Mythic Championship IV And SCG Columbus By The Numbers

Welcome all to another edition of Mox Insights! This week we’ve got a doubleheader of Mythic Championship IV and SCG Columbus, so let’s dive right in.

Mythic Championship IV

We’re grateful that Wizards of the Coast has continued their practice of releasing all the submitted decklists at Mythic Championships. From those records and pairings we’ve created our usual matchup pairings and plotting of the metagame, but considering the tremendous impact of the Hogaak decks on the format, we wanted to take an especially close look at those, as well as highlighting some of the deck selection errors that players made.

The week before Barcelona, it seemed like the Modern format was slowing down. Players were interested in playing Jund and Azorius Control and Eldrazi Tron, even as the rumors of Hogaak’s demise were making it apparent that Bridge from Below’s ban was not enough to depower the deck and in fact might have even improved it:

Talked through it on this week’s cast, but I think the Bridge from Below ban has effectively tricked everyone into building a better version of Bridgevine. Godspeed MC competitors.

— Bryan Gottlieb (@BryanGo) July 24, 2019

Piotr Glogowski then swept a Magic Online Challenge, going 12-0 with Hogaak. As players posted their decklists on social media following the Wednesday deck list submission deadline, it became clear that if you weren’t on Hogaak, you had to have known it was insanely good, as multiple teams independently shared on social media that they thought the deck was, as they say, “busted.”

The Best Deck in Modern

Let’s begin with the lumbering necropolis in the room, since the format is still revolving around Hogaak. Hogaak was one of the best-performing decks on Day 1, Day 2, and the entire combined event, and was by far the most popular deck. When we talk about theoretical best decks, that sweet spot in the upper-right-hand corner of our scatter plots, if you picked Hogaak for the weekend, you made the right choice.

We wanted to dial in specifically on the Hogaak builds and gain a better understanding of how they performed. Admittedly, as with most work we do, we’re drawing from small sample sizes, but there are some divergent things happening in the Hogaak builds that warrant attention.

Hogaak

Reid Duke

16th Place at Mythic Championship on 07-26-2019

Modern

Creatures (32)

• 4 Carrion Feeder
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Vengevine
• 4 Gravecrawler
• 2 Lotleth Troll
• 4 Satyr Wayfinder
• 2 Cryptbreaker
• 4 Stitcher's Supplier
• 4 Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis

Lands (19)

• 2 Swamp
• 3 Polluted Delta
• 2 Bloodstained Mire
• 2 Overgrown Tomb
• 2 Blood Crypt
• 2 Marsh Flats
• 2 Verdant Catacombs
• 2 Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1 Blooming Marsh
• 1 Nurturing Peatland

Spells (9)

• 3 Leyline of the Void
• 2 Lightning Axe
• 4 Faithless Looting

Sideboard

• 1 Leyline of the Void
• 1 Ancient Grudge
• 2 Thoughtseize
• 2 Nature's Claim
• 2 Abrupt Decay
• 3 Assassin's Trophy
• 2 Force of Vigor
• 2 Plague Engineer

Leyline of the Void and Insolent Neonate were two pivotal card choices for players. Unsurprisingly, Hogaak decks in the mirror with Leyline of the Void (two-plus copies) performed better than their counterparts with none. While this was certainly on some level a product of open decklists, some pro teams clearly anticipated that Hogaak would be the most busted thing you could be doing and came in prepared for the graveyard standoffs. What was most surprising, though, is how those decks that pre-sideboarded for the mirror fared against the rest of the format:

It seems that there’s practically no difference with your win rate versus the field whether you’re using Leyline of the Void in your maindeck or not. While the Mythic Championship is a closed field where players can anticipate a tighter, highly competitive metagame and there were open decklists, allowing you to determine if a Leyline of the Void in hand was effectively a mulligan or not, it might be that there’s no real cost to pre-sideboarding for the mirror: Hogaak decks are strong enough that they can survive having three potentially dead cards in their starting 60. And if we’re looking at a Hogaak arms race in the MCQ system, maindeck Leyline of the Void is a tremendous advantage that players cannot afford to ignore.

Hogaak

Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa

93rd Place at Mythic Championship on 07-26-2019

Modern

Creatures (31)

• 4 Carrion Feeder
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Hedron Crab
• 4 Vengevine
• 4 Gravecrawler
• 3 Satyr Wayfinder
• 4 Stitcher's Supplier
• 4 Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis

Lands (20)

• 1 Swamp
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 4 Bloodstained Mire
• 4 Gemstone Mine
• 2 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Watery Grave
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Verdant Catacombs

Spells (9)

• 2 Altar of Dementia
• 2 Lightning Axe
• 4 Faithless Looting
• 1 Fatal Push

Sideboard

• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 3 Thoughtseize
• 3 Nature's Claim
• 1 Collective Brutality
• 2 Fatal Push
• 2 Assassin's Trophy

Among the other things that players tried, we looked at Hedron Crab and Insolent Neonate. Hedron Crabs seemed to matter little to the particular win rate of Hogaak decks. However, players that still played Insolent Neonate fared poorly in mirror matches, going 31% in Hogaak mirrors compared to 69% with players who cut Insolent Neonate. We don’t want to ascribe too much to this particular tech choice, though, not as much as Leyline of the Void as a clear mirror breaker. Insolent Neonate might just simply not be necessary for success with the Hogaak decks and other tech cards like Leyline of the Void are likely more important.

Against the top decks, Hogaak preyed heavily upon all the midrange decks. If you were going to Barcelona with Eldrazi Tron or Jund or Azorius Control, you were going to be trampled. Hogaak decks are not even in the same realm of fair Magic. The best performing decks against Hogaak with large sample sizes were Humans and Urza, Lord High Artificer decks, but Mono-Red Phoenix and Hardened Scales also did well.

Even against the decks that Hogaak didn’t perform that well against, those decks are not significantly overperforming against Hogaak with one exception: Humans. This particular result we would want to put an asterisk next to, since open decklists have particular benefit for Humans players looking to not get run over in a crucial Game 1 against Hogaak. That said, the data of Humans performing well against Hogaak is consistent with our previous work on SCG Tour events and with SCG Columbus this past weekend (more on that later). Humans’s performance against Hogaak is not an aberration.

We would be remiss if we didn’t also break out briefly to discuss the DredgeGaak variants.

DredgeGaak

Roshen Eapen

43rd Place at Mythic Championship on 07-26-2019

Modern

Creatures (23)

• 3 Golgari Thug
• 4 Stinkweed Imp
• 2 Narcomoeba
• 4 Bloodghast
• 3 Prized Amalgam
• 4 Stitcher's Supplier
• 3 Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis

Lands (19)

• 4 Wooded Foothills
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Forgotten Cave
• 2 Gemstone Mine
• 2 Stomping Ground
• 2 Blood Crypt
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 3 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1 Copperline Gorge

Spells (18)

• 4 Life from the Loam
• 2 Conflagrate
• 4 Faithless Looting
• 4 Cathartic Reunion
• 4 Creeping Chill

Sideboard

• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 2 Lightning Axe
• 2 Thoughtseize
• 3 Nature's Claim
• 1 Abrupt Decay
• 2 Assassin's Trophy
• 1 Shenanigans

While this variant wasn’t impressive in the mirror, it boasted a vastly improved Humans matchup. As a Hogaak player, you should not sleep on this particular build of the deck and it deserves serious consideration as players adjust to the meta and attempt to move around Hogaak.

The Return and Re-Liberation of Karn

Mono-Green Tron won Mythic Championship IV. In retrospect, Mono-Green Tron seems like a very logical choice: as players moved back to midrange strategies in the face of Hogaak, Mono-Green Tron was an excellent countermove.

Mono-Green Tron

Thoralf Severin

1st Place at Mythic Championship on 07-26-2019

Modern

Creatures (9)

• 4 Wurmcoil Engine
• 2 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
• 3 Walking Ballista

Planeswalkers (6)

• 4 Karn Liberated
• 2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

Lands (19)

• 5 Forest
• 4 Urza's Tower
• 4 Urza's Power Plant
• 4 Urza's Mine
• 1 Sanctum of Ugin
• 1 Blast Zone

Spells (26)

• 3 Oblivion Stone
• 4 Sylvan Scrying
• 3 Chromatic Sphere
• 4 Chromatic Star
• 3 Relic of Progenitus
• 4 Expedition Map
• 1 All Is Dust
• 4 Ancient Stirrings

Sideboard

• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 2 Nature's Claim
• 2 Dismember
• 3 Thragtusk
• 1 Spatial Contortion
• 1 Warping Wail
• 1 Emrakul, the Promised End
• 1 Veil of Summer

The major difference in both Thoralf Severin’s list and the other top finishing Mono-Green Tron player’s list, Christian Hauck’s, was cutting Karn, the Great Creator and the attendant sideboard package entirely. These are the Tron decks that stood out from the pack. Yet we noted that Mono-Green Tron has not performed well in the previous months, never breaking a 50% win rate at numerous SCG Tour and Grand Prix events. Sure enough, Mono-Green Tron decks themselves on the whole performed to a sub-50% win percentage, consistent with what we had seen before from the deck.

From the data, it appears that Mono-Green Tron’s strength was being a strong Day 2 deck in the winner’s metagame.

Day 1 of Mythic Championship IV was a typical Mono-Green Tron underperformance. It underperformed against Hogaak, underperformed against the small metagame decks, and only performed slightly well against Eldrazi Tron and Humans. This might be that Day 1 is a crucible for Mono-Green Tron players, because when you get to Day 2, it becomes a different story:

Mono-Green Tron flips across the axis in terms of its performance, running into Hogaak and Izzet Phoenix and annihilating them this time around. This creates a small inconsistency in terms of Mono-Green Tron’s performance. One thing we can say confidently is that Eldrazi Tron’s performance continues to be poor against Hogaak. Our hypothesis is that Eldrazi Tron fares poorly where Mono-Green Tron does well against Hogaak due to the nature of how each Tron deck engages with the battlefield. While Eldrazi Tron emphasizes general accumulation of battlefield resources and traction, Mono-Green Tron takes over the battlefield with sweepers and a diversity of attacks on the Hogaak deck, especially when it stops trying to use Karn, The Great Creator as a threat.

How did Mono-Green Tron end up winning this? It appears that the Hogaak decks devoured themselves, leaving space for Mono-Green Tron’s prey of Eldrazi Tron, Jund, and Grixis Urza for Mono-Green Tron to coast on those favorable matchups. Enemies of Mono-Green Tron like Burn and Mono-Red Phoenix had a very bad Day 2, with Hogaak functioning almost as cover for Mono-Green Tron to win out on the day – of course, buoyed by Severin’s Draft record. It might be also that Day 1 eliminated the weaker-performing Tron decks, those still playing Karn, the Great Creator, while the tried and true Karn builds with Leyline of the Void in their sideboard overperformed. The sample sizes for this are regrettably extremely small to try to draw a conclusion from, but we can speculate. Above all, it’s important to contextualize Mono-Green Tron’s results from this weekend. While it came away with a trophy twice over, the actual win rate of the deck still says it’s an uninspired choice.

We wanted to highlight the two former kings of Modern, Izzet Phoenix and Humans. While these metagame shares are rather low for these two popular decks, especially Izzet Phoenix, we would encourage players to not be too down on either of these deck choices. Looking at Mythic Championship IV, it’s easy to see these decks as failing to perform, but both are very safe if uninspired options. If anything, Izzet Phoenix is underplayed compared to how well it performs against the field and the smaller portions of the metagame we don’t usually account for.

Both Humans and Izzet Phoenix struggled in Day 2, but Hogaak wasn’t the problem; all the poorly performing midrange decks dragged Izzet Phoenix down with them. Humans, in particular, seems well-positioned to fight Mono-Green Tron if players look at Severin’s victory as a reason to return to the deck. It might be that Hogaak has warped the metagame enough where Humans and Izzet Phoenix are not the closers they once were when you get to the winners’ metagame.

Here’s to the Losers, Bless Them All

If you packed Azorius Control, Jund, or Eldrazi Tron, this was not your weekend. Even though these were all strongly represented for a Mythic Championship – each was close to 10%, which is generally a signal that the pro player base respects and thinks the deck is a reasonable choice – these three in particular were thrashed over the entire weekend.

Of these poor performers, Jund was the biggest Cinderella story, but it came with a caveat: your only strong matchups were the other two players in the basement with you. In a way, Jund rose to the top of the heap by climbing on its fallen reactive-style brethren. Jund posted the biggest improvement in the conversion from Day 1 to Day 2, as the Humans players weaved through Day 1 and Jund found success especially against Humans.

This might be obvious when playing the deck, but we have the numbers to back it up: Wrenn and Six and Plague Engineer have definitively swung this matchup. Readers of previous Mox Insights articles might recall the breakdown we did on SCG Philadelphia. In that article, we proposed that Thoughtseize-based decks (like Jund or Mardu) fared poorly against Aether Vial decks. Jund seems to have solved the Humans matchup, but it still persists in doing poorly against the other prominent decks. It doesn’t seem as good against Izzet Phoenix as it has been perceived to be.

We discussed Eldrazi Tron briefly in our section on Mono-Green Tron, but we wanted to reiterate that Eldrazi Tron seems like a very middling choice moving forward. You could at least advance the argument that Mono-Green Tron deserves consideration when you look at the way it performs (appropriately designed, of course) against Hogaak and Izzet Phoenix and Humans. Eldrazi Tron has replicated the middling Tron performance that Mono-Green Tron is known for. Eldrazi Tron wants to play against Azorius Control and Burn. Neither deck is tremendously popular.

Where do we begin with Azorius Control? It was one of the worst-performing decks against the top-performing decks. Azorius Control posted negative win rates against Hogaak, against Eldrazi Tron, against Humans, against Jund… among the decks it did well against were Grixis Urza, Mono-Green Tron, and Dredge. Those aren’t big players right now, even if players pick up Mono-Green Tron hoping to copy Severin’s performance. Much like Jund, Azorius Control kept itself afloat by preying on decks with smaller metagame shares, but it struggled to hang with the most popular and powerful decks. Even Izzet Phoenix wasn’t a strongly favorable matchup for it. If you have a friend considering registering Azorius Control for an MCQ, you might want to detain them from trying. [CEDitor’s Note: Good luck stopping Shaheen!]

The Other Field of the Dead

This weekend was not only the Mythic Championship, though: it was also SCG Columbus. Would you believe that Hogaak also did well on Day 2 of SCG Columbus?

In a way, SCG Columbus had some of the same major takeaways of Barcelona, just delivered a little more intensely. Hogaak’s performance at SCG Columbus was even more dominating than it was in Barcelona, Jund and Eldrazi Tron performed even worse than they did in Barcelona, and Mono-Green Tron won it all.

Thanks to the time differential, players at SCG Columbus could see the strength of Hogaak decks and adopted variations on it themselves or played any of the other seemingly top-performing decks – Eldrazi Tron, Jund, Izzet Phoenix, Azorius Control. What was most interesting about SCG Columbus, however, was the presence of Amulet Titan. Amulet Titan’s matchup versus Hogaak isn’t as strong as it was against Dredge, but it seems to be passable. Most importantly, Amulet Titan preys on all the midrange decks that players were still locked in on prior to SCG Columbus, so it was able to post a solid performance on the day, narrowly missing getting a copy into the Top 16.

And just like in Barcelona, Mono-Green Tron was another call that did moderately well against the midrange decks.

Unsurprisingly, Hogaak deck extremely well even with the largest representation of any one deck. Izzet Phoenix and Humans performed better than they did in Barcelona. Mono-Red Phoenix curiously flamed out at SCG Columbus, posting slightly negative records against most of its opponents and diverging from the matchup data from Barcelona. It might be that the matchup is extremely close and difficult to navigate, but we’d probably put more stock in the Barcelona data that suggests Mono-Red Phoenix is a solid deck for fighting Hogaak.

Playing fair in Modern on the SCG Tour seems to continue to be a losing proposition. Will Jund players ever find a metagame to Thoughtseize their way through?

Moving Forward

Prior to Modern Horizons’s release, we would have called Humans and Izzet Phoenix as the top two decks in Modern. We’re of the opinion that Hogaak being banned is a matter of when, not if, so what will the format look like after that happens?

Humans and Izzet Phoenix are both still performing well in the Hogaak dominated metagame, albeit with smaller metagame share than they held prior to Modern Horizons. They don’t seem to be slowing down significantly even with Hogaak in the format; Humans especially likes having Hogaak in the format, whether you have open decklists or not.

For the midrange player, you’re in a particularly vulnerable spot: Wrenn and Six’s power boost to Jund hasn’t been enough to make it a serious contender against the format as a whole. Azorius Control’s performance at Barcelona was unimpressive, especially versus Hogaak. And Eldrazi Tron is extremely poorly positioned with a resurgence of Mono-Green Tron. Mono-Green Tron seems to be the biggest winner from this current Hogaak metagame. We don’t anticipate that continuing to be the case if players make the correct adjustments away from midrange strategies… but we doubt people will make those adjustments.

For those who are looking to try something new and prepare for a format post-Hogaak ban, we’d recommend any of the various permutations of Urza, Lord High Artificer decks. There is no strong consensus on the best design or tech choices outside of starting with four Arcum’s Astrolabe and four Urza. Experimenting with Urza strategies won’t cost you significantly against Hogaak, as the various Hogaak decks seem to be a good matchup for Urza and artifacts; Urza decks actually improved their win rate as they converted from Day 1 to Day 2 in Barcelona. Weak spots for these decks seem to be Azorius Control and Mono-Green Tron, so get cracking on strengthening those matchups.

As always, thank you for reading, and we’ll be back for SCG Dallas (perhaps with 20% less Hogaak!) with more Mox Insights.