A Weekend of Winner's Metagames

A Look at the August 24 MTGO MCQ & August 25 Challenge

It was quite the weekend for Pauper. August 24 saw a 9 round (plus Top 8) Mythic Championship Qualifier on Magic Online and the cream certainly rose to the top. Sunday saw a much more reasonable Challenge (7 rounds plus Top 8). Considering that nothing was banned in today's announcement, it is going to pay to study these results.

Let's start, then, with the MCQ. At 9 rounds, the break even point for Win+ was a 5-4 record, which didn't take place until outside the Top 32. This was a massive event and the additional rounds helped the best decks rise to the top of the standings. While there was only one Tron deck in the Top 32 it made Top 8, as well as 5 of the 17 Jeskai decks. Still, the day was won by Hexproof (featuring four copies of Arcum's Astrolabe). 

When taken as a whole, the Jeskai macro performed extremely well while Stompy did fine. Every other deck that placed in the Top 32 also did at least average with regards to Win+.

At the end of Saturday, Jeskai cemented itself as the deck to beat and Hexproof provided a blueprint on how to do that, building off of the work that Stompy has done this season.

Jeskai is very good at handling singular small threats. While Stompy can go tall, it can still fall prey to a timely Skred. Savage Swipe can turn a tempo profit, but better than going up on tempo is blanking opposing cards. Slippery Bogle is quite good at that. As a result, Hexproof can simply go around Jeskai's main mode of interaction. While the deck is fairly easy to hate out, the archetype should be further explored as a way to attack Jeskai.

What about Sunday? There were more archetypes in the Top 32, as well as 8 different archetypes in the Top 8. There were two Jeskai decks, and this time the one featuring Trinket Mage won the whole thing. The metagame seemed to adjust to the success of aggressive strategies, as indicated by the relatively poor performance of Stompy. At the same time, singular threat go tall decks - Heroic and Hexproof - both made Top 8. When taken together, the Ethereal Armor decks are out performing Affinity, Burn, and Elves. 

Does that mean you should run the card next week? Probably not! Hexproof and Heroic are both highly susceptible to Chainer's Edict style effects, which just so happen to be well positioned in the metagame. That being said, properly constructing these decks could catch the metagame by surprise. That means lessening your reliance on Auras - we see you Leave no Trace. This is easy enough to do in Heroic. In Hexproof it could mean adopting Travel Preparations.

While the best Jeskai deck isn't known, the fact is Jeskai is currently the best deck in the metagame. It's time to put a target on the archetype and work taking it down a notch. How are you planning on melting some snow?

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!

August 18th Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame

On a recent broadcast of the Pauper Premiere League, Charles Jenkins (aka birbman aka Entropy263) said that the Pauper metagame currently pits beatdown decks against Ephemerate decks. The August 18th Pauper Challenge showed that even if aggro wins a battle it might be losing the war. 

Let's be clear: out of the seven challenges this season, 5 have been won by aggressive decks and two have been won by Ephemerate decks. On some level this makes sense - aggressive decks win these days by being faster than potential Ephemerate loops.Out of the 56 top 8 slots, 23 have gone to Ephemerate decks and 21 have gone to different styles of aggressive decks (not counting Burn). The metagame is polarizing with Ephmerate taking on both the midrange and the control roles.

Is this a bad thing? While there has been a homogenization in the midrange department, aggressive decks are arguably experiencing a renaissance. There were four different beatdown strategies (inclusive of Burn) in yesterday's Top 8 and Stompy took down its third challenge.

At the same time, Jeskai Blink - an Astrolabe -Ephemerate - Archaeomancer deck - was both the moist popular and the most successful archetype. And this is not isolated to a single tournament either. Across all seven Challenges since the release of Core 2020, Jeskai Blink is the second most popular deck with 22 appearances. It trails only Jeskai Trinket - a similar strategy that also runs Trinket Mage - by seven entrants in Top 32s. The Blink variety, however, has 22 wins above an X-3 record (Win+), as compared to the 15 from Jeskai Trinket. The best beatdown deck in this regard? Stompy with a Win+ score of 13 in 17 appearances.

The Pauper metagame is not as easy as saying "Astrolabe is everywhere" or "Ephemerate is broken". Instead, there is a real tension where the best archetypes are leveraging the power of these two cards together to have a strong season, but still can fall prey to creatures attacking for damage.

So now we are a week away from the next Banned and Restricted List update. The question remains - what should be done? 

