Hey everyone! This is going up a bit late since I was very busy on Tuesday so I’m writing it now! The metagame for this Monday was a little more varied than it has been in which past though interestingly the results were similar. The green black based midrange decks still rose to the top with Doug and Stefan facing off in a finals in a BUG mirror where Doug’s ability to go slightly larger with cards like primeval Titan and his active attacking of Stefan’s mana netted him the victory. These green black decks continue to over power many of the other midrange decks with their powerful card advantage engines and suite of removal. Combatting these decks is still proving to be challenging for many players the decks do not have one area in which they are particularly vulnerable though at times their mana has looked like the thing to attack.
There was a distinct increase in the amount of aggressive decks this week with mono red and green red aggro putting in reasonable performances. These decks trade out value for redundancy and speed. In a metagame where people continue try to go larger and larger planning to simply goldfish a turn 4-5 kill against most people and being capable of doing this consistently seems like an excellent place to be. The other interesting aggressive deck that appeared on Monday was the mono blue skies deck that Riley played. This deck’s principle plan was to play a 3 power evasive creature and have some kind of mana disruption in the form of cards like trinisphere, sphere of resistance, chalice of the void, or back to basics. It is capable of doing thee things quite quickly too with cards like mox diamond and ancient tomb. I’m not exactly sure what Riley’s record was but he beat me in two quick games and the deck seemed quite powerful against decks lacking explosive starts.
Combo made a bit of a resurgence this week with a variety of decks appearing in the meta. Storm continues to perform though it has yet to put a truly dominant performance. Time Vault also continues to be a potent archetype and Garret is beginning to consistently perform well with the deck. Noel put away his green cards for a week and decided to play blue cards this week, managing a 3-1 performance with his Esper reanimator deck. These three different types of combo decks have all continued to have success in the metagame and will likely to continue to do so unless tempo decks become more popular.
Speaking of tempo decks, there has been a complete and utter lack of tempo in the metagame for the last two weeks. Besides Jeremy’s UWR tempo deck this week there were almost no other tempo decks in the room. Tempo struggles against aggro but has a good match up against most of the other decks in the format. The large departure from tempo might partly be because aggro was more popular previously however in the current metagame it is less present. Potentially tempo decks are the answer to these midrange decks as they have the potential to interact with the midrange deck enough to keep them off kilter.
The spicy deck of the week award goes to Riley for his mono blue skies deck. Riley was inspired by Brett who sent him a sweet list fairly similar to this. As I mentioned above this decks aggressive evasive creatures plus its hateful permanents can often keep its opponent off balance enough to end the game. There are some especially spicy choices in the deck as well such as Timetwister and Windfall as cards to refill after playing some fast disruption.
As usual here is the metagame!
2 GR Aggro
2 Mono Red
2 Bug Tempo
UR Tempo
Junk Midrange
GB Rock
3 BUG Midrange
UWR Tokens
BUG Infect
Mono white splash Red Aggro
Mono Blue Skies
5 Colour Tinker Oath (This one was me didn’t mention it because it was real bad)
Reanimator
BR Aggro
Grixis Time Vault
2 Esper Control
2 Grixis Control
Junk Combo
Suicide Black
Jund Aggro
Storm
UWR Tempo
Bant Aggro
Thanks as always!
-Liam Coughlan