Welcome to the Mox Insights breakdown on SCG Indianapolis, featuring Throne of Eldraine. Once again, a new expansion has had a profound effect on the metagame of Modern, but this particular Modern metagame is also still adjusting from the banning of Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis and Faithless Looting. Let’s begin!
Once Upon a Meta
| Amulet Titan | 3-3 | 5-5 | 4-5 | 3-2 | 5-5 | 4-2 | 1-3 | 3-0 | 0-1 | 1-0 | 2-2 | 1-1 | 1-1 | 0-1 | 2-0 | 3-0 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jund | 3-3 | 3-7 | 4-4 | 3-5 | 2-4 | 1-5 | 2-1 | 3-0 | 0-2 | 1-0 | 2-0 | 1-1 | 2-1 | 0-4 | – | 0-1 | |
| Mono-Green Tron | 5-5 | 7-3 | 4-5 | 4-4 | 3-3 | 0-2 | 0-2 | 2-0 | 2-0 | 3-1 | 2-0 | 1-2 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 1-1 | |
| Urza Ascendancy | 5-4 | 4-4 | 5-4 | 3-4 | 4-2 | 0-7 | 2-3 | 2-2 | 3-0 | 4-0 | 1-3 | 2-2 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 0-1 | 2-1 | |
| Burn | 2-3 | 5-3 | 4-4 | 4-3 | 1-3 | 3-4 | 2-5 | 2-7 | 2-5 | 0-2 | 1-2 | 0-2 | 1-0 | 4-1 | 2-0 | 1-0 | |
| Urza Outcome | 5-5 | 4-2 | 3-3 | 2-4 | 3-1 | 2-1 | 2-0 | 0-1 | – | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 2-0 | 0-2 | – | 0-1 | |
| Grixis Death’s Shadow | 2-4 | 5-1 | 2-0 | 7-0 | 4-3 | 1-2 | – | 2-2 | 2-1 | – | 0-2 | 0-1 | – | 1-0 | – | 0-1 | |
| Eldrazi Tron | 3-1 | 1-2 | 2-0 | 3-2 | 5-2 | 0-2 | – | 1-1 | 0-1 | 1-0 | – | – | 0-1 | 0-1 | – | 0-2 | |
| Humans | 0-3 | 0-3 | 0-2 | 2-2 | 7-2 | 1-0 | 2-2 | 1-1 | 0-1 | 1-0 | – | – | – | – | – | – | |
| Four-Color Whirza | 1-0 | 2-0 | 0-2 | 0-3 | 5-2 | – | 1-2 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | – | 1-0 | 0-1 | 0-1 | 0-1 | 2-0 | |
| Azorius Control | 0-1 | 0-1 | 1-3 | 0-4 | 2-0 | 0-1 | – | 0-1 | 0-1 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 1-1 | 0-3 | – | – | – | |
| Jund Death’s Shadow | 2-2 | 0-2 | 0-2 | 3-1 | 2-1 | 0-1 | 2-0 | – | – | – | 1-0 | – | 0-1 | – | – | – | |
| Azorius Stoneblade | 1-1 | 1-1 | 2-1 | 2-2 | 2-0 | 0-1 | 1-0 | – | – | 0-1 | 1-1 | – | 0-2 | – | – | – | |
| Bant Snowblade | 1-1 | 1-2 | 0-1 | 0-1 | 0-1 | 0-2 | – | 1-0 | – | 1-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 2-0 | – | – | – | |
| TitanShift | 1-0 | 4-0 | 0-1 | 1-0 | 1-4 | 2-0 | 0-1 | 1-0 | – | 1-0 | – | – | – | – | – | 0-1 | |
| Titanshift | 0-2 | – | 1-0 | 1-0 | 0-2 | – | – | – | – | 1-0 | – | – | – | – | – | – | |
| Dredge | 0-3 | 1-0 | 1-1 | 1-2 | 0-1 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 2-0 | – | 0-2 | – | – | – | – | 1-0 | – | |
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Amulet Titan
|
Jund
|
Mono-Green Tron
|
Urza Ascendancy
|
Burn
|
Urza Outcome
|
Eldrazi Tron
|
Humans
|
Four-Color Whirza
|
Azorius Control
|
Jund Death’s Shadow
|
Azorius Stoneblade
|
Bant Snowblade
|
TitanShift
|
Titanshift
|
Dredge
|
| 80 | |
| 70 | |
| 60 | |
| 50 | |
| 40 | |
| 30 | |
| 20 |