This is the part of the story where people expect me to call for bans. To say that some of these cards are detrimental to the health of the format and that they should be removed before they can do more damage.

Here's the part where I talk about how much I hate playing against the inevitability of Flicker Tron and how those games can feel helpless. It's where I tell you that I think that recycling a Stonehorn Dignitary is a net negative for Pauper when it is a popular, if not dominant, strategy.

Except this time I'm not going to do any of that.

Well, I will say I hate losing to endless copies of Stonehorn Dignitary. But that's because I like attacking.

Despite this I don't think any bans are currently warranted. The best deck - Jeskai Blink - isn't even 10% of all Top 32 decks and it's weighted volume - that is the proportional volume of its strong finishes - is not that much greater than its actual volume. Tron, while strong, is far from an unmovable object.

And yet I think that at some point something will happen. As we have seen time and time again, when Pauper cards subvert the traditional mana system, they tend to get the axe. In this vein I could absolutely see Tron being sent to a farm upstate at some point in the future. Same with Arcum's Astrolabe. While Astrolabe does not subvert the mana system on a volume rate, it does so by making splashing too easy. If Pauper were Standard and the card would rotate it would be a novelty. As it stands, it makes running base-blue Best Spells a tad too easy.

All of this would be far more imminent if not for the strength of being the beatdown as of late. Even with overwhelming endgames, these decks still struggle when pressure is applied early and often. So if you're thinking about jumping into the Pauper Mythic Qualifier this weekend, you'd do well to be turning your creatures sideways.

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!

August 11 Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame

The August 11th Pauper Challenge was the second in a row to be won by a Burning-Tree Emissary deck. This is hot on the heels of some yahoo writing about how creatures have a hard time keeping pace in Pauper. So let's look at the results in context.

The winning deck - Red Deck Wins - went through two Jeskai midrange decks before defeating Delver. Last week's winning Stompy deck beat two Jeskai midrange decks before coming out ahead of Hexproof. Both times the aggro decks completely avoided Tron in the elimination rounds and more specifically, they dodged the brand of Tron that can blank a combat phase. Would the result have been the same if, for example TopGrinder was in the same half of the bracket as Modern_Monkey?

When I wrote about creatures and their relative lack of strength, I feel like I glossed over a key point. It is not that the creatures that already exist are bad. Rather, as new cards get added to the format it is far easier for spells to break through than creatures. This creates an imbalance in the arms race between aggro and control strategies. My hope is that moving forward we see more synergy driven aggressive creatures in the vein of Cloudfin Raptor to help bolster decks - and players - that like turning creatures sideways.

Back to the metagame at large. The various builds of Jeskai Midrange continue to succeed at a decent clip. Three main stripes have emerged. The first, Jeskai Trinket, is typified by the presence of Trinket Mage. The more popular (and arguably better) build is Jeskai Blink, leaning harder on Ephemerate. Jeskai Faeries is not as strong as the other builds and gets the moniker from running Spellstutter Sprite and other Faerie synergies. Flicker Tron continues to put up strong numbers.

Being blunt for a second, the strength of the prison Tron decks has me concerned for the long term health of the format. I think a Turbo Fog deck existing is good as a check for when beatdown gets too powerful. However, when Turbo Fog becomes a sustained dominant strategy, that chokes off an entire angle of attack in a metagame. The fail rate of these Tron decks is non-zero, but they are incredibly consistent and can often lock down a game starting turn four. If they are on the play against beatdown, that could mean game over.

The cut off for being featured this week is either a single Top 8 finish or four appearances across the 6 challenges. The three Jeskai decks listed before total 47 appearances - or around 25% of all decks represented across the last month and a half. All those loop Tron decks? 22 total appearances, or almost 11.5%. Burning-Tree Emissary does slightly better with 24 appearances and 12.5% of all Top 32 decks.

So going fast seems to be a way to win. If Jeskai is popular, and aggro beats Jeskai, the question that remains is how to defeat Tron? The answer is to sidestep combat damage. Stompy might struggle here, but Goblin Grenade is great and ending games. Fling - out of both Affinity and Hexproof - works. And then there's my personal favorite in Falkenrath Noble. 

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!

August 4th Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame - Updated

If you look at the deck that won the August 4th Pauper Challenge you'd think all was right in the world of commons. Stompy - a longtime powerhouse - beat a Bogle brew in the finals and took down two midrange decks on the way. Everything looks good above the surface. The rest of the iceberg, well, that isn't so pretty.

