MTGA | Friday Night Meta | August 2021 Week 1 | White Blight | Standard 2022


Hopefully everyone had a healthy and fun time last season! This weekend’s focus is going to be all about the MQ! I know a few of you have already reached out and asked for a pov on which decks to be playing this weekend.  For those of you participating I wish you the best of luck, and maybe we will cross paths.                                                                                    

Welcome to this week’s Friday Night Meta update! The goal is to equip you faster with information in a fast evolving game, and to get you the right information to help you make the decisions you need to make! This is intended to be a comprehensive view with a lens from Magic the Gathering Arena with impacts from the MTG gaming scene.

Last call for this weekend’s Standard 2022 League that I am fully excited about!  You can find the information here.  Thanks to those of you that are already participating and great to see many folks whose decks I have covered on the channel!  Additionally, I got out the August Tier List that you can take a look at as well for Standard.

I slice and dice weekly data using untapped.ggs companion app for BO1 & BO3 standard, cover a key deck for the week, and we talk about some key meta impacts!

You can check out the weekly coverage here:

Additionally feel free to come hang out in the Discord Server.

Last Week’s Episode

Last Week’s Piece

Recap

BO1: Naya Winota closing out the season as one of the best decks, with mono white aggro hanging in there.  Winona decks dominate 25%+ of the meta.


BO3: Temur Lukka sneaks into the top end competitive part of the meta.  Gruul Magda made some fast movements as well, starting to gain a large share of the meta itself.  Naya Winota still is the key deck running roughly 30% of the meta!

Top Deck: 

Temur Lukka (Deck List)

Standard 2022:

First cut of data & release of Standard 2022 Tier List!  Mono White Aggro Commands the best win rate at the moment while Mono Green Stompy is the most played.

Top Deck:

Mono Green (Deck List) *Note Landfall variant

BO1 

Lots of movement this week as we kick off the August Season! Mono White Lifegain is commanding the best spot right now in terms of aggregate wins, as well as high level competitive play! This is going to be a deck to keep an eye on.  It’s slightly favorable against Winota!  Another deck creeping into the scene once again is our cycling archetype!

BO3

Winota continues to dominate the BO3 scene, however Temur Lukka has been holding the top winrate spot now for a week.  It continues to look promising.   The big up and comer though in terms of the meta is Rakdos Sacrifice! We will continue to watch this to see if it sticks around or if it’s mainly an out of the gate new season deck kind of thing.

Mono White Blight – Mono White Lifegain

Lifegain is strong out of the gate, and once again doing work.  Personally I was surprised to see it fall off as hard as it did, and now its back!

Deck List

Deck Video 

Standard 2022

Most of what held true last week continues to hold true for the meta at large when it comes to standard 2022 this week.  Maybe we will continue to see some changes. The big one that fell off though was Orzhov angels, and dimir control continues to not do well in terms of win rate.  Meta continues to be heavily dominated by Mono White Aggro & Mono Green Stompy!

Data courtesy  untapped.

Mono White Blight – Mono White Aggro

What’s not to like about this list! I wanted to showcase another variant of Mono Green for you this week that encompasses a bit of a more go wide strategy leveraging landfall.

Deck List

Deck Video

Event Impacts

Standard: SCG 5K, with Rumti taking things down in Mono Green Stompy Style!  Tier 1, a plethora of interesting stuff due to mixed historic & standard.

Standard 2022: No key new ones.  Look to play in Mythras Multiverse Standard League!

What’s Next

Two Big tournaments in the Standard space this weekend.  Another SCG 5K and Insight Esports.

Feel free to join us in ongoing real-time discussion or to hang out on the discord server.  You can also find this week’s article here.

Tier Lists

Standard August Tier List

Video & Piece

Standard 2022 July Tier List

Video & Piece

Anthology 5 July Tier Lists:

Historic BO1 & BO3: Video & Piece

Week Highlights

Last call for Community Standard 2022 League Sign-Ups!

Our Discord community is starting to pull together fun free tournaments, so stay tuned!  We also have a very active streaming group if you are looking for some community live Q&A.

A few standard decks I checked out this week were: Main focus this week was Arena Open! Day 1 & Day 2

Standard 2022 decks for your consumption: Izzet Dragons & 4C Ramp

Historic showcases: Mono Black Aggro & Jeskai Control

Community Appreciation with Matches.  You can check it out here on Twitch or Youtube.

Standard August Tier List!

Sources

I leverage multiple sources like untapped.ggs companion app stats, MTGAzone, Aetherhub, twitter, personal gameplay, tournament matches (mtg melee, magic.gg), this reddit as well as others, MTGData,  personal stats, and consistently hitting Mythic and  Mythic Qualifiers.

One last thought I would like to share: 

If you have a competitive deck (different than one featured) I am always happy to do a piece on it time permitting. I have several folks that ask, and have done several player featured decks. I rather enjoy this so please don’t hesitate to reach out or ask. I always try to prioritize with the following and timing or relevance – MTGA Rank (1500s)/Top Tournaments, Mythic Unique decks down to Plat2Mythic Decks.  Feel free to hop in the discord server and share your successes or PM/DM me!  Lastly, a great fun way for us to interact is on Twitch where I currently stream x2 a week, and plan to do more in the future.

One other piece, I have recently started doing collaboration videos.  If you are interested please let me know, and I would love to partner!

I wholeheartedly welcome any feedback on how to meet your needs as well as improving your experience!  Additionally, for the near term my focus will be on Standard, and I hope to organically add in Historic in the future.

Thank you for your time, and hope you enjoyed this week’s piece!