NerdtotheCore

March of the Machine season has arrived! After ten weeks of Phyrexia: All Will Be One a new set of cards has entered the fray. If you’re interested in my take on the new cards you can check them out here but today I want to talk a little bit about the April 22 and April 23 Challenges.

First off, it is hard to make any declarations about a format after a few days. The early chatter from March‘s release indicated that Wrenn’s Resolve would push red to another level and Meeting of the Minds was incredibly strong in Azorius Familiars. After two events these portents appear to be pointed in the right direction.

Let’s start with Wrenn’s Resolve. Kuldotha Red has adopted the card while a somewhat new archetype – Reckless Burn or Impulsive Burn – has hit the scene. The latter deck runs a lighter burn suite than traditional Burn but runs the full suite of Thermo-Alchemist and Kessig Flamebreather. In this way it plays a bit like a slow storm deck, chaining together its draw spells to provide a steady stream of damage. Compare this to Kuldotha Red which has cut some of non-core creatures – that is, creatures outside Voldaren Epicure and Monastery Swiftspear -to fit in the second playset of draw spells.

The divergence is sure to have ramifications in the metagame as these decks require rather different answers. Against Reckless Burn, for example, cards like Lightning Bolt go up in value as they pick off several of their key threats, while Smash to Dust and End the Festivities lose value since there are fewer targets. Reckless Burn also does not run Great Furnace (at least not yet), which turns off Galvanic Blast but in exchange it has Searing Blaze. Targeted removal is better against this newer deck but it is rather resilient, aiming to win in the mid and late game.

Azorius Familiars has been one of the format’s secret best decks for years. The main thing holding the archetype back is the fact that it is difficult to pilot effectively on Magic Online without quite a bit of practice due to the user interface. Leaning on loops with Ephemerate/Ghostly Flicker and Archaeomancer, the deck can eat up a ton of clock. Despite this when the deck does show up it performs rather well. Over Phyrexia season it had 29 Top 32 finishes and made Top 8 in 14 of those while averaging close to a Top 16 Swiss finish; approaching an average event finish in the tenth-sixth place spot, and had two wins to boot. Meeting of the Minds provides more card advantage at a bargain basement price. Familiars is already adept at reducing the cost of spells and so, given the composition, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where Meeting can be looped for effectively free.

Where does that leave things going into next weekend? Red is going to be everywhere, but which version remains to be seen. It would not surprise me to see a small uptick in Familiars while Affinity remains constant. Bogles also had a strong weekend but I don’t see it having consistent staying power. If I were trying to tech for the meta I would want to try and figure out an Arbor Elf/Utopia Sprawl deck that could survive against red until it could stick a Flourishing Hunter.

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The Phyrexia: All Will Be One Pauper season has ended. Ten weeks saw 20 Challenges and one Super Qualifier on Magic Online while it also contained the absolutely massive Paupergeddon Milan in Italy. That being said this article will focus on the data from the online metagame. The overarching story is one that will sound familiar to anyone who has played Pauper over the past several months, but there is a lot of nuance that will get lost if you only pay attention to the headlines.

A quick aside: While I am a member of the Pauper Format Panel, I see my role on this page as one where I talk about the format from the perspective of a player. The suggestions I make here are made with the intent to provide different ways to approach the format that may yield you success. Good? Good.

A second aside on terminology: 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 is one I call True Volume, which takes the average of all three volumes (Actual, Win+, K-Win). This number helps to provide the most robust image of a deck’s performance in the metagame.

Defining the Metagame

Grixis Affinity and Kuldotha Red continue to define the Pauper metagame. Kuldotha Red was the most popular deck in the Top 32 metagame with 120 appearances alongside 20 Top 8 finishes and an impressive 6 wins (including the Super Qualifier). The deck also had an average Win+ of 0.58 and a K-Win average of 1.6. Grixis Affinity had 94 finishes in the Top 32, taking down a whopping 28 Top 8 slots and winning three events. Affinity’s Win+ average clocked in at 0.83 and it’s K-Win average settled at 1.84. When looking at True Volume, Kuldotha Red finished with 16.11% (down 1.64% from its actual volume) while Affinity closed the season with a True Volume of 14.92% (up 1.01% from it’s actual volume).

What does this all mean? Both of these are very good strategies that are solid choices for anyone looking to get into Pauper. Kuldotha Red is a bit more volatile and despite winning the most events in the season averaged a finish closer to 17th place than inside the Top 16. Affinity, on the other hand, had a better average finish in the Swiss. Player gathered data shows that both of these decks have acceptable non-mirror win rates, with Affinity hovering in the 50% range while Red often dips below that number. Yet these two decks are often to focal point of frustration in Pauper circles.

Perhaps this is because they get to simply be. The power of these decks means that overall there is relatively little fine tuning that needs to go into the builds. The strength of the core strategy is high enough that stock lists can perform admirably in a given event. Compare this the the other decks in the metagame which have to be constructed with these two in mind. Now it can be debated whether or not this is a “good thing” but from my vantage point there are always going to be decks that are the focal point of a metagame and it’s the job of the meta to adjust – especially when those threats are known.

Faeries, Again

And adjust the meta has. One of the biggest stories of this season has been the rise of Mono Blue Faeries. The deck has taken on a far more aggressive slant, eschewing Preordain for Faerie Miscreant and moving to maindeck copies of Mutagenic Growth as a standard inclusion. Faeries had a True volume of 9.35% over the first four weeks of the season and jumped to 13.10% over the second four weeks. The final five events saw Faeries end with 18.42% of the True volume. All told on the season the blue menace took home 13.10% of the True volume, 0.67% higher than it’s Top 32 presence. In 84 Top 32 finishes it had 20 Top 8s (the same as Red) and two victories.

Faeries is a low to the ground card advantage machine. Moon-Circuit Hacker, Ninja of the Deep Hours, and Of One Mind allow it to load up on cards while pressing its advantage in a damage race. If the deck can get to a point where it can resolve Snap into Spellstutter Sprite it can take over on tempo. Cheap countermagic such as Spell Pierce can help the deck maintain its advantage at a low cost. All told Faeries is looking to be a good choice moving into March of the Machine season.

Death and Taxes

Another story to come out of this season was the return of Mono White Aggro to the metagame. Practically a non-factor in the first four weeks of the season (two total Top 32 finishes), the deck came on strong in the second four weeks (10 Top 32 finishes, 5 Top 8s, 1 win) and had 3 more Top 8 finishes with 11 more Top 32s in the final five events. Like Faeries, Mono White Aggro is a low to the ground deck that wants to press its advantage via creatures. While it lacks the stack interaction of blue it makes up for this in burst damage with the likes of Steadfast Unicorn and Guardians’ Pledge.

The deck also has a decent number of options that are not always standard inclusions. Some builds are able to pivot into a Monarch or Initiative build while some lean on Militia Bugler. Recommission was commonly seen but is hardly a requirement these days. Instead it is all about picking creatures that are slightly better on rate than the other choices on curve. Then, thanks to Prismatic Strands, it can steal combat steps and win the old fashioned way: via combat.

Hardly Ephemeral

I don’t want to write this without acknowledging two of the better decks from the season: Azorius Familiars and Flicker Tron. Both of these strategies lean on a mana advantage (either from the Tron Lands or from Sunscape Familiar) to super charge the Ghostly Flicker/Ephemerate loop with Archaeomancer/Mnemonic Wall. From here these decks get to cherry pick the best option from their graveyard and eventually win the game thanks to their overwhelming advantage and ability to lock the opponent out of meaningful action.

Flicker Tron had seven Top 8 finishes in 26 appearances in the Top 32, concluding the season with 3.02% of the True volume (+0.07% over actual volume). Familiars ended with 5.32% of the True volume (+1.04% over actual volume), 14 Top 8s and 2 wins. It also had a positively gaudy 0.97 Win+ average, placing its average finish right around the Top 16; its K-Win average was 2.38 which correlates to a finish between 8th and 16th. These decks cannot be discounted moving forward and, despite their relatively small metagame presence, are major players.

Odds and Ends

Here are a final few thoughts that I’d be remiss to exclude from this wrap up:

• Paupergeddon Milan showed the power of Altar Tron – a Myr Retriever/Ashnod’s Altar/Golem Foundry deck. This strategy has some limitations imposed by the Magic Online user interface which may be artificially depressing its numbers.
• The surge of both Faeries and Mono White Aggro does give me some pause in that these two decks are incredibly consistent in part to their mana base. If the meta is pushing decks towards being a single color that may not be ideal for long term format health.
• March of the Machine has a lot of interesting cards for Pauper and while some folks are concerned about Wrenn’s Resolve, I see this set as far more likely to bolster non-red archetypes than send Monastery Swiftspear to another level.

I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons – both old and new. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, rewards for my Patreon start at just $1 and every little bit helps.

