Metagame Check
Hello all!
Samuel Wells again, bringing you another metagame check.
Last week I primed a GW aggro list that focused on a low curve and high consistency draws. And if you check the most recent SCG open, you will see that a GW aggro list took the tournament down. Congratulations to Scott Lipp for showing the power of the deck and playing incredibly this weekend. Here is his decklist for reference:
Moving forward, I think GW aggro lists will continue to make top 8 and be a major presence this summer. I am happy to see the deck that I called nearly a year ago to finally be relevant.
This week I will be doing something a little bit different. Instead of priming a new deck that I think is well set up for the current meta, I will be give you a look behind the scenes of how I build my decks and what I look at when I am trying to size up the meta.
For me, my deck building process is two-fold. One, I will look at the available card pool and see what cards stand out to me as too powerful not to play or consider. An example of this would be a card like Fleecemane Lion or Voice of Resurgence. These cards really strike me as incredibly powerful and have such a low opportunity cost to play, that I have looked to play them every new set since they have been available. I also look to the decks that these cards can be run in and if the tools are there to make the deck work. It looks like GW aggro has all of the tools necessary to be built without having to run subpar cards.
After I have considered what cards I am most interested in running, I then look to the most popular decks in the format. For this, I look at the four or five “Pillar” decks that are present. These are the decks that you can reliably find in any given tournament. Short of extensive playtesting against all of these decks, which is hard to commit that time before being happy with the deck, I look to the scariest things that the deck can do and what the deck is best at doing.
To give you an example of what that looks like, I will go over what I see as the pillars of the current standard format and explain how I want to interact with these decks.
The first deck that I will go over and the biggest boogeyman of this format is mono-Black and Bx devotion lists. Since its creation, black devotion lists have dominated the top tables of tournaments. This deck is both incredibly powerful and consistent, but what really sets this deck apart is that it has all of the tools necessary to take on any deck. The ability to adapt and evolve to match up against any deck really sets this deck apart. Black has targeted discard and sources of consistent card advantage to take on the control decks , but also has the ability to switch to hyper efficient removal such as doom blade or hero’s downfall and proactive removal such as Lifebane zombie for the GW aggro lists and the Jund monsters lists. The deck is so incredibly flexible that makes it impossible to truly force a deck like this out of the meta. These facts make it incredibly hard to plan against this deck, but there are some patterns to the deck that can be prepared for. When I am thinking how my deck fairs against mono-black, I look to see how my deck can handle the one-for-one responses that mono-black relies on.
To give an example of this, the GW constellation deck that I primed several weeks ago has a bad match-up against mono-black. My constellation deck was very soft to thoughtseize. I really struggled to set up my engine against black devotion lists. Even if I made it past the early hand disruption the deck folded to the spot removal had. I just ended up being left with mediocre cards that could not match up with the top decks that mono-black has. After seeing that, I see a key to beating mono-black relies on the power of your top decks or running cards that are natural two-for-ones so you are not left needing to topdeck.
The next deck that I consider my match up against is Mono-Blue. This is a difficult one for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is hard to know when to have a sideboard plan against it because it goes through such major cycles of being the dominant deck and being next to unplayable. I tend to lean towards having a plan against it because I have generally built decks that are incredibly soft to mono-blue. There are obvious hate cards such as Skylasher and Mistcutter Hydra. They are vital in the GW decks that use them, because the matchup is generally poor for the GW deck. Mono-BLue has the advantage of main decking hate against green decks because of cards like Tidebinder mage. There are also more reactive cards that are considered great in the matchup. Cards like Deicide do a lot to hate out one of the lynch pins of the deck. What I have found to be a better judge of the matchup is focusing on the plan of your deck. This is because mono-blue is great at hating out other aggro decks that may pop-up. Mono-Blue is a highly tuned aggro deck that has found the optimal cards for the deck that also threatens to go over the top with Thassa and Master of Waves. These cards feel like the deck is doing unfair things in a deck that should play like a fair deck. Decks that provide you with the ability of pinpoint disruption and the ability of making proactive plays are the best at combating Mono-Blue.
