Pioneer Meta: May 20-21, 2023

Saturday Decklists

Sunday Decklists

Top of the Metagame

Winners of the Week

UW Spirits (Saturday)

Boros Convoke (Sunday)

Top 5 Archetypes Across Top 32s of Both Challenges (Ties Weighted by Top 8 Conversion)

1. Rakdos - 26.56%

2. Mono G - 10.94%

3. Mono W/Greasefang - 7.81%

4. Bring to Light/Rakdos Sac/UW Control - 6.25%

5. Boros Convoke - 3.13%

Best of the Best: Top 5 Decks Representing the Highest Percentages Across All 3 Top 8s (Ties Weighted by Overall Metashare)

1. Rakdos - 12.50%

2. Boros Convoke - 12.50%

3. Mono G - 6.25%

4. Mono W/Greasefang - 6.25%

5. Bring to Light/Rakdos Sac/UW Control - 6.25%

To the surprise of no one, Rakdos held strong in the top spot for yet another week, though the rise of some new archetypes and some bad matchups rose up to cut down both its metagame share and top 8 conversion rate. We’ll dive deeper into some of those below, but a quick note on the solid outings for Mono W and Greasefang this week. Mono W is re-emerging in the meta as a solid choice to take down Challenges and RCQs. It has a powerful new two drop in Coppercoat Vanguard, a Rakdos match-up that seems more and more winnable as time goes on thanks to cards like Invasion of Gobhakan, Guardian of Faith, and Wedding Announcement, and a close to unloseable match-up against Mono G and Lotus Field. The powerful simplicity of its plan is matched only by Greasefang, a deck that high-rolls so efficiently that it remains most Rakdos players' worst nightmare. Similar to Rhinos in Modern, both these decks that will often auto-win you games with fast opening hands and well-timed draws while still possessing a strong ability to grind in tougher matches, elements that I think make them decks you should seriously consider for long tournaments. Speaking of fast decks…

Boros Convoke: Pioneer’s Hogaak? Certainly Not. Something Viable? Maybe.

Let’s talk about the Loxodon in the room. Boros Convoke, a deck that puts close to lethal power in play with an army of tokens before beating face and ending the game on the spot, arrived in a big way this week to equal amounts of fanfare and derision. Streamers and brewers such as d00mwake have been championing this deck for a few weeks before fully realizing its power this week, as it took the top two spots of the Sunday Challenge and seemed to be popping up in RCQ top 8s around the globe. The deck has since been by far the most popular deck in Pioneer Leagues, already leading to declarations of a broken format, cries for bans, healthy skepticism, and downright dismissal as a flash in the pan archetype. Who’s in the right? Bans are certainly a laughable take, but I think both the champions and haters of this new archetype are overplaying their position a little bit.

Fans of the archetype are quickly declaring it unbeatable with the right draws, and while they may have a point, don’t expect it to last. With Mono W on the downlow until this week and other aggressive decks mostly falling off the face of the Earth, board wipes aren’t as popular in the format. That will change now that this deck is everywhere, and as more and more removal-favored archetypes adapt to its presence I think it will have a hard time continuing to put up results like it did this weekend. This is without mentioning the many, many one-mana token haters in the format: Illness in the Ranks, End the Festivities, Authority of the Consuls, I could go on. I’m also puzzled by how this deck does anything meaningful post-board, as Invasion of Gobhakan stands out as the only card that does anything to mitigate its bad matchups, though I imagine sideboards will adapt accordingly with cards like Guardian of Faith in the coming weeks. All that being said, Twitter users spouting takes that this deck is the new Hogaak and will spell the death of Pioneer going into next month’s Regional Championships need to take a breath. It has an easy-to-disrupt plan that recovers poorly from any interaction and has almost no card advantage outside of Thraben Inspector clues and Knight-Errant of Eos, a card that requires 4 bodies in play to use effectively. Hogaak had such perfect hands and was so difficult to interact with that entire metas were slamming 4 Leyline of the Void into their main deck to combat it and often that wasn’t even good enough. We aren’t even close to that point!

However, contrary to the many players laughing this deck off as a temporary meme, I do think this deck could have some legs. Similar to Mono W, it exposes a hole in the metagame as a proper aggro deck that overwhelms Rakdos’ density of removal. It does have some absolutely nuts draws and will net you some free wins, and I imagine decklists are only going to improve from here as the current builds are being heavily debated already. More testing is needed to decide if Burning-Tree Emissary or Clarion Spirit are the better routes to getting those hyperactive draws, and we’ll continue to see opinions develop as the masses register this deck in the upcoming weekend’s Challenges. The RCs are soon enough that I do think this deck will have a considerable impact on the metagames for those events, though we’ll have to see if it’s completely hated out of contention or innovates enough to remain viable by the time those events begin.

Rakdos Sac: Back and Better Than Ever?

It feels like Rakdos Midrange has been the premium deck in the format for ages now, but it’s easy to forget that at one point it was not the premium red-black deck in the format. That mantle once belonged to Rakdos Sacrifice, a mainstay archetype since the printing of the Cat/Oven combo in Throne of Eldraine that slowly faded out of the top tiers of the metagame over the past year. This was largely due to the looming specter of Mono G during the first RCQ season, by far the deck’s worst matchup and so ever-present that the deck became an actively bad choice to register.

With Mono G still very strong but not as popular as it once was, Sac players are picking the deck back up to combat Rakdos and Mono W while testing out new potential playables like Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin to try it and give it a newfound edge. The new Ob seems like an obvious choice for the deck at first glance: it grows quickly and generates card advantage with every ping of a Cauldron Familiar or Mayhem Devil, though at four mana it’s too early to tell whether or not it’s too slow to be a viable card. The one Sac list that made top 8 wasn’t running Ob, and those that did only had 2 in their lists. Regardless of the card’s impact, the deck was solidly back in the mix, representing the same meta-share as top decks Bring to Light and UW Control. I imagine the desire to test this card made Sacrifice players realize how good their deck is feeling right now regardless of whether or not you draw Ob, and that goes a long way to explain its sudden resurgence in the meta.

Chandra Turns: New Week, New Look

I wrote at length in last week’s newsletter about how I thought the new deck centered around Chandra, Hope’s Beacon and Alrund’s Epiphany had a lot of potential, and not one week later it has already made its first Challenge appearance with a sweet new list and a top 4 finish to boot! This list changes things up a bit by adding Bonecrusher Giant in favor of Volcanic Spite, opting for an additional backup threat that still acts as a piece of removal. It also adds Fable of the Mirror-Breaker to the mix as the go-to card advantage spell in the format, as well add some usual sideboard options for UR shells to the main deck such as Anger of the Gods and Abrade. Not such a bad idea with Convoke and Reckoner Bankbusters running around! An interesting piece of tech here is the Izzet Phoenix-proven 2 Galvanic Iteration as another way to copy your Epiphanies and take additional extra turns or maximize pieces of your removal. Unless you have Chandra in play and are already going to cast two copies of Epiphany anyway, I’m skeptical you’re ever going to have enough mana to cast Iteration and Epiphany in the same turn, though it’s certainly an interesting idea that plays well with the rest of the deck. In the sideboard we also see two of the new card Nahiri’s Warcrafting, a nice 3-mana way to kill a Sheoldred while generating some card advantage if it’s used against something else. You can almost guarantee we’ll see additional innovations on this archetype in the coming weeks, and while I think it might be a fringe archetype it will definitely be here to stay.

Atraxa in Creativity: Good Enough After All?

Last week I went in-depth on why Atraxa, Grand Unifier seemed to be falling out of favor with Creativity players after a brief period of experimentation. I mostly chalked this up to the fact that the cards Atraxa hits for you are of pretty low quality in the late game, hence why the 5c Atraxa Fires deck (which had another top 8 this week) should be the go-to option for fans of the Phyrexian angel. However, it looks like some pilots were looking to prove me wrong this week as the only two Creativity decks with top 32 finishes this week both featured Atraxa in their lists. One was all on in the card while the other paired a singleton copy with 3 Gearhulks in the stock Gearhulk Creativity list, an idea I actually like quite a bit. My issue with the Gearhulk/Opus plan is again that it sometimes isn’t quite enough to close out games, though hitting an Atraxa alongside one or two Gearhulks is a nice way of generating enough card advantage to flat out win the game, possibly even grabbing you the last Gearhulk for your next turn. While I still think the Fires archetype is the better Atraxa deck at the moment, perhaps there’s more to playing her in Creativity than meets the eye.

That’s all for Pioneer this week. See you next time for more metagame breakdowns and in the meantime, happy trophy hunting!

Liking the newsletter so far? Upgrade your subscription and become a Friend of the Multiverse for £5 a month or £50 a year for exclusive access to monthly metagame recaps.