Hey everyone! It’s Liam and though I’m now living on the other side of the country I’m still going to try to provide a break down of the weekly metagame! I’m going to handle things slightly differently now as well since there is already a bunch of work being done for Thursdaylander (seriously check out all the great recaps and interviews) I will be mostly focussing on Mondays. I will certainly report the Thursday metagame and talk about it if it is particularly compelling!
This week provides a nice return point from a meta perspective as the metagame was fairly diverse with many different archetypes represented. The one glaring exception to this is that there were not many true control decks represented in the field. Instead these decks have been pushed out by the powerful midrange decks like Nick P’s Dark Bant deck and Noel’s GB graveyard synergy decks. The consequence of this decided lack of true control decks is that aggro decks can have a much easier time climbing to the top. This week Tim took down the whole tournament with Goblins! He was able to slice through a field of midrange and combo decks that were a bit too slow to handle the synergist power of the goblin tribe. In the finals he met Nelson whose suicide black deck also benefited from the lack of hard control decks in the room!
For future weeks control seems like a reasonable place to be as many iterations of it are quite powerful against creatures based aggressive decks. Furthermore there aren’t enormous amounts of tempo decks to really punish controls reliance on more expensive powerful spells which helps the case to play it even more! The real problem from the control perspective is that some of the fast combo decks can provide real issues for them if they do not draw either counter spells and hand attack. Some versions of esper control almost eschew counter spells entirely going down to 9 or 10 in order to increase the planeswalker and removal density and while these changes are great against aggro they are quite bad against combo. Finding the right balance in these numbers and potentially the right colour combination should help someone be quite successful with control in the near future.
Finally we have the spicy deck of the week. For this section I’m certainly going to look at both Monday and Thursday because not doing so would be a disservice to those Thursday only players. Without further ado the spicy deck of the week this week certainly goes to Noel for his very cool take on a GB midrange deck utilizing extreme graveyard synergy! While at first glance this looks a bit like the Alasdair Howie GB stand by further inspection reveals that Noel has cut a lot of the removal in favour of more graveyard synergy and raw power. Check out the full list here:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/gb-cemetery-2/
Want your deck featured as the spicy deck of the week? Send me a list! I’d love to have a better idea of the exact make up of the deck!
Monday Meta:
Esper Prison
Big RUG
Eggs
Mono Green Combo
Bant Midrange
GB rock
2 Goblins
Bug midrange
Dark bant midrange
Jeskai tempo
BG graveyard aggro
4c Wildfire
Junk blade
RUG Tempo
Sui Black
Boros midrange
Boros aggro
Naya aggro
2 Bug tempo
5c Storm
Thursday Meta:
3 Goblins
UR Burn
5c Storm
BG Graveyard
RUG Pod
UW Control
Grixis Timevault
Esper Infect
RUG Knuckleblade
Bug Tempo
Boros aggro
Elves
Thanks for reading everyone and thank you to Bernie Nelles for collecting the metagame data! See you all next week.
-Liam Coughlan