there be targets for your Spell Pierce?
Against combo, do you have an answer for their win condition on the turn you’re likely to see it? That’s pretty much the only issue in these matchups!
Against control, there are so many difficult decisions. Can you plausibly get on board fast enough to get under them? If not, do you have a decent set of interaction to challenge their big turns? Is your hand filled with creature removal but you know that the first creature they play is a token off the four mana The Wandering Emperor? Do you have another target for their likely Fatal Push before you risk your Tarmogoyf? Control is a challenging matchup.
How to Sideboard With a Midrange Deck
In best-of-three and/or tournament Magic, you’ll have a sideboard with answers. For example, old-school Jund used to run some copies of Shatterstorm. Presumably you know why the fifteen answers are there, which ones to pack versus decks you are weak against, etc.
But to bring in some hammers, you need to remove some of the scaffolding from your deck. How will it function without them? In some cases, it’s easy. You bring in more graveyard hate and lose some creature removal because their deck is creature-light. But other times you need to shave down wincons or interactions. And those hammers, well, maybe you really need them but you only have two. If you land a Shatterstorm you win, but how do you play to find them versus the way you’re playing before? Do you prioritize drawing through the deck? Do you play more defensively to hold out for the topdeck?
Playing midrange is a game of knowing your outs so you have an evolving sense of the value of a card off the top of your deck.
How to Build Midrange Decks
There are no hard and fast rules, as your job is to supplement key aggressive cards with interaction and card advantage appropriate to your format's meta.
Understand Your Format’s Meta and Speed
Large formats have more diverse sets of playable decks, which makes midrange harder to manage, whereas Standard seems to be permanently dominated by midrange strategies.
Midrange just isn’t very possible in very fast formats, those where the game can be won on turn 1 or 2, like cEDH, Timeless, Vintage, and Legacy. It’s telling that the closest we get to midrange in Timeless, for example, are decks built around Death's Shadow and Thoughtseize, both 1-drops!
Turn 3/4 formats, like Modern and Historic, are difficult, as well, and in those formats we’re usually talking black to cast a discard spell or evoke Grief on turn 1. Otherwise, you’ll need a counterspell ready on turn 2 on the draw, which is harder in a deck with fewer counters than proper control decks.
When you hit turn 4-plus formats, like Standard, Pioneer, Explorer, Pauper, and Commander, you have time for your card quality mixed with a variety of disruption to take over the game.
All this means that depending on the format, you need to build the deck with the right mix of interaction for the speed. Take a card like Bloodtithe Harvester. It’s an attacker and blocker, removal, and card draw/filtering. And it’s been a midrange mainstay in Pioneer and Standard, but because its card draw and removal both require untapping on turn 3, it’s too slow for other 60-card formats.
Define and Maximize Your Win Condition
You start a midrange deck idea with either a very powerful card you can get down early to start building value, like Tarmogoyf, Raffine, Scheming Seer, or Fable of the Mirror-Breaker or a package of synergistic cards – think of the Throne of Eldraine adventures deck starring Bonecrusher Giant, Brazen Borrower, Lovestruck Beast with Lucky Clover and Edgewall Innkeeper.
Then you add pieces that interact, keep you alive, and maybe even sneak in damage. These will ideally all be folded into the same card for extra value, but not every meta supports that. At best, those additional cards provide alternative wincons you can tap into as needed.
Plan Your Interaction Suite
Obviously you need removal, which comes in all colors. But your primary decision point is what to do with powerful enemy spells. If you’re playing blue, you can add in a few counterspells, like the ubiquitous Make Disappear. Without blue, you often need hand disruption, like Inquisition of Kozilek, Duress, Liliana of the Veil, or Deep-Cavern Bat.
These two methods, and sometimes both, are almost irreplaceable in midrange, especially in faster formats.
Supplement with Creatures and Card Draw
There are no clear rules for how much card draw and how many creatures you need in midrange decks, largely because it depends on the value synergies inherent in your top selected cards. And I’d argue that the defining feature of modern Magic that makes midrange possible as a deck idea are creatures that grant card advantage, all the way back to Dark Confidant. It saves the deck space control spends on big card draw spells like Memory Deluge. Creatures can replace themselves (or get close to that) minimize the impact when aggro combat-tricks away your blocker or control drops a sweeper.
Thus, the ideal is for midrange decks to make just about every creature that’s not already interaction in some way a pile of value, as with Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor or Preacher of the Schism.
How Many Lands Should a Midrange Deck Have?
As always, this depends on the mana value of your cards. You don’t need to guarantee your fourth land drop in a Death's Shadow deck, but you do with Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. And missing land drops in midrange is pretty much a loss, as you have so much one-for-one interaction that you often can’t catch up with runaway aggro or a control deck with enough lands to cast threats while holding up those pesky 2 blue mana.