Looking for another way to support my work? Click here for my TCGPlayer affiliate link. Any purchases through the link let the folks there know you like my content!

Win +: Measures all wins better than X-3 in Swiss (X-2 is 1, X-1 is 2, etc). Measures a deck’s relative strength against the field in that event

K-Wins: Measures all wins less all losses, Top 8 inclusive. Measures a deck’s strength in a winner’s metagame

The April 8 and April 9 Pauper Challenges tell us a similar story to the weeks before: Grixis Affinity and Kuldotha Red are two of the better decks in the format, but Faeries is not far behind. In the ten challenges since March 11 Faeries has 12 Top 8s with a win – the same count as Grixis Affinity in three fewer appearances (Kuldotha Red, for the record, has 14 Top 8s and four wins in 64 Top 32 finishes). During the same same it has the best average Swiss finish and the best average finish, Swiss and Top 8, when looking at the Top 32 metagame. Whether or not it can stay in the top three remains to be seen. If history is any indicator, Faerie’s slot rotates between different flavors of blue, having cycled through CawGate and Dimir Terror, while the other major players jockey for position in and around the top of the metagame.

Here we can see some of the limitation of challenge data. These events, while regular, are relatively small compared to the volume of matches being played on Magic Online. The weekend challenges hover between the mid-40s and mid-70s for player count, meaning that any deck that has five or more pilots will make an outsized impression in the volume. This is one reason why I track results over a set’s release: it helps to provide insight as to what is happening given a set pool of cards. But even that does not always tell us how games play out.

Pauper, right now, is going through some serious game play growing pains. There are a few decks in the metagame that, given their power level or strategy, can leave people feel like they are playing “non-games”. Kuldotha Red has draws that just get there while Gruul Cascade is built on trying to prevent the opponent from actively doing anything. The result is that these strategies can leave the person on the other side of the table feeling as if they lack any sort of agency in actual game actions.

This is the reality of non-rotating formats once they reach a certain size. There are some matchups which are utterly lopsided or hinge on drawing a very specific card. Maybe I’ve been watching too many Legacy videos involving Chalice of the Void recently, but this is also nothing new to Pauper. Before there was Gruul Cascade there was Mono-Black Land Destruction which was never popular but could Choking Sands you out of the game. Before Kuldotha Red there was Burn which could still catch people unaware. The difference between past and present is that these decks are, for the time being, good.

That has nothing to do with what happened over the weekend, but it is a thought that’s been rattling around my skull for a while. As for looking forward, we are in the final week of Phyrexia season and one card I feel should be seeing more play is Anoint with Affliction. While it does miss many of the larger threats in the metagame it does something important in removing the animated lands from Kenku Artificer. While it is slow it also does trade with everything out of Kuldotha Red as well while also nabbing most of the standard inclusions in Faeries outside Ninja of the Deep Hours. I do not think you necessarily need to go all in on Corrupted, but I’m not sure it would hurt either. Whether this is a modified version of Black Garden or a Carrion Feeder based sacrifice deck with Crawling Chorus and Blightbelly Rat, I think you want to be using Swamps next weekend.

I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons – both old and new. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, rewards for my Patreon start at just $1 and every little bit helps.

Looking for another way to support my work? Click here for my TCGPlayer affiliate link. Any purchases through the link let the folks there know you like my content!

Biggest Winner: Dimir Terror

Biggest Surprise: Mono White Aggro

What I’d Play Next Week: Black Garden

Win +: Measures all wins better than X-3 in Swiss (X-2 is 1, X-1 is 2, etc). Measures a deck’s relative strength against the field in that event

K-Wins: Measures all wins less all losses, Top 8 inclusive. Measures a deck’s strength in a winner’s metagame

Wondering where my long-form breakdown went? You can find it here on my Patreon!

Looking for another way to support my work? Click here for my TCGPlayer affiliate link. Any purchases through the link let the folks there know you like my content!

Biggest Winner: Kuldotha Red

Biggest Surprise: Faeries

What I’d Play Next Week: Mardu Synthesizer

Win +: Measures all wins better than X-3 in Swiss (X-2 is 1, X-1 is 2, etc). Measures a deck’s relative strength against the field in that event

K-Wins: Measures all wins less all losses, Top 8 inclusive. Measures a deck’s strength in a winner’s metagame

Wondering where my long-form breakdown went? You can find it here on my Patreon!

Looking for another way to support my work? Click here for my TCGPlayer affiliate link. Any purchases through the link let the folks there know you like my content!