Is there any official word on it or study or something?

I find it evens out - I'd never judge it based on 2 games and if I do 100 games, I meet plenty of different decks.

I doubt there's a difference between unranked and ranked. I haven't been in unranked for months, I just play bo1 ranked and test the decks there. Mythic is easy enough to obtain for the 5 packs, and besides that, I don't give 2 flies worth about placement.

I have seem some fun theories though - like my favourite: "It's hard to rank up, because arena gives me unfavourable match-ups!"



It's a 2-player game and arena gives YOU unfavourable matchups. So that means your opponent got a favourable matchup? I wonder how that evens out, since all the matches are played between 2 players.

My secret to enjoying even the worst matchups? Play something so janky and stupid that still has a small chance of pulling a win out of nowhere. When it happens, the smile almost makes the memory of T3feri fade. Almost.

It is weird though. If I play monored in BO1 unranked, I run into other monored players. If I switch decks, I stop running into monored players. I'm certainly not basing this on the two games I just tried, it's also based on other games I've played in the past. It's also my feeling that I play against a more varied meta in ranked even if I'm playing monored. All usual caveats about small sample size apply, but it's my impression this happens.

I'm not complaining that monored runs into other monored decks. In fact that might even be good for my purposes, since games are fast which means I get to finish my quests/dailies quicker. I'm also certainly not complaining about bad matchups, it's a mirror match so it can't be too far from 50-50. However: if I am going to play against monored after monored deck, I want to slot Blazing Volley and Redcap Melee and whatnot in my monored deck. It's simply the sensible thing to do.

I might be talking out of my arse, but i believe the play queue tries to queue people up who have a similar deck "strength" (whatever that means, presuming it's to stop people with a full collection destroying new players)

As a consequence of this Mirrors are probably way more common - same strength and for mono red where there's a lot more commons/uncommons in that deck then the average deck i bet it favours the mirror massivly

Nope. They very deliberately screwed with matchmaking the last time I quit. The (failed) theory was to make sure that casually you only played against decks with similarish power ratings. This severely reduced the frequency of my favorite matchup (aggro v control) in practice. Same sort of crap they pulled with the shuffler in 1 v 1.

tbf, now if you play any of the ranked ladders (both BO1 and BO3 in any format) it doesn't take deck strength into account

yes



yes

Can Standard Bant ramp beat Modern Jund? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6VJyzdKVaE

Lol, that's hilarious. I feel like the Jund player misplayed a bit - clearly Jund is the aggro deck and they needed to bring in more aggressive cards, not to mention stop trying to outvalue the Bant player ove rthe long term. But still, it's hilarious.

Random thoughts on the meta:

- Sultai ramp seems like the best deck.
- It's sort of funny how UW control was a real deck before the bans, but now it's completely disappeared. Teferi too strong, I guess.
- I tried playing some control myself, but it's not good. Sure you still got Dream Trawler and Elspeth Conquers Death etc, and you could go creatureless and hope to strand the opponent's removal in game 1, but Uro is extremely dangerous and so is Hydroid Krasis. Both cards are capable of beating you on their own. Nissa is also a problem - you could answer the planeswalker with a card like ECD, but there's still a 3/3 beating you down (they can usually afford to lose it too). Plus Sultai also has Thought Erasure to break apart control hands.
- Ugin is very strong as a ramp target, the minus can dig one out of most things. Only problem is it kills your mana dorks too, and of course it's an 8-mana card.
- Mystical Dispute has dropped a lot in play (which is a bit surprising given that Teferi, which stops counterspells, is gone), but Aether Gust has not. Which actually makes sense, it's hard to conceive of a deck that doesn't have RG. One could play Esper control, but see the above about Uro and Hydroid Krasis.

I think I'll probably play Sultai, mainly because there's nothing better. I'm not keen on Temur Clover because that deck is too synergistic (i.e. reliant on drawing the correct pieces at the correct time) for me, and Casualties of War can even answer Temur Clover's artifacts. I might try using Clover and Beanstalk Giant to ramp at some point, because I feel like Clover is what makes Fae of Wishes really good. We'll see.

lol, Sultai been the baddest deck for like two weeks now. We're right back where we were in the Oko/nissa days with maindeck aether gusts and going first winning you the game. What I wanna know is what beats Sultai because the Uro play pattern is getting boring af. I've been meaning to look into some Winota/WW builds.

Idk, I'm only at platinum, but I climbed from plat4 to plat 2 yesterday with UW deck. I just replaced Teferi with Mu. I run Baneslayer instead of Trawler. Ugin -3 exiles all those Uros and Krasis' but also snags my Mu and tokens from Mu, Meletis and U6in, which killing U6in tokens isnt a bad thing.

You dont get the draw from Teferi, but often a -2/0 is enough to protect her long enough to get 1 or 2 flying 4/4s. The meletis walls and Teferi phasing creatures helps protect her to. A few 4/4s and a baneslayer are usually enough. The regular UW good stuff holds the line.

Also, removing all their dorks and taking them down to 2 land with shatter the sky is pretty back breaking.

