Hello everyone!
For this week's article, I am going to talk about the results from the Eternal Tournament Series 2018 Season 3 Week 2 - Top 8, 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
This time the tournament had 64 players playing, so it is still hard to make any concrete conclusions from this data. Once again, I will only use data for decks that had more than two copies in the tournament.
As we can see from the chart, midrange still remains the most popular archetype this week, making up 49% of the overall tournament and has increased from last week's tournament (46%). This time we have less of a representation of aggressive decks, decreasing from 14% last week to 9% this week, whilst control’s representation had increased to 30% from 21%. We also have ‘unfair’ decks being represented this week at 11%, with Charge Rod being the most popular of this archetype but also some Scream decks as well.
Win Rate Analysis
Here I will go through the win rates for each archetype and give my thoughts about them.
If we look at the performance of each major archetype, we can see that midrange is still performing well (54%) a little better than last week, whilst we see control decks performing much worse (47%). Aggro decks still performed badly but a little better than last week (43%) whilst unfair decks had a decent performance at 52%. Overall, all of this data make sense if we think that unfair decks look to punish control decks really hard and that most midrange decks have very solid lists. The majority of the experimentation lies in the aggro decks so them underperforming also make sense. What surprised me the most was how well unfair decks, in particular Charge Rod, performed this week. However, once we think about the metagame with a lot of Time midrange, which is an even to good matchup for the deck, and the popularity of control decks that are already very bad against it. Coupled with the fact that most aggro lists have not been optimised yet because of all the experimentation, this makes for a very good metagame for Charge Rod.
Decklists
Now I will talk about every deck with 3 or more copies in the tournament:
JPS(11%): I will put JPS in the garbage tier of decks that you should not touch if you want to win. For those of you familiar with Magic: the Gathering, my advice about how to improve this deck is similar to this:
FJS (50%): Heavily targeted this week, the deck still managed to have 50% win rate and that shows the deck is solid but clearly this was not the tournament for it.
Mono Time (54%): A deck that I still don't understand why anybody would play because it is just a bad version of Praxis and keeps performing worse than Praxis for that simple reason. Although I can see a budget reason being a factor but outside of that it is just a bad deck choice (dont play it).
TJP Gift (55%%): Looks like the only good Gift deck or at least the better one and the only good aggro deck right now in my opinion.here is probably still room to refine the deck and whilst im not sold on Crownwatch Press-Gang or Sharpened Reflex, it’s a solid deck.
Feln Control (53.33%): A deck that is mediocre as always but for some reason people play it. The key for this deck to be good in my opinion is how good the cheap removal is in the metagame. What I mean by this is, if three of theses four cards (Hailstorm, Annihilate, Permafrost, Rindra’s Choice) are good in the metagame then the deck can be good. However, if you only want two or less of these cards then the deck is bad. Right now you need to play Annihilate and Permafrost (all the copies you can) just to not lose to Teacher of Humility and Time decks in general. The problem is those two cards are really bad vs FJS and mediocre to bad vs TJP Gift. Hailstorm is bad vs all of them (only mediocre vs TJP) and Rindra’s Choice is really bad vs Time decks. All this means that Feln is in a really bad spot in the metagame and you should not play it right now because relying on the bad unconditional removal that cost four will get you nowhere if you want to win games.
Combrei Pants (59%): Combrei is still looking solid with the addition of two very good weapons, being Vanquisher’s Blade and Sword of Unity, and all the very good Combrei cards.If you don't make the mistake of playing bad cards like Mystic Ascendant, you will win games.
Charge Rod (57%): The coin flip deck performing surprisingly well this week. I want to believe this is because of a favorable metagame but maybe my nightmare is real and the deck is just very good now.
Praxis Midrange (60%): Solid as always with the best performance in the tournament. Looks like people don't respect it enough.
The Top 8
The only deck in the top 8 that we didn't talk about was TJP midrange that Pupicitus said he was to lazy to update with new cards, like markets and still remains a solid deck. Of course I think this deck is sub-optimal and can be improved with the new set cards like merchants making it even better. Outside of that, we see all the usual suspects in Praxis midrange, FJS, Combrei pants and Mono Time (bad Praxis Midrange) and the new kids on the block Charge Rod and TJP Gift, which was piloted by my teammate Mouche, and eventually took down the whole tournament.
Next Week
People need to respect Time decks more as they keep performing even with FJS in the metagame. You should avoid any control decks next week as they can't handle the rise of Charge Rod in the metagame. I think you not only need to be proactive but also very fast or disruptive if you want to beat this type of deck and I do think it will be popular. I believe a good deck to play next week would be a TJP Gift deck, but you should be prepared for quite a bit of hate, as it is the new boogeyman of the format.
Lists I like
At this point you should have the lists of most of the decks that performed well this week. If you don’t, you can look at my previous week analysis and find them there. So I will give you the list for Charge Rod from the best player of the archetype and my teammate Grimfan, along with my own list for TJP gift, which I used to consistently achieve Rank 1 in Master many times this week.
Charge Rod by Grimfan:
TJP gift by camat0:
