Hello Highlander fans! Welcome back to the Monday Metagame! We had a solid 23 player turnout this past Monday and the metagame has shifted a little bit from last week so there are plenty of interesting things to talk about.

This week practically the whole room decided that it would be a good idea to play blue with over 16 of the 23 decks being fairly deep into what is often argued as the best colour in magic. These decks were varied and all sorts of blue decks were represented. Esper dominated the control variants though there were also a UR control and control combo decks that did quite well. Lastly Jeremy White piloted his UW control deck all the way to the finals. Right now with all of the blue decks in the format finding the best control variant likely revolves around being consistent and not stumbling on mana at all or else you risk dying the tempo decks or falling behind in the control mirrors. There were a few different tempo decks in the room last night though the most successful variants were the ones playing green. Again in a room full of people playing blue decks being able to stick a Tarmogofy or Lorescale Coatl early on then protect it for the rest of the game seems like a very decent place to be. The state of combo currently is about the same as it was last week, most of the combo decks, with the possible exception of academy, are not all in on their combos and instead either look to play to play a tempo or control game to keep their opponent off balance only to then combo kill them. Overall this strategy seems to be paying off for many players.

The non blue decks follow a fairly similar trend to last week though there is a significant lack of true aggressive decks in the format right now as Shane Harwood’s GR aggro deck and Nigel Dufty’s BW hatebears deck. Its probably that the disparity in these decks is what is causing people to be able to play so many blue cards. Many of the control and tempo variants in particularly can struggle against these very low to the ground aggressive decks as they have many relevant cards and they can be very low to the ground.

For the this week’s spicy deck of the week I just so happened to the pick the winner on Monday night! Aaron played his UB tempo list to a 4-0 finish this week defeating Jeremy on UW in the finals. His list has a faerie theme in it. While this might give people who were playing in Lorwyn standard nightmares it is a fairly unknown entity in the highlander community. Aaron was able to gain tempo over his opponent using his black splash and then finish the game with some of the terrifying flying menace often suited up with equipment. This equipment made many of his creatures redundant and allowed him to press his advantage with virtually any creature! He was nice enough to give me his lift so I’ll have a deck tech of that coming out tomorrow hopefully!

One more note! I will likely be out of town for next Monday but Jeremy has been nice enough to volunteer to record the metagame for me so there will still be an article!

Without further ado here is the exact break down of the decks played on Monday:

GR Aggro

BW Pestilence

Monogreen Combo

3 Esper Control

RUG Control

RUG Combo

UG Tempo

UWRG Aggro

Pattern Rector

BUG Tempo

Wildfire Combo

2 UR Control

UR Time Vault

BW Hatebears

Academy Combo

GB Rock

UB Tempo

Esper Academy Control

Junk Value

UW Control

-Liam Coughlan