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.
Let’s talk about Jeskai Glitters. After the first four weeks of the post-ban metagame the aggressive Affinity strategy, which takes the All That Glitters shell and trades stack interaction for Galvanic Blast, the subarchertype clocked in with 5.6% of the total challenge metagame and 6.81% of the winner’s metagame. Last weekend both the Saturday and Sunday Challenge fired and Jeskai Glitters was 12.3% of the overall metagame and 8.29% of the winner’s meta.
I’m not going to bury the lead – Jeskai Glitters did not have the best weekend. Looking at adjusted meta score above replacement it finished outside the Top 5 with an aMSAR of 0.50. Yet these decks are looking to set the pace of the metagame for the immediate future as they provide a quick clock that can win from nowhere. Unlike the threats Kuldotha Red, Jeskai Glitters has options that are resilient to the most commonly played sweepers in the format. The ability to “just win” cannot be understated and was enough to convince 16 players to pick the cards up for the weekend. Still the deck fell short. So what happened?
Despite the raw strength Jeskai Glitters, like many aggressive decks, have some serious shortcomings in Pauper. Looking at the raw volume chart above CawGate, Black Gardens, Dimir Faeries, Grixis Affinity, and Izzet Control can all be classified as control strategies in the metagame while Kuldotha Red and the Glitters variants occupy the assertive roles. The Terror variants are more mutable but tend to play towards a tempo game. All of this is to say that as strong as decks that play to the board can be there is power in keeping those threats off the board, either through removal, counters, or bounce. When 47.1% of the discrete metagame can take on the control role at a given time then the potential for answers to line up well with threats can make it difficult to get over the line for 20 damage.
The Top 32 metagame tells a similar story. While the beatdown decks are far from absent the top of the winner’s meta is stacked to the brim with interactive strategies. I have often said the best way to get ahead in Pauper is to have the correct removal for a given aggressive strategy but that means that picking the correct threats to dodge answers matters just as much. In Pauper that means selecting threats that have break points at 3 toughness (to dodge sweepers) and 4 toughness (to dodge Lightning Bolt). Jeskai Glitters has Myr Enforcer which checks all these boxes and can lean on other three toughness threats to round things out.
As for aMSAR, the week shook out with CawGate as the very best with an astonishing score of 3.4. Next up was Black Gardens with 1.11 followed closely by Izzet Contol with 1.1. Grixis Affinity is next up with 0.88 with Blue Terror rounding out the top 5 with 0.72. In other words, Jeskai Glitters might not have been the best deck on the weekend but people absolutely came prepared to defend their life total. Whether this was a result of Kuldotha Red remaining a top contender or chatter around the Jeskai deck running up to the Challenges, folks had their shields up and it paid off.
Looking ahead I would be hesitant to go too deep on Jeskai Affinity as I expect more copies of Cast into the Fire as a way to fight against the various low to the ground threats and high impact artifacts. No matter what I would want to find a way to get around CawGate while also not losing a step to the other beat down strategies.
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