Edit - in fact she makes shatter the sky better because now agro has to over extend instead of keep playing the same creature.

@niatpac I don't think anything beats Sultai consistently, the deck is just too versatile. Hell, the template was playable before the bans, might not have been tier 1 but could says something about how strong it is.

@sixty how do you beat Uro and Hydroid Krasis? I tested out a Jeskai control deck which wins with Trawler & Outlaw's Merriment for two games, and although I went 1-1 against Sultai (queued into that both games), the win was very scary because I take so long to kill them and they are always one Hydroid Krasis draw away from being right back in the game. They don't have mana dorks either. Granted Narset is quite strong against Sultai, but she's just one card and can be attacked away by Nissa lands. I can't imagine what it'd be like postboard either after they side out all their Extinction Events and bring in Duress, Shark Typhoon, etc.

ECD and U8in are perm solutions to Uro. Krasis is more difficult to deal with. I'm also playing Bo1 so my sideboard is just a wishboard for Fae (Grafdigger's Cage ect). I'm also in Platinum, and I'm sure my opponents are easier than yours (exe, guy Duress' U8in while my ECD is at lvl2 and I had no targets in GY). I think my 4/4 flying tokens help to close out games quicker. Outlaw's Merriment sounds way to slow, I run 6 5-drops, 1 U6in and 2 U8in at my top end. I agree with you though, Sultai is a tough cookie to crack

side note - Do you use Field of Ruin? It can function as a forced shuffle after you use Aether Gust (I think MBM taught me that). They will eventually draw it again though. I run 2 Gust and Teferi can toss them if they're dead cards

What are you guys playing in Historic right now?

Really tempted to give God-pharaoh's gift a shot, think there's gotta be something there, especially as Historic has a lot of tools that the standard version didn't, like Tower and supplier

Added bonus that everyone's graveyard hate at the moment is Grafdiggers cage which does nothing vs gift haha

Think if you wanted to play the best decks at the minute it would be something like:

Field of the dead varients - tier 0

Burn, Aura's, Collected company decks - tier 1

That sounds really cool. Artifact Ramp to get there and cycling creatures to feed the GY?

Right now I'm playing CGBs blue devotion deck centered around Oracle/Lotus/Gadwick.

I am brewing a historic WU deck around Smothering Tithe, Emiel and tons of ETB creatures. IDK, it could be jank but it has potential

Was thinking of it being centred around the self mill guys (i.e Supplier, merfolk secretkeeper, and Emry) and Gate to the afterlife

Emry, lurker of the loch especially is pretty disgusting in this shell - she fills the GY for your gate, but then she can also bring it back from the graveyard to fetch up a second/third GPG which is just backbreaking haha

Probably will hold off on building it now we know bans are coming on Monday, just to see how the meta shakes out first

Saw a vid LVD did about emiel, and he kinda went to try and lock the opponent out with frilled mystic seemed pretty powerful but obviously hard on the mana

Your deck idea sounds great.

Bans on Monday? Like WTF? We're doing bans every other week now. This is getting ridiculous. I have a theory on these bans but it's hard to articulate, so bear with me.

I feel like, with people staying home during the pandemic, a lot more of the average joe is playing Arena now. Joe is not a good deck builder. Average Joe net decks a LOT. Joe sees decks winning tournaments and Joe plays those decks. A lot. over and over again.

Average Joe also likes to go to twitter and official pages and such and complain when he loses. Joe likes to do this a LOT especially when he's playing a deck that he has seen a pro pilot to top 8, or tournament wins. So Joe thinks that his deck is really good (but Joe sucks as a pilot) so when Joe loses, it must be because of some OP card that Joe sees a lot. The card must be OP because Joe always loses to it, but in reality Joe is just to uncreative to move outside of his net.dec and figure out a solution for his problem, so Joe goes to twitter to complain.

All of these joes complaining to Hasbro has built into a crescendo and Hasbro knee jerk reacts. And then the cycle starts over. Joe just needs to learn how to play Draw/Go counterspell now that Teferi is gone IMO.

Seriously, how do you explain T3feri and Growth Spiral being playable for 1.9 years, and then only a few weeks from rotation they get banned.

Also, since I'm on the Nyx Lotus band wagon for now, hows this look:

4 x Llanowar Elves
1 x Ranger's Guile

2 x Track Down
4 x Heroic Intervention

4 x Llanowar Visionary
4 x Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner
4 x Steel Leaf Champion

4 x Nyx Lotus

4 x Nyxbloom Ancient

3 x Finale of Devastation
1 x Primal Might

23 x Forest
2 x Castle Garenbrig



I'm 3 Nyxbloom Ancients away and 3 MR wcs is a steep price for what could be a tier 2 deck

I think the two Track Downs should be Arboreal Grazer to increase the odds of T2 Champion or T3 Lotus. Not real sure what else I would cut for 2 more 1 drops since I already cut Manifold Key. Maybe the Ranger's Guile and something else like an Ancient

Welp monogreeon won in the SCG tournament today. Barely eked out the victory, though. Sultai is still the top deck.