The Metagame Check -Week One
with Samuel Wells
Hey all! This is Samuel Wells and I am going to be going over the recent shifts in the standard metagame. What caused it, how people have adapted, what it is all about. Then, I will show you some of the tools that you have in the current standard to combat the tier 1 decks du jour.
First things first. The recent scg opens have experienced an unprecedented amount of success from mono red strategies in several forms. Most notably from Tom Ross at the invitational. Mono red aggro decks have been fairly non-existent in standard since about Born of the Gods. This all changed in the last month and three straight opens were taken down by the red aggressive decks. Before that, a mono blue devotion deck took the tournament down. Which is almost as surprising because the once powerhouse mono blue has seen next to no love since Journey to Nyx. This surge marks a massive shift in the format back to hyper aggressive decks, but what made this the right time for these decks to blow up.
That requires looking at what decks were popular just prior to this surge. Three decks were ruling most of the top tables at this time. Jund monsters, Black devotion, and UW control. But Samuel, you might ask, haven’t these decks been popular for quite awhile now and were strong when mono red was losing popularity. You would be right, to a degree. The green based ramp/midrange deck to a lesser extent, but all three decks have existed since about the beginning of this standard. But there is a key difference to all of these decks that wasn’t true a month or so earlier. They are slowing down. They are all trying to play for a longer game.
