Magical Hack: Deconstructing Regionals

In our search for up-to-the-minute technology, the network that allows for us to see new and breaking decklists for tournaments within just a few days of an event’s completion has pretty much spoiled us entirely. The U.S. (and others) Regional Championships were almost two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a lot of tournament reports about things like the Dovescape version of Ghazi-Glare, and all sorts of fun wackiness. New and interesting things were promised in the weeks leading up to Regionals, and now that Standard has officially broken out its wide-open metagame we’re twiddling our thumbs waiting for the Wizards Information Network to provide us with the results and sweet, sweet decklists for every tournament. Two weeks is a long time to wait, and those of us who are not Michael J. Flores have to wait until his article comes out to see the greater picture.

Fortunately, for the readers of this article, that was yesterday. For the writer of this article, that is either tomorrow or today, but man that’s really pushing the deadline. Deadlines exist to be pushed, though… right, Craig? [Hmm… – Craig.] Fortunately, the observant might have noticed that around 4:00 on Wednesday afternoon, StarCityGames posted links to all of the Regionals decklists on their sidebar, allowing for a reasonably simple numerical analysis, even if a more in-depth analysis might prove a bit clunky.

All of the elimination-round decks can be found here for your perusal; the final tally by archetype was liberally borrowed from Mike’s Thursday article on MagictheGathering.com, which can be found here.

That’s a lot of decks. Where to begin?

Two weeks ago, just before Regionals, I wrote an article entitled Dispelling The Beatdown Metagame Myth, which went into an analysis of the format. It started with its precursors and followed through logically to apply Dissension to it all, figuring out whether the notion of this year’s Regionals as a beatdown metagame was accurate. In the end I determined that there were likely to be near 50% aggro decks, as a reasonably safe guesstimate, and that this year was a beatdown metagame, just not for the reasons everyone was assuming. Beatdown wasn’t going to be in vogue because “the format is new,” or “beatdown is easier to play,” or “beatdown evolves first,” or “beatdown means you can grab lunch in between rounds instead of slugging it out to the last minute every time.” All of these things may or may not be true… but in the end the good decks win, and the bad decks don’t. Beatdown was due to be prevalent because beatdown was good, between Ghost Husk and the various flavors of Hand decks, and with both Zoo and Heezy Street besides.

Count up a tally of the above by archetype and you see the following:

In summation, without the by-deck breakdown where you can see what sketchy decisions I made when classifying a deck as one thing or another… Any Greater Good deck was listed as a Control deck, except for Ghazi-Good, which is basically just a beatdown deck with Greater Good added in; “Aggro-Ideal” is a Control deck, while Enduring Ideal isn’t because one has Wrath of God and the other has Seething Song; “misc.” decks tended to be assigned a controlling role, under the presumption that they probably worked that way if they even worked at all… all sorts of slight biases that could be interpreted a few ways.

Never mind that the final tally is an odd number, and so clearly at least one deck has been missed somewhere in there. The number of decks qualifying is an even number, so whichever deck was lost in the shuffle was at least a deck that didn’t win a Nationals slot wherever it was played. Here we see beatdown present at just over the fifty-percent mark, a minimal combo presence (where combo was Owling Mine, Seething Song-powered Ideal decks, and Heartbeat decks), and “the rest” being control decks at forty percent strength in the metagame. I’d expected a bit more Heartbeat, but hey… for all we know the Swiss had more Heartbeat decks, and they couldn’t penetrate the sea of Black/White aggro decks. One flavor or another of B/W Aggro is admittedly Heartbeat’s worst matchup, and as I’d said going into Regionals, Heartbeat would be an acceptable choice in the hands of a strong player knowledgeable in how to win the B/W Aggro matchup and equipped with the proper tools to do so, but a poor choice otherwise. I certainly wouldn’t consider it worthy of enough attention to try and figure out sideboard cards specifically for the Heartbeat mirror, which was reflected in my choice of decklists for a final Heartbeat list exactly two weeks ago in my Magical Hack preview of Regionals.

