Metagame and GP:D.C.

Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cave. This week I take a look at the current metagame and the national qualifiers around the U.S. and Grand Prix- Washington D.C. It seems a little repetitive to write one after so many great magic writers have touched on this subject this week but I like to write my take on it.

Let me start of with the following point, jund "was" the best deck in the format. This is not because Jund is dead but the problem was after a few sets, jund became too dominant due to bloodbraid elf and blightning and many magic players started to get very tired of playing against it ,including myself who's been playing the deck since Faeries was dominating the format. Although due to the rapid change of the format after the releases of Worldwake and Rise of the Eldrazi, standard took a turn for the better. We then came across new decks such as U/W tap out control, polymorph, vengevine varients, and other decks. Worldwake was the hit of the block set with the reveal of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, who made heads turn to try to fit him into any deck they can find until find homes in the U/W control and super friends, becoming one of the most expensive cards to date in this set, overshadowing Baneslayer (whom I no longer see as the wallet slayer) in the price range.

Thanks to the folks at StarCityGames, the top ten deck lists played at all of the national qualifiers were jund, mysthic consription, U/W control, Super friends, RDW's, Vengevine Naya, polymorph, grixis control blightning deck wins, and mythic. Jund being at the top at 27 percent of the field and mythic conscription coming in at 17.8 percent of the field. The rest are 10-3 percent.

Now lets take a break down of this, Jund is still the big boogie man of the format while closing behind is the new tech of Eldrazi Conscription and Sovereigns of Lost Alara.
This combo is very deadly if you are tapped out and with no blockers to consider, its pretty much game from there. I personally have played against this deck and I will always keep mana up for removal for any bant or variant of a deck looking like it runs the combo.

Now lets take a look at Grand Prix: Washington D.C. top eight shall we? We have two U/W control decks, three jund, one mythic conscription and two super friends decks. Seems to me results speak for themselves. My analysis is that after a few months ago Jund was more likely to have six of the top eight slots and thanks to players who more then happy wanted to crush the boogie man of the format came up with a healthy standard environment.

Next time, I build a couple of rogue decks that can perhaps beat the big bad monsters of the format. See you all next time in the cave.

The Cave:an introduction

My name is Kellen Huber, a semi-competitive magic player with ten years of playing magic. This blog is to focus on my magic experiences, tournament reports, deck building and lists. I will post regularly on ideas and my Friday Night Magic reports. Also I will post some of my opinions of current topics in forums, rumors, and spoilers for new sets. I named my blog The Cave because of my ongoing alias as the Caveman nickname from most of my magic friends. I've written articles before for a small site and the site has basically been ignored and no longer write for them so I'm excited to restart something fresh.

To give a little more information about myself, I started to play magic during classic aka sixth edition as a casual player. I tired to play in high school however we were banned any sort of card game somewhat after we had a couple of meetings. It wasn't until I starting to play with my original play group at a local Barnes n' Noble with the guys and it wasn't until I found my first gaming store I hung out at called Tate's Gaming Satellite in Lauderhill, Florida (where I later started to work at) and is still my favorite store to hang out and play at. It was a few months later that I started to look at magic in a semi-competitive way. I now play at CoolStuffGames here in Orlando while going to school at UCF. I am a heavy aggro player when Guildpact came out and my original style of play was mono-red sligh. I still play an assortment of decks archetypes but aggro is my overall favorite. My next article will be based off the current meta game and GP: DC.