New Capenna Decks I've Had Some Success With

 When a new set comes out, there's always this sort of awkward stage where it's really not clear what decks are going to be super good, and so I often make some new thing with a lot of new cards that I'm all excited about, only to be beaten down with decks that have spent the last card set cycle getting refined and tested.

However, in the five days or so of New Capenna being available on Arena, I've managed to cobble together (with a lot of help from online deck lists) some decks that actually seem to be able to win now and again.

First off, there's a Cabaretti (Naya) tokens deck. This one is very vulnerable to sweepers - something that we have a lot of in Standard these days, between Meathook Massacre, Doomskar, Burn Down the House, and Farewell. But if you can manage to build up a lot of creatures with things like Esika's Chariot, Join the Dance, etc., there's some great payoff. Jetmir, the legendary mob boss of the Cabaretti, can be the thing you plunk down on the battlefield and just win the game with - he gives bonuses to all your creatures based on how many you have out, and giving everyone +1/+0 and vigilance, then trample, then double strike is pretty nice (though the latter you need nine creatures out to get).

The next deck I've been playing is a Brokers (Bant) deck that uses Teleportation Circle for enter-the-battlefield recursion. Here, we have cheap creatures like Prosperous Innkeeper and Topiary Stomper to ramp up, but then things get really crazy when we get Workshop Warchief or Titan of Industry - the latter of which is going to bring a ton of pain to your opponent, as you can kill enchantments and artifacts, pump out 4/4 rhino warrior tokens, gain five life, or put a shield counter on one of your creatures, which is nuts.

A deck that I'm hoping to refine is a sort of Maestro (Grixis) control deck that make use of a few cards like A Little Chat - which is a simple but useful card-draw engine - and of course, Ob Nixilis, the Adversary, which is the new hotness in planeswalkers. Having a bunch of Eyetwitches and Shambling Ghasts means that sacrificing a creature for these cards is actually more of a bonus than a drawback.

It'll be a few weeks before the new, most powerful deck archetypes reveal themselves, and of course, a lot of fairly old cards at this point are still pretty dominant - I think we're going to have to wait for Kaldheim and Strixhaven to rotate out of standard before those nasty Izzet control decks go away.