Let’s begin by laying out the matchup matrix as a launching point for describing what happened in the tournament. Something to note in reading these charts: we plot these right to left and top to bottom in terms of popularity, so if you’re a deck like Jund and you see a lot of red on the left and all your blue is on the middle or right, that’s a visual shorthand for, “Your deck isn’t doing well in the winner’s metagame.” Amulet Titan and Jund were the two most-represented decks in Day 2 of SCG Indianapolis, but they diverged in terms of how they fared Day 2. Amulet Titan posted a 55% winrate as one of the most popular decks in the tournament. In contrast, Jund brought up the rear, barely getting a 45% winrate over Day 2.
Jund’s failure is, as per usual, Mono-Green Tron’s success. Mono-Green Tron had a more diversified spread of matchups than Amulet Titan did, splitting a number of matches until it got down to smaller parts of the metagame pie. Mono-Green Tron was supposed to have a good matchup versus the various flavors of Urza decks, but based on Day 2, it only did medium against the Jeskai Ascendancy and Paradoxical Outcome variations. For Whirza builds, however, that seemed to bear out. This Day 2 could have looked very different for Mono-Green Tron if it didn’t have all this Jund to prey upon.
Among the Urza decks (Whirza, Urza Ascendency with Paradoxical Outcome, Urza without Ascendency and just Paradoxical Outcome), there wasn’t a strong deviation between the Ascendancy and strict Outcome builds in terms of their matchup spread, although Urza Ascendency decks seem to be the best out of all the Urza decks at winning the Urza mirror, while Urza Outcome decks slightly edged out Urza Ascendency in the field. The biggest downside for those Urza Ascendency decks? They ran into a brick wall of Grixis Death’s Shadow matchups on Day 2.
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (17)
Spells (27)
It’s a very basic build, very close to what Michael Rapp recently made the elimination rounds of back to back Players’ Tour Qualifiers with. But that mixture of disruption and aggression is what the Urza Ascendency decks struggle with. Grixis Death’s Shadow also did well against Jund, generally doing fine against the most popular decks at SCG Indianapolis.
Burn and Humans were two of the other significant archetypes we wanted to discuss. Humans’s best matchup of the tournament was Burn. Against the top decks, it did very poorly, which is not a strong reason to continue bringing Humans to tournaments where the metagame is more predictable. More on Humans later.
We might have reached the point where Burn is no longer a fairly well-positioned deck. Players have appropriately tuned their decks to give themselves a fighting chance if not beat Burn outright. While Burn split most of its most common matchups on Day 2, this leaves it in the unenviable position similar to Mono-Green Tron; if those decks are your only decks in Modern, tune them appropriately for the metagame. But if you have options, you should have a strong reason for picking those decks to bring to a tournament. As a Mono-Green Tron or Burn player, you need to be considering your most favorable matchups and the positioning of those decks. For example, consider the re-tuned Mono-Green Tron lists with maindeck copies of Thragtusk. What once could be a reliable pairing is now much more precarious for Burn players.
