Hey Planeswalkers!
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.
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!
We are now a week into our May Season, and looking forward to seeing what impacts we get with the reset and events!
You can check out the weekly coverage here:
Last Week’s Episode
Last Week’s Piece
NEW Strixhaven April Tier Lists:
Standard BO1 & BO3: Video & Piece
Kaldheim April Tier Lists:
Standard BO1 & BO3: Video & Piece
Historic BO1 & BO3: Video & Piece
Week Highlights
My last week has been a slew of personal events! I got my pod packed, and the house deep cleaned to get it listed. In the real magic news, two super cool things. One if you are not aware I do at least one community night a month on twitch where I play subs as well as supporters. You can watch every single one of them kick my butt here. Also, shout out to Fascion for totally destroying me with his Jank…One other call out is to this community, and that on the discord for stepping in while I have been busy with said above highlights. I literally can’t keep up anymore on chat, and very proud of all the limited support seeing several players having killer drafts! So, Thank You!
Recap
Winota has cooled off in both BO1 as well as BO3. We had a first key impactful SCG Strixhaven $5K with good pull through on Naya Tokens. Mono White Lifegain continues to dominate BO1.
BO1
This week’s story is a bit different. Mono White Lifegain has been dethroned by a few decks. Most notably 4C cycle really climbing, and then also Winota showing its face again pretty strongly. Honestly most of the decks have been going pretty sideways in terms of the percent played. One of the other biggest movers was mono black auras! There has certainly been a ton of discussion in the discord on this, and the key point the deck really hasn’t changed with Strixhaven.
BO3
Here we continue to see the pull through on Naya Adventures / tokens / insert name deck here. There are too many flavors to track now. We see Sultai Ultimatum to continue to dominate the main archetype played even increasing, and the biggest benefactor of this was certainly mono red aggro. Despite it going sideways or a bit receding as a top deck being played it has had the biggest uptick in win rate.
Certainly a nice thing for the aggro players out there. With Sultai Ultimatum’s pace you could generally expect to play this deck once in every five matches.
Spotlight Deck 4C Cycle
I have a big spot in my heart for the cycle decks, mainly because it is a low cost to entry deck that is very competitive. It has a nice ability to quickly come into the Meta, and make waves forcing players to quickly adjust. It is a great deck, and not always as linear as most people think.
The deck excels well against a lot of the late game decks, and well positioned on midrange. The list I shared here is almost better positioned against aggro, and aligns well in its Jeskai Pyro version with a nice hint of new Strixhaven cards.
Event Impacts
This week no new key events to report on so we pivot to two other fun items this week. The first is a shoutout to JafferMTG and his awesome event running, as well as helping me navigate a few things in the event world!
The second I would like to publicly thank RockstarCowboy1 for their kind constructive criticism in an effort to provide another cut and helpful data. In particular in having the courage to reach out to me directly with a well voiced opinion. In lieu of that I shared some data, as well as a lovely visual from MTG Data. I wanted to show their take on last week’s event, which still as mentioned above has pulled through for Naya! Let me know what you think!
What’s Next
We get another qualifier coming up this weekend for the SCG Online tours, and a host of others. Looking forward to seeing what we get!
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.
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 down to Plat2Mythic Decks.
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!