Pauper is currently an interesting beast. There is archetype diversity - that is, there are tons of discrete decks that seen play - but when looking at macro-archetypes, we are seeing a serious stratification. Over the five challenges since Core 2020, Jeskai Arcum's Astrolabe-Ephemerate decks have been the best strategy with Arcum's Astrolabe-Ephemerate- Ghostly Flicker Tron decks currently pacing for the silver medal. While aggressive strategies exist at the moment, they have a hard time keeping up with decks that can consistently blank the combat phase, cast Moment's Peace, or undo several turns of attacking thanks to  Weather the Storm. 

This is not the fault of any one card or interaction. Rather it's the cumulative effect of using the common slot to print highly synergistic cards for Limited environments and keeping the slot free from powerful pure offensive threats.

Let's use Modern Horizons as an example. The best creature to come out of the set, to this point, is Faerie Seer. It didn't earn this award on the back of its power in the red zone but rather because of how well it synergizes with both Spellstutter Sprite and Ninja of the Deep Hours. Compare this to other Modern Horizons cards seeded for strategies - Ephemerate and Winding Way. Ephemerate exists to help make the Blink deck work in draft and Winding Way exists to supplement the Golgari graveyard deck and the Gruul "lands in graveyard" archetype. Put them into Pauper and they take on completely different roles. 

Setting aside Winding Way for the moment I want to focus on Ephemerate. All the synergies it had in draft are dialed way past 11 in constructed. It is a two-card engine with Archaeomancer and its kin. That's not a problem in it of itself. Similarly, Arcum's Astrolabe is not a problem on its own but rather when you put it into the context of the existing Pauper environment things look different. 

So what about the creatures? The options for attacking pale in comparison to the reward for delaying the game. Even with an abundance of three-power two-drops available, the creatures get outclassed far too quickly to really matter past the first few turns. This is reflected in the challenge stats.

The minimal threshold for appearing in this chart is either a single Top 8 or three total Top 32 appearances. 

I want to focus on Weighted Volume. This is a newer metric based on this Frank Karsten column. It takes the total accumulated Win+ (an X-2 record is a Win+ of 1, X-1 is a W+ 2, etc) and then takes each individual deck's Win+ to extrapolate a weighted volume - that is, how much of the Top 16 records is a deck taking up (on average). The top two in this metric are Jeskai Trinket (typified by Trinket Mage) and Jeskai Blink (typified by a lack of Trinket Mage and a lack of Spellstutter Sprite). In fact, these two make up the bulk of Jeskai's success. Summing the macro-archetypes, we end up with a Top 10 that looks something like this:

Jeskai Astrolabe-Ephemerate makes up just about 16% of all Top 32s through five Challenges yet has over 25% of wins allocated to the Top 16. Loop Tron - that is any Tron deck that focuses on either an Ephemerate or Ghostly Flicker endgame - has over 14% of all Win+ score, topping it's actual volume by over 6%. 

When looking at the other top decks from this season, they all fall much more in line between their weighted volume and their actual volume. All of this is to say that the Jeskai and Tron decks are not only the best decks but are the best decks by a decently sized margin and that the decks that are trying to come for them are not nearly as strong.

So where does this leave Pauper? Right now, outside of an abundance over strong creatures coming in Throne of Eldraine I'm not sure. The incentive to have a dominating late-game is incredibly high and outside multiple threats on the magnitude of Insectile Aberration I do not see that changing outside of bans.

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!

EDIT: It was brought to my attention yesterday that my math was off. I didn't have a chance to check my calculations until today. Upon review, this is the corrected chart for macro-archetypes (and this time I grouped both Red Deck Wins and Goblins under the Goblins macro).

So what's changed? Quite a bit actually. Instead of seriously out performing their volume, both Jeskai and Loop Tron are merely performing above average. In fact, Loop Tron is punching above it's weight class in a manner similar to Affinity. 

This image of the metagame is far more healthy and diverse, even if concentrated at the top. All that being said, if an archetype is making up almost a quarter of al Top 32 decks and accounts for nearly 30% of wins above 32nd place, then that may be a sign of imbalance.
But imbalance is not the same as unhealthy. So things are not nearly as dire as I thought yesterday. On that note, I do want to leave this update with one more chart.

Blue is the weighted percentage of Win+, red is actual volume. 

What do you think about this chart?