The Monday Mulligan: Week 22

Gatherling Metagame Breakdown

Number of players: 25

Play-offs:
Dark Evocation by phantomphage
UR Burn by zipstein
Kithkin Weenie by plainstrider
URw Burnt Blink by ZeroFusion
Dark Evocation by Rozbity_Bezel
WB Rebels by Spills
Red Deck Wins by SypherSun
Storm Control by Zouily

Metagame:
Aggro - 10
Control: - 5
Aggro-Control: - 10
Aggro-Combo: - 0
Mid-range: - 0
Unclassifiable - 0

Discussion:
Last week, when discussing decks that beat Storm, I forgot to mention today's winning deck. Why? Because it hadn't shown up mutch during the season. It showed up at SPDC 4 Worlds and made some top eights during the season. On top of that, the usual lists don't play nearly enough discard to put a stick in the wheels of Storm. Fortunately Storm wasn't overrepresented last Monday.

Dark Evocation came back on the radar when walkerdog piloted it to a trophy one week ago, at SPDC 5.09. phantomphage took the list and made only slight manabase modifications (adding a Prismatic Lens) and went to town, with excellent results. Another top eight spot was secured with the same list, failing against the fast Kithkin Weenie deck.

The silver liner was zipstein with UR Aggro-control, featuring a mishmash of good red and blue creatures and lots of burn. It does play some unusual (suboptimal?) choices, such as Bloodrock Cyclops, and a lot of 2 and 3 offs with no apperent reason. The last person in top four played Burnt Blink. It has made multiple top eights and fours lately, but hasn't gone further. The Burnt Blink deck was a lot more controlish (no Marauders, no Infiltrator) than the one I advocated, but it seems to work for his pilot. It is a nice deck, but doesn't have the dominant power that Storm, WW or even Grimdrifter has.

Going into top eight, we see Storm Control, RDW, the second Dark Evocation and Rebels. I discussed Rebels strengths and weaknesses last week (I am glad Spills removed the Gazes and added a quadruplet Fortify, they speed up the clock and counter mass removal). The Storm Control list was the only one to make play-offs out of three, losing to Evocation.

Someone stated last week that Momentary Blink wasn't an awesome card in today's meta. Three decks at play-offs beg to differ! Is this the triumphant return of Blink strategies? Only time will tell. I think Dark Evocation might be here to stay, it can be tuned to fight multiple different metas. Be it lots of discard for Storm, Rebeling into Riftwatcher+Blink for RDW, lots of instant removal to take out other Blink decks, etc. Burnt Blink will always remain an underdog, it plays too "fair" in todays meta. Each top dog can do "overpowered" things, like storming for a bunch, playing with far too few lands to play more aggresive creatures, etc, while Burnt doesn't do that. This makes it a fine "play-off deck", but not a very good "trophy deck".

Notables in the rest of the meta were three Storm Control decks. They made a much smaller splash than last weeks 4 out of 4. Another Dark Evocation and a Paint in Blink deck were present and five red aggro decks made an entrance. Only one made just top eight.

The week before the Championship we can conclude that we have a very diverse meta. There is no one top deck, with all "broken" deck having weaknesses to be exploited by multiple other decks. I think we will have a combination of the following decks next week:

• ~3 Storm Control

• 1~2 Red Deck Wins

• 4+ Dark Evocation, because it is new and exciting

• 4~5 White Weenie, because it beats DE

• 2~3 Grimdrifter/Greendrifter

Good luck testing, see you at the Championship!