Hello everyone!
For this week's article, I am going to talk about the results from Kaelari's Saturday Challenge, a best-of-three tournament with no sideboards that took place last weekend, and analyse the metagame from there. I will then conclude by giving my thoughts on the deck lists that were brought to this tournament and provide my suggestions on what to play and look out for next week.
Metagame Analysis
The tournament had a fairly small turnout with only 24 players playing, so it is hard to make any concrete conclusions from this data. Once again, I will only use data for decks that had more than 2 copies in the tournament.
As we can see from the chart, midrange still remains the most popular archetype this week, making up 46% of the overall tournament, but has decreased from last week's tournament (56%). This time we have more of a representation of aggressive decks, increasing from 14% last week to 33% this week, whilst control was underrepresented at 21% compared to 31% from last week.
Win Rate Analysis
Here I will go through the win rates for each archetype and give my thoughts about them. It is important to note that I have considered the win rates for decks with at least two copies of each in the tournament. Granted the sample sizes are small, due to the turnout not being the largest, but these results are still relevant and give us an early indication of what to expect in future tournaments to come.
If we look at the performance of each major archetype, we can see that midrange is still performing well (52%) but it's not as dominant as last week, whilst we see control decks performing much better (61%) with aggro decks still performing really badly (39%). It makes sense that midrange performs worse and control performs better this time and is something that we can expect from the normal evolution of the metagame. On the other hand, I think the reason why aggro performed badly this week is mostly due to the variety of different types of aggro decks. We had so many flavours of Gift decks (40%) which is intriguing and it shows that many players aren't afraid to brew and try out different strategies. I'm not saying the deck is bad, at least not yet, but it could be that people still don't know how to build the deck optimally or even which faction combinations are the best. At this point, most people agree that Justice is a core faction that's required for the deck to be successful but I'm not even sure that is right yet. We could attribute the bad results of Gift decks to the difficulty in building the deck and not in the power level of it at least for now.
We can see that the best performing deck was the Removal pile/FJS midrange deck (61%), which I will treat as one for now because it is difficult to know when they become the other, followed closely followed by Praxis Midrange (59%). The good performance makes a lot of sense because Statuary Maiden plus a lot of removal against Time Midrange is very effective and Icaria is still the best finisher in the game. The deck can have almost all the tools to beat any other deck except for go wide and hyper aggressive strategies, making Skycrag Aggro and Rally-based decks very good counters.
Another note about midrange, we see that most people decided to play FJS decks instead of Big Rakano most likely due to Statuary Maiden being so good in the metagame. Also, we see that most people have stopped playing mono Time, because the deck is basically an inferior version of Praxis Midrange. Additionally, we can see that Praxis Midrange still performed very well (59%) and this make sense because the deck is very powerful and proactive. I believe that Praxis is the best Dawnwalker deck right now, with only Xenan being a possible contender for the time being. I think Mono Time and Elysian are two decks that are doing mostly trying to do the same thing as Praxis but worse. Turning to Icaria-based decks, I think for now they want to include Shadow as their third faction because of Statuary Maiden and access to better removal for Time Midrange decks, but if aggressive and go wide decks become popular at some point, then Primal will be better because of sweepers such as Hailstorm.
The Top 8
We can see that three FJS decks made it into the top 8, as I had recommended last week, along with two Praxis Midrange decks to nobody's surprise. Then we have a deck that look like a lot of fun in Argenport Revenge by Tobboo. We can see an interesting Berserk version of Skycrag aggro from Paradox, that looks really good against control decks in general. Lastly, we can see a Combrei Aggro deck from the winner of the tournament Nishava. I really like this list, at least on paper, and I'm a big fan of Vanquisher's Blade, particularly when Time decks are popular.
Next Week
At this point people know that FJS is a good deck but we still don't know the best way build it (either midrange or control). Time decks are still good and are a safe choice whilst we have the new kid on the block in the form of Gift decks, which we also have no idea how to build yet but I'm skeptical about them anyway. Any control deck without Icaria is most likely bad, whilst aggressive/go wide strategies start to look more appealing right now. We can also see that Time decks are not as oppressive as some people initially thought and I suspect the metagame to be a lot more diverse and harder to predict at least for this week. My recommendation would be to be proactive and have a plan for Teacher of Humility and Statuary Maiden. If you just fold to either one of these two cards then you should probably not play that deck. Decks that can be interesting for this weekend are Grenadins, Scream, Rally and Skycrag whilst I can see any of these decks being good vs the tier 1 and 2 strategies if you build them well.
Lists I like
For the popular archetypes I will give you some lists that I like for each in case you want to play them. For FJS mid, Removal pile and Praxis, I will use my own lists because I'm confident they are at least decent takes on the archetypes. For the gift deck, I will give you the list from my teammate AhornDelfin because I know he worked on it and he is a very good deckbuilder. Links to each decklist are available by clicking on each title.
Praxis Midrange (Fire Merchant)
Praxis Midrange (Time Merchant)
Removal Pile
FJS Midrange
Miracle Blitz
That wraps up this week's overview of the Eternal metagame post Fall of Argenport. Until next time!
