The Monday Mulligan: Week 23, Championship

Gatherling Metagame Breakdown

Number of players: 13

Play-offs:
WW by stiffdiddypinky
Elves! (Standard) by yogev_ezra
Storm Control by Bulldog333
URw Burnt Blink by cRUMMYdUMMY

Metagame:
Aggro - 4
Control: - 3
Aggro-Control: - 5
Aggro-Combo: - 0
Mid-range: - 1
Unclassifiable - 0

Discussion:
So we have a small, but balanced archetype division. With aggro, control and AC all taking about 33% of the metagame, give or take. The top four does even reflect this, with one control, once AC and two aggro decks facing eachother.

The problem which such as small player pool is that there is not much to discuss. The winning WW list played Elves in the finals, and Burnt Blink and Storm Control twice, losing only once to Storm. Beating Burnt Blink is not a very substantial feat, because WW is so much quicker than Blinks defensive gameplan. Beating Storm once is far more impressive. It isn't the main aggro antagonist for nothing.

Speaking of Storm, it didn't fair very well this event, failing against WW, Elves (twice!) and Burnt Blink on top of the usual loss against Blue Beats out of ten played matches. Not very impressive. The highest ranked list lost only once though, in its quarter final match against Elves!.

Elves made a good impression this event, after a lot of less than steller performances (it did make top eight a few times). It was able to beat Storm twice (and lost once), which is huge for a creature based aggro deck. Burnt Blink was another win, but it also lost the finals to WW. These were some great games played, making me feel like Elves has more potential than I thought. But the reason might also be that it's pilot yogev is very experienced with it, playing it both in Standard and FutEx for quite some time now.

The Burnt Blink deck in the quarter finals was a very controlling one, with main deck Martyr of Ashes and the Pestermite/Spellstutter configuration. It's only losses were due to WW, it managed to beat Storm in the Swiss. I've seen a lot of this happening lately, and I think it is because of a possible aggro strategy and MD/SB Martyrs or Hurly-Burly's. This provides an answer to Warrens while keeping the pressure up, forcing answers from the control player. The Blink-Storm matchup isn't as lopsided as I once thought.

The other two Blink decks wound up with 0-3 records, but those lists were radically different.

Two other good decks were Red Deck Wins and Blue Beats. The former was played by me with a round one loss due to late registration, but managed to aquire six points in the following two matches against two Burnt Blink decks. Riftwacher isn't unbeatable for the angry small red men. The latter of the two was also piloted to a 2-1 record, but got stuck on tiebreakers. He went 1-1 against two Storm Control and got his last three points from Rebels.

I sure hope to see you all during next season , which starts with MPDC 3.01 on June 16th. Next Monday will be a casual event, sporting LLM Pauper Draft via WoCo's Draftling. Be there! For next weeks MM episode, expect an overview of the decks that have showed up this past season and a look into Shadowmoor with a "What to Get?" list in anticipation of MPDC Season 3, Shadowmoor Style.