Hello everyone!
For this week's article, I am going to talk about the results from the Eternal Tournament Series 2018 Season 3 Week 4 - 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 58 players playing, so it is still hard to make any concrete conclusions from this data. We also had some card changes the day after my last analysis so it is time to see what happened after these changes.
As we can see from the chart, midrange still remains the most popular archetype this week, making up 50% of the overall tournament and has increased from last week's tournament of 43%. This time we have less of a representation of aggressive decks, decreasing from 20% last week to 10% this week, whilst control’s representation had increased to 24% from 21%. We also have unfair decks being represented this week at 15% from last week 10%.
Win Rate Analysis
Here I will go through the win rates for each archetype and give my thoughts about them.
We now live in a new format and for that reason, it makes sense to see that aggro performed very well this week when nobody knew exactly what was going on, so being proactive was rewarded. Midrange performed decently but not great, though to be fair, it was half of the meta and there were a lot of decks in this major archetype so this doesn’t say much. Control decks were mostly Icaria decks and they performed very well for that reason, even if they have a lot of removal they have a proactive plan as well and that makes them good in wide metagames. Lastly, unfair decks underperformed, which is normal when proactive decks are so popular.
Now I will talk about every deck with 3 or more copies in the tournament:
Big Rakano (63%): The best performing deck this tournament. Turns out that playing many Icarias and before turn 7 is a good plan (shocker!).
Combrei (58%): These are all the Combrei decks in the tournament. Some try to play more aggressively whilst others play Alessi. However, all of them play Sword of Unity and Awakened Student and most of them have Vanquisher’s Blade (maybe those cards are just good), whilst none of them played Mystic Ascendant. I'm not sure what the best Combrei deck is yet but Combrei as a faction does look really strong right now.
Praxis Tokens (57%): Still a solid and good deck, very proactive.
FJS (56%): Still one of the pillars of the format. I find it hard to believe this deck will stop being played any time soon, as it is just a pile of great cards and the deck has a lot of tools to adapt if needed.
Icaria blue (50%): Basically the same deck as FJS but with Hailstorm instead of Statuary Maiden and this is the biggest difference between the two decks. I do think they have the same gameplan and the reason to play one or the other just depends on how good Hailstorm or Maiden are in the metagame.
Xenan Killers (44%): The worst performing popular deck. I'm not sure how to build this deck yet but I do think this deck has potential. Clearly this was not the week for it to shine, and is probably due to the popularity of Praxis Tokens. However, I do believe that both this deck and Praxis are the only good Dawnwalker decks right now (yes I know Elysian exists but I think Elysian is just a bad version of Praxis). The difference is that Praxis is a very unidimensional deck and that is usually very good but it can't adapt that well whilst Xenan is probably less powerful but it has a lot more options and can adapt to the metagame a lot more.
The Top 8
We have a very diverse metagame this week. In first place was my teammate Mouche, who is probably the hottest player right now, with Combrei Alessi showing the power of this 1-drop. I’m not a fan of this list but he probably knows one or two things about the game, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. In second place we have Aetherllama with the other Alessi deck, this time in FTJ moment , the other deck I'm not a fan of. I think this is the result of him being a very good player and not the result of a good deck but we will have to see. I don't have any strong opinions about this deck yet. Then we have AromaNova with the always solid Praxis Tokens so nothing to talk about here. In fourth we have Drolicheck with what looks to me like a little suboptimal Icaria blue list. I really dislike how greedy the list is with the power base and think playing less than 33 power in a deck like this is just a mistake. In fifth place we have Sabriel playing Xenan Killers, and I really dislike the fact that they played Thundering Kerasaur over Predatory Carnosaur, which i'm pretty sure was a mistake. Next we have TheRocke with TJP gift showing that the deck is not dead at all. His list looks very solid if you ask me. Seventh place we have Fuzzyfrog with FJS and here I’d like to thank him. We talked about the deck the day before the tournament and he pointed out to me that there was no reason to not play Granite Waystone in my list because I did not have any Sseats, so we made that change. He also decided to play some number of Statuary Maidens in the main to make the Dawnwalker match up better, now that TJP Gift got nerfed. Last but not least is another one of my teammates, this time Grimfan, with a list of Charge Rod he helped me to build. We had some little differences in the tournament lists, mainly the fact that he had Desert Marshal whilst I had torch as early interaction. I'm still not sure which of them is better in that list, but I like Torch more in general.
Charge Rod
This time I want to talk about something different and that would be Charge rod. Why? Because I think this deck is good and no one respects it. Grimfan and I had a combined result of 9-3 in this tournament with the deck and that was with a list I now think is bad. I've been working on the deck a lot more and even went from rank 100 to 2 with my latest list. Don't get me wrong, the deck is not broken and is not the best deck in the game. I don't even think it is a Tier one deck on ladder because it is weak to hyper aggressive decks, but do you know where people don't play hyper aggressive decks? In tournaments. Why? Because of two reasons.
Firstly, hyper aggressive decks are much worse when people know your deck before playing. Secondly, hyper aggressive decks are more popular than good in ladder because even if they don't have a great win rate, they win a lot of games per hour and that is what matters for most people. This is why when you look at tournaments, aggro decks are between 10% and 20% of the metagame, which means you will probably face only one of them most of the time. Charge Rod has a decent to great match up vs any other deck, making this deck a great tournament deck, and I hate that because I don't think this deck should be good (for game play reasons) but I do think you should be aware that this is a good deck for tournaments. I will show you my latest list below and whilst I'm still not sure about some of the cards, I can tell you that Privilege of Rank and Answer the Call are the best cards in the deck. This makes the merchant the best card in the deck and 90% of the time you search for Privilege, Answer the Call or Harsh Rule from the market. These three cards shouldn't be changed but the other two can be. The Granite Waystone is particularly great in this deck because not only can it be used for the market, but it is also a real unit if you play Kaleb. Diving Rod, Bullet Shaper and Diogo are the weakest cards in the deck but they all play a role and right now, I wouldn’t change any of them. Additionally in this particular list, Desert Marshal is not an option over Torch because of Bulletshaper and Rizahn caring about spells. I also want to thank Grimfan here, as he helped me a lot in making the deck. We made a lot of versions and talked about the deck and particular cards so if the deck works then he deserves the credit for it. If it doesn't, well then you can blame me.
Charge Rod
I also want to thank one of my lab rats, who threw ideas or criticisms at me about my decks (joking aside, he really helped me make the last list I love). Even when I dismiss them initially, I will think about them and many times use them after or let me try new things.