Looking across the entire tournament, this presents a quandary of data for you to pick and choose from. While Humans performed very well as its overall win rate, it failed against the top three most popular decks. As a Humans player, you’re going to need to pick and choose your spot when taking them out or tuning your sideboard more effectively. Amulet Titan hit that sweet spot for best performing deck in the tournament considering metagame share and win rate, but it posted an even spread across most of those top matchups, without a strong reason for it to excel. Tightly behind Amulet Titan were Urza Ascendency and Mono-Green Tron. Looking at Day 2 of SCG Indianapolis, there’s plenty of good decks to choose from that give you a shot in the Modern metagame. We dare say it’s probably one of the healthiest points the Modern metagame has had in quite some time, if you saw Faithless Looting decks as a problem.
And yes, that’s Azorius Control at the very bottom. Most of the time, decks that do that poorly aren’t popular enough to be represented on this graph.
Into the Story of Throne of Eldraine
While Once Upon a Time had received a lot of buzz and discussion about how it could impact Amulet Titan, Mono-Green Tron, TitanShift and other big mana decks, there are quite a few minor new players to Modern that are worth highlighting for future exploration. Sam Black build-around with Mystic Sanctuary is just the beginning of what players will be experimenting with.
The real overperformer from this tournament? Oko, Thief of Crowns. There was barely any time for Oko to become a sideboard powerhouse in the Urza decks, offering them a new angle of attack. How good was that angle of attack? It was enough for a ten-point swing in terms of matchups between Urza decks that were playing Oko, Thief of Crowns in comparison to the Urza decks that were not.
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Urza decks with Oko, Thief of Crowns in 75 |
Match Win Percentage |
|
4 Okos |
67% |
|
3 Okos |
56% |
|
2 Okos |
57% |
|
No Okos |
43% |
Decks that ran Oko, Thief of Crowns in their maindeck had a 62% win rate on the deck. Of the decks that ran Oko in the main and side, their win rate was 64%. We are just beginning to see the impact of Oko on Throne of Eldraine Standard. In his short time in Modern, he’s already become the sixth-most-played planeswalker in Magic Online Modern 5-0 League results.
Just as big as Oko is for the archetype of Urza decks, there’s also The Royal Scions for Grixis Death’s Shadow decks.
|
Grixis Death’s Shadow Version |
Match Win Percentage |
|
With The Royal Scions |
62% |
|
Without The Royal Scions |
42% |
These are just Day 2 sample sizes, but we would encourage you to add The Royal Scions to your Grixis Death’s Shadow lists based on these numbers. It seems pure upside.
Happily Ever After
Before we preview what’s coming, we wanted to briefly discuss the upcoming Banned & Restricted announcement set for next week Monday. We anticipate that there will be a Field of the Dead ban in Standard, but there has been some speculation around banning Urza, Lord High Artificer and/or Mox Opal. Looking at the results from SCG Indianapolis, Urza-based decks are clearly popular: combined, all the Urza decks were twice as much as the most represented archetype in Day 2 (Amulet Titan or Jund, each with twelve decks). But their win rates were not dominant, within a sweet spot of 50-55%. If there was concern about the Urza decks, we would hope to see a greater reason for those bans. In fact, there’s quite a bit of diversity among the Urza players in terms of their approach. Urza, Lord High Artificer is clearly a powerful card, but looking at SCG Indianapolis, the numbers aren’t there to suggest the need to take action in Modern.
It is theoretically possible that Mox Opal becomes a target for a ban in the future, since Mox Opal is a critical component of the consistency of the Urza decks’ engine and allows fudging on the alleged soft rule of Modern not allowing Turn 3 kills. And after Faithless Looting, nothing is safe. We would encourage people to be more reasonable about their calls for the banning of Urza, Lord High Artificer or Mox Opal. Modern is still developing from Throne of Eldraine – we’re excited to see what archetypes Oko, Thief of Crowns might open up, for example – and the banning of Faithless Looting has caused graveyard decks to experiment with new enablers. With SCG Regionals coming up this weekend, we might see more good performances from the deck. That’s okay. Sometimes, it’s okay to have a really good deck in the format.
We’ll be back at the end of October for SCG Atlanta and further development of what is shaping up to be a very exciting Modern meta. We’ll see you then with more Mox Insights!