The Sphinx’s Revelation decks are the next strategy that I will go over. This deck is possibly one of the easiest to sideboard against or to create a strategy to beat. This is because the deck is so linear and does not run a concentration of powerful cards, such as the other decks in the format. You have the ability to create a hyper aggressive deck that can pump out damage faster than the deck can reach a Supreme Verdict. Decks like mono-red aggro highlight this sort of plan against the deck. There is also the strategy of running a glut of hand hate in black decks. Besides thoughtseize, which is wildly popular, there are cards like Duress and Sin Collector which, when used in conjunction with each other, pick apart the hand and eliminate all of the relevant spells from the hand. There is also the option of going over the top, as Jund monsters has done, and run Rakdos’s Return which does a lot to combat these strategies. Overall, I do not worry about these sort of matchups, because it's hard to lose to when you're prepared.
I have gone over the three biggest pillars, the boogeymen if you will, but that is not the extent of the decks that you can expect to face on any given weekend.
The next deck that has been incredibly popular for this standard is Jund Monsters. This is another deck that seems incredibly hard to plan to beat. It has such incredibly powerful individual cards and is happy to get into a topdeck war. There are some weaknesses to the deck though. Cards like Hero’s Downfall become appealing when it is able to interact with all of the threats that Monsters brings forward. Being able to interact with creature threats and maintain pressure on planeswalkers becomes the key to beating this deck. It is next to impossible to go as big as fast as this deck. Planning on beating it with a tempo game and using cheaper responses to its threats can pick apart the deck. I will say that Jund monsters being created after the three pillars has allowed it to be better adapted to the environment and does not have holes like the ones that I have pointed out for the other decks.
*As an addendum to the previous paragraph, decks like GW aggro fall into a similar category when you are considering matchups and are weak to many of the same cards. Doom Blade and the like.
The final two strategies have not had the same record of major wins as the first four, but are decks that make up a significant percentage of the field at any given time. One such deck are the mono-red aggro decks and the boros burn decks that cycle in and out of popularity since their creation. These decks work in a different way than most other decks for two reasons. One, they do not concern themselves with card advantage. A sligh deck will happily put madcap skills on a one drop to deal 5 damage and having it killed on your turn. Burn works slightly differently but it is still in the same principle. The deck is looking to get the right mix of spells that add up to 20 damage.
Secondly, tying to the first point, the decks do not have the same sense of tempo that other decks have. They have a kill by turn X clock instead, because if they do not achieve that it means they most likely have exhausted their resources and will not get enough gas to kill the opponent ever. There is also an easy answer to why these decks have failed, it is due to the fact that they are very easy to beat post board if you have planned for them. There are very strong tools available to beat these decks. Nyx-Fleece Ram and Scavenging Ooze, here’s looking at you. All of this incremental life gain on bodies that can get in the way when need be, provide too much utility against these plans that make it impossible for them to be more than a flash in the pan type deck. It is worth to devote a handful of slots out of the board to counteract these strategies, but it is rarely a match up to fear.
The final strategy to look out for is a bit of speculation, but seems likely gain traction in the coming months. These are the Nykthos devotion decks. Both the RW decks and, more importantly, the Green devotion decks. I will also consider constellation to be a part of these decks. I define these decks as engine decks that are incredibly streamlined and threaten to do amazingly unfair things as early as turn 3-4. These are the combo decks of the format and have earned this title. As with many combo decks, they are at their worst when the opponent can interact with them. So Thoughtseize is the bane for these decks. But fortunately for us, they are also creature based “combo” decks. So that means the doom blade type cards we were running to be GW and Jund Monsters will also be good in this match up. Better than removal, counter has been accepted as the most efficient way to prevent the devotion decks, simply because the devotion decks can’t build up said devotion if their permanents are never hitting the board.
As it is, these are the known decks of our current standard and some of the accepted methods of beating said decks. This has been a special, inside the mind, edition of the Metagame Check.
Signing off, this is Samuel Wells
…...and remember, you have to not lose before you can win.
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