Usually, the number is 25-26 lands in slower 60-card formats. In fast 60-card formats just about every deck rocks 20 or less. In Commander, a midrange deck is already a tough road, so depending on your cards, closer to 40 lands than 30.
How Do You Build Your Sideboard for a Midrange Deck?
Obviously, you’re responding to difficult matchups in the meta, but how do you do that? Sometimes you need a bomb answer to a powerful deck that everyone has trouble with, and that’s often a piece of graveyard hate like Relic of Progenitus. But in other cases it depends a bit on the strength of aggro in the format.
If aggro is powerful and good and ubiquitous, as with the Embercleave days of Standard mono-red, midrange strategies have to tip more towards cheap spell-based removal. Those cards tend to be blanks against control and some combo decks, so your sideboard should be control answers. But if aggro is weaker, for example during the Rakdos () midrange slugfests of post-March of the Machine Standard, maindeck answers to midrange and control, like Duress, need to be sided out for removal against creature decks.
The sideboard is about key answers to specific decks as well as accommodating for your maindeck bias against the overall speed of the meta.
Midrange Decks on Arena
This is really a question about best-of-one, as best of three looks like everything we’ve discussed. But the motivation structure of Arena rewards players for faster games, which means you see more desperate aggro on the Bo1 ladder in Arena than you do in paper Magic.
If aggro is Bo1 king, you need quicker answers over value, so more Cut Down copies than Bloodtithe Harvesters. You need fewer classic midrange cards that do a little bit of everything in order to throw in a few more pieces of quicker interaction. The Esper Midrange decks seen on the Pro Tour Outlaws of Thunder Junction tended to have 8-10 pieces of spell-based creature removal main deck. The midrange-y deck I used at that time to make mythic in Standard had more like 16.
Are Midrange Decks Good?
They can be, but not on principle. In theory midrange is terrible. But when the meta lines up and the cards work together to serve multiple purposes and enable crazy value, then yes. And that just happens to be often in the years since the end of the Mayan Calendar. Which is why midrange generally doesn’t make sense in Limited or Commander, two formats where your ability to determine that you’ll have the right topdeck on turn three are pretty low.
What Kind of Cards Make the Best Midrange Deck?
Aside from the wincons and the cheap interaction, the bulk of midrange cards need to do many things, which is the hallmark of midrange classics from Deathrite Shaman to Bloodtithe Harvester.
What's the Difference Between Control and Midrange?
Midrange decks are flexible and can easily take on the role of aggro or control in a matchup, as needed, which control decks usually can’t do. Midrange decks are more reliant on creatures, especially value creatures with multiple possible functions, and most importantly, card draw. Control typically has more powerful, single-purpose spells, especially in the card draw realm.
But there are definitely decks that feel like they have a foot on both sides of this river.
How Do You Beat a Midrange Deck?
Carefully!
There are no hard and fast rules because midrange takes many forms, but there are patterns.
If You Are an Aggro Deck…
Go faster!
And be cognizant of the two-for-one economy like when playing Limited. Play a second Monastery Swiftspear instead of a Monstrous Rage if there’s a chance they have removal up. Save your Play with Fire to take out their first creature and don’t go face to get the scry.
If You Are a Combo or Ramp Deck…
You need to be able to cast your important things and keep them safe. Sometimes that means almost goldfishing if you have redundant parts in your hand. But that often means playing for intermediate pressure so you can force them to use their cards at suboptimal times. Perhaps you hold back spells and just swing with an awakened Topiary Stomper to force them to use a card on it.
If You Are a Control Deck…
Your advantage is that they have a bunch of mostly useless creature removal spells. You effectively start with more cards in hand and have more relevant topdecks. They’re going to try to play aggro but their deck isn’t built to do that efficiently. Your job is to survive long enough to play a big sweeper or planeswalker with mana up to counter their counter, for example. Manage threats as you need, but remember they need to take the risks to end the game and you don’t.
Wrap Up
Thoughtseize | Illustration by Aleksi Briclot
Are you tempted to join the midrange masses? Are you interested in a skill-testing deck filled with tactical flexibility? Do you want to feel like you have a chance to find a way in any matchup?
It’s a serious question! There’s something to playing decks that do one thing well and fold to the wrong matchups. It’s easier to blame the cards and move on.
But I would suggest that learning how to effectively play midrange strategies is absolutely key to leveling up your game, especially if you’re thinking about more paper Magic in your life. What you learn about tight, responsive, accurate play is astonishingly valuable.
This is normally where I ask you about your thoughts on midrange, but I’d love a more specific response in the comments or on the Draftsim Discord, if you wouldn’t mind. I want to know what your first midrange deck was. How did you cut your teeth in the world of, dare I say it, adult Magic? Are you a Jund boomer, Esper zoomer, or something else entirely?
Thanks for reading, and may your Duress always find a target!
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