When you look at depth of penetration, combo pretty much stayed the same, beatdown dropped off a little and control picked up a little, in the instances where making the Top 8 wasn’t quite good enough to qualify you for Regionals. Control caught up on beatdown in the elimination rounds, and that’s probably because the control decks that made the cut were better prepared to face aggro decks than the usual bumper crop of control decks we tend to see… lots of Wrath of God-based decks, and even the Blue-Red control decks had a higher level of Wildfires than usual. And yes, that is egg on Mike Flores‘ face, for saying that Izzetron with Wildfire was abysmal when it far outpaced Izzetron-without-Wildfire in this beatdown-heavy metagame. But then, I have a Polaroid of Mike Flores which cryptically has “Teddy – Don’t Believe His Lies” written beneath it; I suspect I was trying to remind myself of something, but I don’t know what. We can’t all be right all the time; I’d predicted that Magnivore decks would drop off in the face of a strong beatdown metagame, only to see it flourish as the predominant controlling strategy of the bunch as far as sheer numbers in the Top 8 are concerned.

For our second time running with numbers, I wanted to have a look at the color combinations being played to figure out whether there were any clear advantages in the colors being played at Regionals. My suspicion walking into the whole shebang was that White was going to be the color most predominantly played, because it matches up in B/W Aggro decks, most breeds of controlling decks, and Zoo and plenty of other beatdown strategies besides. Savannah Lions and Isamaru make a wonderful team for a lot of beatdown concepts, and I expected that to be displayed at Regionals: either the two-power pair or Wrath of God were likely to show up in the greatest number of decks overall.

Breaking it down, we see:

Say whatever you want, but White ruled the roost at Regionals. Well over half the decks making the cut to Top 8 played White, and as strong a percentage advanced to win a slot to Regionals. Blue was next up behind White, with a very small percentage lead coming into the Top 8 and a slight improvement at qualification… while Red and Green were next up, and Black last actually in terms of presence in the Top 8. This may be due to the fact that Blue/Black is a sorely under-represented color combination, and Black/Green only really seeing play in controlling strategies… and Black/Red is only really seeing play in aggressive strategies, and very limited play at that. Black is under-represented here because there are few color combinations you’d play it in that deserve respect, pretty much Godless Shrine all the way… and so it’s riding the other colors’ coat-tails, who all have at least two viable color combinations worth considering and all sorts of different strategies worth pursuing across the board. Black makes up for its seeming scarcity with its staying power, as it improves by 5% for slots taken, second place only to White despite being fifth overall in Top 8 appearances. Green takes a nose-dive, dropping from the middle of the pack to a miserable last-place finish for slots taken, and it rarely ever takes the slot when paired with the best color of Magic, as various Ghazi-based decks that didn’t push through the Top 8 can show: “just” G/W Ghazi-Glare / Chord / Good made ten appearances, with zero invites to show for it. If you can’t even win with the best on your team, it’s time to reconsider whether you should be on the team.

So, Regionals in a nutshell: there are a lot of good decks out there, and plenty of strategies worth pursuing, but there is a strongly disproportionate split saying that beatdown is prevalent in the metagame. Likewise, there are five good colors of Magic… but one is clearly king of the roost, and one is clearly in the doghouse. Time to develop the metagame further will likely balance the colors out closer towards even, because there are plenty of good non-White decks, and the development of the U/G and B/R guilds as things get figured out will help bring the other four colors up and drag White down to be just another player. Whether Green can push through its qualification issues, however… that’s a story for another time, and as the Regionals season develops across the world I’m sure this will be revisited.

There are a lot of good things to look at… but despite Flores saying that “most” of the multicolored Ghazi-based decks looked like the Dovescape deck designed by Clan Cymbrogi and brought to a Nationals slot by Nick Eisel, in fact that was the only Dovescape deck I saw like that, with the others usually splashing Black for such hits as Cranial Extraction, Culling Sun, and Okiba-Gang Shinobi out of the sideboard. Ghazi-Scape will likely develop well, thanks to its tutoring power and sheer mass of powerful cards, and given my experiences with U/W I figure U/W control will continue to evolve and grow and succeed as a foil to the beatdown metagame. My particular version is one I find especially good against beatdown decks, with Descendant of Kiyomaro main, but even the incredibly slow U/W decks killing with Windreaver were making Top 8 and even qualifying for Nationals… so it just goes to show even an imperfect fit, like mine and like theirs, can still do the job “well enough” so long as you’re bringing anti-creature cards to a creature-packed metagame. The rumors that Dissension cards wouldn’t be seen outside of the dual lands has already been proven wrong, because I saw a lot of maindeck Spell Snares as I was paging through all of the decks, and more than a few Condemns, too.

Which might explain why even Ghost Dad is good, ten million years after its extinction…

Sean McKeown
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