See the breakout deck from this past weekend as its mastermind pilots it through the metagame! Now that the world knows about G/W Devotion, can it be beaten at #SCGDAL?
Despite my large number of feature matches at Grand Prix Miami, I figured some people might be interested in actually hearing me talk through my thought process with my current version of G/W Devotion, as well as seeing how people may be adjusting online and how things might look for the deck following its Grand Prix win.
I’ll be using exactly the list I wrote about this week:
My opponent’s fourth turn in game 1 was really devastating, and I never really recovered. It’s hard to beat Jeskai Ascendancy with three tokens when you can’t really interact with any of it. My opponent didn’t do anything in the second game, and in the third game I just had all the answers.
Round 2
It’s very hard to compete in the mirror when they have Nykthos and you don’t, and even harder when they have Whisperwood Elemental advantage. My opponent made some operational mistakes with Nykthos, or at least one significant one, but it wasn’t enough to matter. I didn’t mention it at the time, but the turn before I got wrathed, when I didn’t play Polukranos, it would have gone really badly for me if I had because my opponent could have flipped Polukranos in response and killed mine to counter the ability. I was losing either way, but it’s something to keep in mind.
I definitely sideboarded wrong. I needed to cut some combination of Elvish Mystic and Sylvan Caryatid. The mana creatures live, and after we have removal for big creatures, I just needed to make my deck higher impact.
Round 3
Mono-Red Aggro really is a pretty difficult matchup, especially when cards like Valorous Stance eat more sideboard slots that could otherwise go toward early defense. My draw in game 1 was nothing special, but it wasn’t bad. It felt like I wasn’t really in it. The Courser of Kruphix almost managed to take the game back if my opponent had missed for a turn or two, but it didn’t work out that way.
Things are quite a bit easier on the play, and my opponent’s draw in game 2 was horrible.
In game 3, my draw was pretty good, but I was way behind even before I got blown out by Act of Treason.
Round 4
In game 1, the gimmicky deck got me. That said, it’s a gimmick that might kind of make sense as a way to specifically exploit G/W Devotion, but it basically seems like a worse Jeskai Ascendancy Combo deck to me. I felt like games 2 and 3 showed the problems with my opponent’s deck. In game 2, I was able to answer the few big threats, and in game 3 I have to assume they lost essentially to their own inconsistency.
Act of Treason out of red decks is a reasonably scary adaptation, but it doesn’t seem like players are going to go far out of their way to deal with G/W. I think it will still do well at the Open Series in Dallas this weekend.
