Welcome back to the Monday Metagame! This week the metagame shifted slightly further towards midrange. In addition to moving even more towards midrange the metagame is also starting to shift away from blue decks and towards more green based decks. Fewer players showed up with combo decks this week as well which meant that many of the midrange decks rose to the top of the standings. Alasdair Howie made yet another run to finals this week as his green black midrange was able to overcome many of the other middling strategies. He however lost in the finals this week to me. I was playing a Bant aggressive deck with some pretty heavy disruptive elements attempting to disrupt other decks mana. This deck’s combination of powerful green creatures and disruptive white and blue elements meant that it was able to over come both aggressive red decks and slower control decks.
This week there were even fewer combo decks in the room than usual. There were no mono green combo decks and only three Academy decks and one Oath of Druids deck. Outside of these three decks there were a few other decks that contained combos in them but were not all in on these strategies. Combo seems like it’s in an incredibly powerful position in the metagame currently. Many of the mid range decks struggle to put a clock on their opponent quickly and are instead looking to acquire significant amounts of value and eventually grind their opponents out of the game. Many of the combo decks in the format can deliberately choose to ignore this value game and instead execute their own game plan efficiently. Furthermore the lack of fast clocks in the format means that many of these decks will be given a significant amount of time to set up before they are forced to go off. Classically tempo has been the hardest match up for combo decks but with many of the tempo decks forced out by midrange combo could be in a very good place right now.
Lastly we have the spicy deck of the week! This weeks award goes to Jeremy for his 4 Colour Oath deck. This deck is extremely well positioned in the metagame currently as there very few decks not playing creatures meaning that triggering Oath is not very difficult. Furthermore the bulk of midrange creature are basically dead to most Oath targets as they have a hard time beating both Emrakul and Griselbrand.
I’ll have a deck tech of Chris Sutherland’s RUG deck and my Bant deck coming out this week.
Also there is a Highlander for staple event this weekend so expect some coverage and deck lists from that!
The meta as always!
4 Colour Graveyard Synergy
Infect
Goblins
4 Colour Artifact Combo
Time Vault Combo
2 Bant Aggro
UWR Control
2 UR Control
BUG Tempo
BG Rock
2 Junk Midrange
2 Junk Pod Combo
4 Colour Oath
UG Tempo
Mono Red Aggro
Bant Midrange
Esper Control
BUG Control
RG Midrange
Esper Prison
RUG Midrange
UR Tempo
Jund Midrange
Thanks as always!
-Liam Coughlan