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The Monday Metagame (January 26th)

We’re back! I didn’t get a chance to play this Monday however I showed up just in time to get the metagame down! We still love blue decks but the rest of the colour pie is starting to fight back.  Decks like Mono White Aggro and BG Rock attempting to be too low to the ground or too redundant to be overcome by the blue decks. After three rounds however the only decks that were still in contention were UB Tempo, Grixis Time Vault, and UG Sorenson.  A noteworthy difference in the this weeks winning deck is that it was entirely focused on winning the game with a combo. Jeremy White piloted his Grixis Time Vault list to a 4-0 record this week and won about a third of his games with Time Vault. Despite this powerful combo’s potency it is not the only win condition in the deck. Jeremy also elected to play the Splinter Twin combo and Painter’s Servant Grindstone Combo in order to increase his density of win conditions. The constant here is the combo element. Since Jeremy was able to win the game on the spot if he resolved key spells he was able to battle through the other blue decks. Conversely the tempo and control decks suffer from needing to protect a threat for some amount of time before winning the game. In a metagame full of people trying to be very interactive this plan can often struggle. It is a decent time to be playing combo decks that also feature control elements as many of the decks in the format now allow the games to progress much longer than the metagame of a few weeks ago. Decks like Jeremy’s Grixis combo deck or even perhaps decks like High Tide might be well suited to the current metagame. There is also still a glaring hole in the metagame for very fast aggressive decks. Decks like Goblins, Slow Burn, and Suicide Black might well be able to punish many of these decks that are looking to many land drops and a establish a few threats.

The other pressing issue to discuss is the recent points changes that occurred. In case anyone was not aware Muddle the Mixture, Crucible of Worlds, and Mishra’s Workshop all went down from 1 to 0 points Grim Tutor was reduced from 2 to 1 and Balance was increased to 1 point. Of these cards only Muddle the Mixture has featured incredibly heavily in decks thus far but it is certainly not  yet concerning.

Lastly we have the Spicy Deck of the week! An honourable mention must go to Serge Yager for his mono Blue Ramp deck though every deck he plays is spicy and I could feature him every week (and might well do so soon). This week the Spicy deck award goes to Jeremy White for his Grixis Time Vault deck which he is 8-0 with thus far! Hopefully we’ll have a deck tech of that deck coming out soon!

Here is the breakdown of the metagame:

Mono White Aggro

UG Sorenson

2 Esper Control

Grixis Time Vault

UB Tempo

UR Control

Bant Midrange

UR Tempo

Grixis Control

BUG Tempo

Academy Combo

UW Tempo

2 Pattern Rector

Eggs

Wildfire

BG Rock

BW Hatebears

RUG Control

RG Aggro

Mono Green Combo

BUG Infect

Big Blue Artifact Ramp

Comments loved as usual!

-Liam Coughlan