Happy Tuesday Highlanders! My name is Liam Coughlan and I’m starting a new weekly column here on Canadian Highlander called the “The Monday Metagame”. I’m a recently newly elected member of the council and one of my goals is to increase coverage of the format! So with that in mind I’m going to do a weekly overview of the Monday metagame so that those who weren’t present get an idea of what’s going on in the scene and so that those were there and are planning to come the next week can potentially metagame appropriately!
This week was marked by an abundance of fair decks with about 75% of the metagame. The unfair decks can be separated into two different categories, the artifact combo decks (two Academy and one Wildfire), and the mono green Craterhoof combo decks. This week it definitely paid to either be able to interact with creatures decks heavily or be able to go bigger or wider than the other creature decks.
Stefan Bard was one of the players who was able to interact with these creature decks quite well and won all the matches he played against them and finishing 3-0-1 with an unfortunate draw against Wildfire.
The Finals featured two creature decks battling it out as Matt piloted his mono red Goblins past Pat J. playing Pattern Rector. Both these decks are good examples of ways to beat the large number of other creature decks. Goblins are able to both go wide and close out games with burn meaning that goblins often get there despite sometimes being out matched in size. Pattern Rector uses its tool box of creatures and combo elements to either go over the top of other creature decks and ignore their creatures or simply go bigger. Both decks were certainly well situated in a creature based meta game.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is the spiciest deck of the week. I’m going to do this every week and all it really is is a deck that I think is particularly cool or well situated in the metagame. This week the spicy award goes to Adam Price for his Black White Pestilence deck. Adam has been playing this deck for a while but it was particularly well situated this week as playing a deck full of X for one removal in a room full of creatures is definitely great. Adam’s only loss came to Will on Grixis Control I believe and he beat down on all the other match ups he played against. Congrats Adam!
Here’s an exact break down of the decks that were played on Monday!
Jund
BG Rock
2 Esper Control
Grixis Control
UR Control
BW Pestilence
Mono Red Goblins
BR Goblins
Naya Aggro
2 Bant Good Stuff
BW Hatebears
UR Tempo
RUG Tempo
UB Tempo
BUG Tempo
2 Academy Combo
Wildfire
Pattern Rector
3 Mono Green Combo
Thanks a lot guys and tune in next Tuesday for the Monday Metagame! If you have any comments please don’t hesitate to send me a message or comment below!
Liam Coughlan