Happy 2024 everyone!
After some time away from writing I am back in the saddle (if you consider this chair at my kitchen table a saddle) and ready to dive back into Pauper. The format has had more than a month to adjust to the absence of Monastery Swiftspear and things are starting to come into focus. We aren’t getting as clear a picture as we normally would, at least about the top of the metagame as the last two Sunday Challenges failed to fire. I would hesitate to read too much into this fact as those events fell on Christmas Eve (or Christmas Eve Day) and New Year’s Eve (or the associated day) and well, people may have had more important (and dare I say fun?) things to do with their time.
But there has been another (exceedingly welcome) update: Daybreak Games, the outfit that currently manages Magic Online has started sharing every decklist from the challenges, not just the Top 32. This is awesome as it provides a more complete picture of what is going on every weekend. That being said it did present me with a conundrum as the data I historically collect and present has been based on the Top 32 data. With access to records I could create a more robust image of the metagame but while doable it would require more time than I currently can dedicate to this endeavor. But the data is still important so here is where I landed: My usual Top 32 analysis will continue as it has for the past several years but it will now be provided with the context of the entire Challenge metagame. This will provide a more complete picture, including how well archetypes are doing with regards to breaking through to the so-called winner’s metagame.
With that out of the way, it’s time for this preamble once more: I use a few different metrics when looking at the Top 32 metagame. The first is just Raw Volume. The second is Win+, which takes the sum of all wins at X-2 or better in the Swiss and assigns a score; Win+ is helpful in measuring a deck’s Swiss round performance. K-Wins takes all of a deck’s wins and subtracts its losses, Top 8 inclusive; this helps to give a measure of overall performance. The final pair is call Meta Score and Meta Score Above Replacement, which takes the average of Win+ and K-Win to try and position an archetype against its field. This number helps to provide the most robust image of a deck’s performance.
Here is what the Pauper Challenge metagame looks like over the past six Challenge events on Magic Online. The cutoff for having an archetype listed outside of Other is ~2% raw volume (minimum 7 appearances) and there are 34 strategies that fail to meet this threshold.
From a raw volume standpoint the format looks to be in a good place with two different aggressive strategies topping 10% of the aggregate meta. A board control deck – Black Gardens – comes in at 10%, while two blue tempo/control decks in Terror and Dimir Faeries round out the top 5. From a macro level the format is looking to be in a good spot.
So what happens when you look at just the Top 32 metagame? Here the Top 5 decks break down like this with regards to volume (or presence):
- Glitter Affinity – 11.89%
- Blue Terror – 10.94%
- Kuldotha Red – 9.9%
- Black Gardens – 8.33%
- Dimir Faeries – 7.29%
Glitter Affinity remains the top deck in the Top 32 isolated meta by volume, out performing its total presence which indicates the deck is a solid choice. Blue Terror’s Top 32 rate is over 2% better than the Challenge at large which is not a surprise given the strength of the cards involved. Kuldotha Red’s share is largely in line with how often it gets played. Dimir Faeries steps it up as well while Black Gardens takes a decent step backwards. Overall the story here is that being assertive in some capacity remains a powerful option in Pauper if you want to make it to the Top 32 of a Challenge. Gardens and Faeries are more reactive in nature while the other three big players have a more proactive gameplan.
How about winner’s meta share? How do these decks stack up?
- Kuldotha Red – 11.19%
- Glitter Affinity – 10.27%
- Blue Terror – 9.17%
- Black Gardens – 8.61%
- Jeskai Glitters – 6.81%
What about Dimir Faeries? It comes in at seventh place with 5.59% of the winner’s meta share, coming in behind CawGate (6.31%). The strength of Kuldotha Red here and the addition of Jeskai Glitters (which runs Galvanic Blast) points at a format that rewards getting ahead early and shutting the door with cheap burn. How do things look once we take into account adjusted Meta Score Above Replacement – a metric that measures relative strength of archetypes?
- Kuldotha Red – 1.21
- CawGate – 0.87
- Glitter Affinity – 0.62
- Black Gardens – 0.58
- Blue Terror – 0.45
With Jeskai Glitters just behind at 0.42. Dimir Faeries? That clocks in below average with an aMSAR of -0.03. Taken all together it sure looks like Kuldotha Red is the best deck in the format with a strong conversion rate to the Top 32 and an increasingly impressive position the higher up the standings you travel. We can also see the power of the archetype in the slow and steady rise of CawGate, a deck with a strong matchup against Kuldotha Red, as we get closer to the elimination rounds. Yet it is not the overwhelming force it was previously with other strategies remaining competitive.
What does this mean moving into the next stage of the meta? A dedicated control deck that does not account for starting the game at effectively 16 life is not going to succeed. With so many decks running Galvanic Blast and other burn spells to close things out having a plan to survive remains important. The absence of Monastery Swiftspear gives decks a little more time to develop their defenses before facing down lethal. I remain bullish on white midrange but Murmuring Mystic is a messed up Magic card and having that card in a control deck outside Jeskai Ephemerate seems like a great day to absorb some damage.
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NerdtotheCore 