November 10th Pauper Challenge Breakdown

There were 10 varieties of Flicker Tron decks in the Top 32 of the November 10th Pauper Challenge. Tron had two decks in the Top 8 and won the event. The recent performance of the deck has been the source some concerns expressed over the archetype's dominance as of late. 

But is this warranted?

I am not so sure. Taking a look at the chart that breaks down the Top 32, Burn performed on par with Tron. The most remarkable thing about the Top 32 may not be the number of Tron decks but the absolute dearth of Stompy - and aggro in general. While Boros Bully might be an aggressive deck, it is not beatdown in the sense of Heroic or Slivers (in the case of Sunday). Rather there exists a full spectrum of strategies under the Tron umbrella while everything else is trying to find a lane.

This is perhaps the best argument against keeping Tron around. Tron is a powerful enough mana engine that once it is online it simply gets to do more than a deck with a non-Tron mana base. Thanks to cards like Expedition Map and the advent of the London Mulligan, Tron's fail rate has declined. As such it has a greater chance of being able to leverage its mana advantage earlier and more often. The result is that decks that are not Tron get squeezed out by similar Tron-based strategies. Why play a control deck without Tron when you can play one with the engine and never want for mana again?

The popularity of Tron would be more worrisome if it had more success on Magic Online. Through three Challenges and a PTQ, Flicker based Tron decks are make up 17.19% of the Challenge Metagame while accounting for 20.48% of the Weighted Meta - that is weight of wins at a X-2 record or better. That's a pretty good clip but considering its popularity, the deck would have to be performing better to register as a problem on the radar of someone caring exclusively about numbers. 

By comparison, at the end of the Core 2020 season Jeskai midrange was 25% of all Top 32 lists and accounted for over 33% of the Weighted Metagame.

So Tron isn't as dominant as previous "best decks" but I don't think that tells the whole story. 

Tron can be miserable to play against. A non-Tron deck can establish its gameplan according to the most well written script and it simply may not matter. If Tron is able to come online it stops acting as a control deck and instead plays prison, locking the opponent out of meaningful actions. But the war is not entirely lost and so there exists a compulsion to play to the bitter end of things. 

It comes down to this: Tron is not a dominant deck as we have come to know them in Pauper, but the toll it takes on the psyche during a game is quite high. That is not to take anything away from people who enjoy playing the archetype, but I have heard from multiple people who win with the deck that they actively hate it and only play it because they feel there is no other choice.

That's not good.

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