Last week, we saw the banning of a couple format all star cards,
Winota, Joiner of Forces
Winota, Joiner of Forces
Whenever a non-Human creature you control attacks, look at the top six cards of your library. You may put a Human creature card from among them onto the battlefield tapped and attacking. It gains indestructible until end of turn. Put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your library in a random order.
and
Expressive Iteration
Expressive Iteration
Look at the top three cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand, put one of them on the bottom of your library, and exile one of them. You may play the exiled card this turn.
. Winota being the top deck of the format, and Expressive Iteration being a multiformat, multideck all star, it was safe to say the format was going to be in flux. Well, we had a major event happen over the weekend that really showcased what the metagame looks like for Pioneer, and it looks awesome!
NRG Lansing Pioneer Metagame
The NRG Series of events is one of the premier tabletop series out there, with Lansing being the most recent event. The event was Pioneer, and had 200 players. First off, let’s take a look at the breakdown of the metagame for the tournament. Thanks to HollyMacaroni01 on Twitter, we have a nice graph to show the top 10 decks of the event.
As we can see here, the metagame looks relatively diverse. It was to be expected that Mono Green Devotion took the top spot in the meta. It’s a straight forward playstyle, and it was an up and coming staple of the format.
The next few decks down also make a bunch of sense, with Rakdos Midrange and Azorius Control being format staples as well. What’s surprising, and maybe not so much, is that Izzet Phoenix still shows up tied for 3rd place in meta share. With it losing Expressive Iteration, you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking the deck lost a good chunk of power. But clearly, people still think that it’s a very viable deck, and it goes to show just how strong that deck was.
The rest of the decks down the line are also all metagame staples. This does make some sense that a lot of the meta staples would continue to be staples. What’s really cool about this event though was the top 16, as we see a fair number of decks in there that aren’t in this graph!
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Top 16
For the Top 16, we see a good mix of decks 10 different decks making an appearance here. Five of them are decks that aren’t in the graph above!
So let’s start with Top 8. Izzet Phoenix taking the tournament down was a very unexpected, but cool to see the deck still has legs. Mono Green coming up in 2nd, and Mono Blue Spirits in 3rd. Rakdos Sacrifice comes up in 4th as the first off meta choice. This version of the deck isn’t playing
Oni-Cult Anvil
Oni-Cult Anvil
Whenever one or more artifacts you control leave the battlefield during your turn, create a 1/1 colorless Construct artifact creature token. This ability triggers only once each turn.
{T}, Sacrifice an artifact: This artifact deals 1 damage to each opponent. You gain 1 life.
, it’s a more traditional Cat-Oven style.
The next somewhat off meta deck choice was Esper Control. Now Esper is a very interesting choice, as it should have a better early game match up against things like Mono Green or Rakdos. It’s sporting some hand disruption and early single target removal to deal with things on the board.
In 11th place, we have Izzet Combo, which is just Izzet
Indomitable Creativity
Indomitable Creativity
Destroy X target artifacts and/or creatures. For each permanent destroyed this way, its controller reveals cards from the top of their library until an artifact or creature card is revealed and exiles that card. Those players put the exiled cards onto the battlefield, then shuffle.
combo. At 14th, we have 5 Color Niv Mizzet, which used to be a staple but had been fairly low in the overall meta share. Speaking of a deck that’s been phased out, in 16th place we have 5 color Humans! Once one of the strongest decks in the format, it fell to the wayside but it seems that it could be back!
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Overall, the metagame is looking quite interesting! Since this is one of the first major events post banning, we’ll have to see how much of the door is left open for some of these off meta picks to shine.