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.
Things are accelerating or decelerating depending on your point of view as we move into our second full week of the May season. Additionally, we did get some META impacts/influence I look forward to covering in a bit.
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:
Last Week’s Episode
Last Week’s Piece
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
The personal one here for me this week was trying to navigate all things magic while being sick, so apologies ahead of time on the groggy voice. On a good note my kids were tested and found negative for covid as well. Another big piece is we were able to list our house for sale!
Now, for some Magic. First, I am very proud of AngryPanda in the community Discord, finding their own path to Mythic and Top 1500! With that, keep an eye out for their deck on the daily Top Decks, and a friendly reminder to never hesitate to reach out, tweet me, or whatever to give me a heads up to showcase your deck! Also, another personal Thank You to an individual that graciously reached out to me to do some 1:1 coaching. We had a great time, and if this is something you might be interested in let me know.
Lastly, I despite being sick had a chance to check out two pretty neat decks this week. First, Mono Black Lifegain, and then second Azorius Magecraft. Initially I was all over the Azorius Magecraft, and did end up taking it for a spin on Twitch last night…however, alas always best to get bigger data sets, and it seemed a bit to fall short. Not good on the draw, however upside is matches tend to end fast when you win. I was sub 50% with the deck.
Recap
Mono White Lifegain was dethroned as the best BO1 deck, and Winota started to climb back in BO1. Naya Adventures continued to have momentum coming out of the previous weekend’s events, and Sulti Ultimatum continued to move up!
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, 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.
How to Trigger Winota – Mono Black Auras
One deck that Winota struggles with in particular playing the BO1 format is Mono Black Auras. This deck has continued to pull through and see play from the Kaldheim season without much tweaks to the board. It did peak at #1 at one point in the KHM world in April.
This archetype has a good performance against aggro and creature based decks in the current META. It will have challenges with later games as well as some midrange decks that stack large creatures.
Event Impacts
This past week we saw another Strixhaven $5K tournament with some interesting results. By interesting we have a pretty varied list of decks in the top 8 however, Sultai Ultimatum took it down. Leading to the exacerbated continuation upswing of the archetype being played in the meta. We did however, get some additional influence on Rakdos Sacrifice as it finished in the Top 4!
What’s Next
We get a pretty significant BIG Magic tournament, and a host of others. Looking forward to seeing what we get! Also, if anyone can read Japanese I am open to an interpreter.
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!