Hey Planeswalkers! 

As promised I am rolling out a new weekly piece all about a comprehensive take on Magic the Gathering Meta.  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 to be supportive clips to enhance my monthly POV for the Tier Lists.  First and foremost – 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.

You can check out the weekly coverage here:

BO1 

Here as noted in the Tier List for BO1 earlier this week we see the aggro domination.  Additionally, what we find noteworthy is the archetype percent played vs win rate being flipped for the top three decks which isn’t at all surprising.  The rise of Mono White Lifegain has been on the backs of its advantage over Mono Red Snow.  Additionally, the check on this archetype is the late game decks being suppressed.  As this continues to happen Mono White Lifegain will continue to be positioned well, however is at risk to the Mid Term pressures of our Sacrifice Deck Midrange friends.

BO3

Again as noted earlier again in the Tier List for BO3 we see an aggro dominated BO3.  However, what is prominent to note is the rise of Rakdos & Sacrifice decks starting to rise in both percent played, and win rate in the short term.  This also makes sense as we move into the “how to” section of today’s piece.  It’s a great hard counter to aggro decks even if the BO1 stats currently don’t fully align, the BO3 ones do show this.  Interestingly enough, and not at the same time this deck is probably the one pushing out the traditional Rakdos Midrange as well.  The Meta remains healthy and we will continue to keep an eye on aggro to mid to late game cycles as well as the decks that are primed to impact!

How To

As Mono Red Snow is both a large percent of the Meta roughly 15-17%+ of the decks played it is important to focus on how to tackle this in both BO1 & BO3.  The key deck minus the Rakdos Sacrifice deck mentioned above is Mono White Lifegain as I touched on for BO1.  Then in BO3 a great contender is Mono White Aggro.  Mono White Lifegain isn’t played as much if any in BO3 due to its broader range ability to hold up against a variety of decks.

Event Impacts

Since I did a look back slightly for the full month there are really two key events that I wanted to highlight.  

The first was the SCG 5K Kaldheim (vday) tournament that we saw drive  two key points.  The first which I continue to hammer on but the real value of Sultai Ultimatum not being as good as its perceived value.  The second was the initial support and prominence that drove the rapid rise of Mono Red Snow.

The next more recent event from last weekend was a Big Magic Tournament out of Japan.  Key takeaways again that Sultai Ultimatum didn’t deliver above a 50% win rate, and an impressive showing of Naya Adventures.  This archetype net was 70% on win rate! In the short term this is going to be big to watch going into this weekend’s events.

What’s Next

We get a huge opportunity to see a fairly significant impact over the weekend as we bump into the Kaldheim League weekend.

I believe Rakdos Sacrifice will continue to provide short term pressure on the Aggro heavy meta, and I would keep a bigger eye on Naya Adventures.  Transitioning slightly from pure aggro into a more midrange, and longer term value contender.  Flavors have been around for some time but this deck has certainly been under some fine tuning within the last week.

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, 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 down to Plat2Mythic Decks.

Thank you for your time, and hope you enjoyed this new weekly piece!