The First Four Weeks of Duskmourn

Want to learn more about the metrics I use in tracking the metagame? You can find an explainer here.

We’ve been trapped in the haunted house that is Duskmourn for just about a month and, just like the villain in a horror franchise, Kuldotha Red has reemerged to terrorize the metagame. Can anything be done to escape this house of horrors?

Let’s start by breaking down some of Kuldotha Red’s numbers. The deck has half of the Challenges in Duskmourn season (this counts the October 12 Qualifier as a different tournament) and has almost 27% of all Top 8s during this season (this is inclusive of the October 12 Qualifier). After an abysmal performance over the October 18-20 weekend where it actually performed worse than the average Top 32 deck (an Adjusted Meta Score Above Replacement of -0.34), the deck closes out the first month of Duskmourn with an AMSAR of 0.90; just about one win better than the average Top 32 deck. Kuldotha Red has taken up 18.51% of the Top 32 metagame and 20.1% of the Winner’s Metagame. But this is only part of the story.

Out of the 28 Top 8 finishes, Kuldotha Red earned fully 24 of those in Challenges with under 60 participants. Out of the six wins, five of them came in Challenges with under 60 participants. As the field expands, Red’s ability to close out events appears to diminish. This correlation makes sense as longer events provide more opportunities for sideboard cards to have an impact and gives Red more opportunity to conform to its mean win rate which hovers around 50% in non-mirror situations.

This, then, prompts another question: why are Pauper Challenges so small these days? There are a number of external factors at play, from Daybreak altering the prize structure to other formats being exciting. Pauper has also been relatively stable since the release of Modern Horizons 3 with the top tier remaining largely unchanged for the past few set cycles. While there have been some shifts – such as the Gruul deck largely dropping land destruction – the top rungs of the meta ladder bear more than a passing resemblance to the same strata from August. The aftershocks of Modern Horizons 3 have abated and things have started to settle.

One thing that is interesting to note here is that out of all the decks in the format, Kuldotha Red remains the only one that is fast. I don’t mean that it is low to the ground (which it is) but rather its games by and large end quickly. Win or lose, Kuldotha Red’s games take less time than the other decks at the apex of the format. This temporal advantage appeals to a certain subset of players and given the combination of quick games and strength it makes sense that Red shows up a lot.

There is another potential explanation – that Red is actually as good as advertised. The deck’s popularity and strength could be part of the reason why it continues to put up numbers. The deck may be strong enough to fight through the copious amount of hate and still put up the results it has achieved this season. It is within the realm of reason that Clockwork Percussionist has pushed the strategy to another level.

Where does the truth reside? Likely somewhere in between. Kuldotha Red is probably better than it’s Bloomburrow performance where it was the fifth best deck in Pauper but it also isn’t as strong as it looks in Duskmourn season. Time, of course, will tell but until then we have to operate in a world that death may come in a flurry of fire at any moment.

Duskmourn Power Rankings (through October 20)

• 10: Bogles
• 9: Izzet Control
• 8: Azorius Familiars
• 7: Dimir Terror
• 6: Golgari Fog
• 5: Blue Terror
• 4: Gruul Ramp
• 3: Jund Broodscale
• 2: Grixis Affinity
• 1: Kuldotha Red

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