I’m playing in my first Mythic Championship tomorrow.
Despite winning a qualification for Mythic Championship IV in Barcelona a few months ago, I received a last-minute discretionary invite to #MythicChampionshipIII, which comes a few weeks beforehand. While the invite is an incredible honor and I’m incredibly excited to be playing in the event, it’s Best-of-Three Standard, a format I’d all but planned to write off after the Season One Invitational a couple of weeks ago.
The plan for the event was to work with Autumn Burchett, and not really work with anybody else, as corporate red tape made it difficult to talk to anybody about the fact that I would be competing. With a squad of two, and a fairly small amount of time to actually prepare for the event, it became apparent that it would be best to take a page out of Andrew Elenbogen’s book:
Competitive Magic is the art of correctly generalizing from sample sizes too small to draw real conclusions.
— Andrew Elenbogen (@Ajelenbogen) January 10, 2019
Autumn and I were on a fairly similar wavelength. Standard is fairly wide-open at the moment, and it wasn’t particularly realistic to try to test every single variant of every archetype. Decklists were due the weekend after SCG CON Summer, so we planned to do the bulk of our testing the week after, using the results from the event and the previous weekend’s Grand Prix in order to inform our decision of how to metagame a small tournament.
Going into the Season One Invitational, we worked together on a version of Esper that was specifically pointed towards the Gruul decks that had succeeded the previous weekend, as well as red variants. Esper has been the de facto fair deck of the format and is naturally going to be a front-runner as the safe option for any serious tournament. Without having put in a ton of work in yet, this is what we submitted:
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (11)
Lands (25)
Spells (22)
The specifics of the list aren’t important, but what matters for this list is it gave Autumn and me a starting context as a lens through which we could look at the format. Esper has a good number of tools in order to fight specific strategies, and each variation of the deck was going to be including or eschewing specific tools in order to try to gain edges against a given archetype.
At the beginning of the format, it was a pretty common line of thought that either Simic Nexus or Mono-Red Aggro would dominate the format, but that hasn’t been the case because there are so many powerful answers to every card type and strategy.
What does this mean?
This means that for something as top-heavy as #MythicChampionshipIII, it’s going to be best to try to call a shot in order to win the event. To summarize this point: the difference between a bad result and an okay result isn’t incredibly large – not to knock $5,000, of course because that’s a ton of money. A great result, on the other hand, can be worth as much as $100,000. When there isn’t a ton of downside to calling a shot wrong, but obviously a huge amount of upside to calling it right, players are heavily incentivized to try to come in exactly first.
Taking this into account, Autumn and I set out to find an exploitable hole in the format, preferably with a card or engine that has proven itself as powerful.
Early on, we determined the pillars of the format that carried the best ratio of proven-themselves-as-resilient and customizable were Arclight Phoenix; Teferi, Time Raveler; and Nissa, Who Shakes the World.
Our biggest priority was being able to play a deck that would have a reasonable matchup against the Esper variants, while also having game across the rest of the expected metagame. We wrote off aggressive decks early in the testing process because they had been struggling in the greater metagame. On top of that, if any other players ended up trying to beat up on specifically the Gruul and Mono-Red decks, as we had for the Season One Invitational, we didn’t feel we could come up with a way to navigate those matchups to a positive place in the time we had available to us.
Autumn had a good bit of experience with Arclight Phoenix due to their playing it at the MOCS, and after Brad Carpenter and Andrew Jessup’s great performance with it over SCG CON Summer weekend, it was hard not to be interested in trying the deck.
Creatures (12)
Lands (8)
Spells (40)
The biggest draw to Arclight Phoenix is that it is quite good at killing opposing planeswalkers. All jokes about Snare Thopter aside, the deck doesn’t need to be functioning at 100% in order to just cast a 3/2 with flying and haste in order to start pressuring cards that are pressuring the axis that the deck tries to operate on.
The biggest problem we found with Phoenix was primarily how hard it struggled against the Esper decks before sideboard. The deck performed fine in several other matchups, but we expected Teferi, Time Raveler to occupy a large chunk of the metagame, and we weren’t comfortable overloading on Finale of Promise as a result.
This put us in a spot where, if nothing else knocked our socks off, we could look back at Izzet Phoenix and spend time tuning it, but without being sure that we’d find something we like, sinking a bunch of time into tuning the deck was a fairly large ask.
After our Esper testing that led up to the Season One Invitational, Autumn and I had some fairly crystallized opinions on Esper. They’ll have an article on it tomorrow, so I don’t want to go too deep into this, but the short version is that we were expecting a large quantity of Esper decks to be coming this weekend, and it being Public Enemy No. 1 wasn’t a secret. This meant that we needed to have some sort of mirror breaker (outside of the expected Hero of Precinct One) and be prepared for other people’s mirror tech.
Outside of the Esper decks, most of the Teferi decks in the format had warped to also play Nissa, Who Shakes the World, which segues into the decks that occupied a large chunk of most of our testing:
Creatures (18)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (9)
Spells (25)
Sideboard
The Mass Manipulation decks played fairly well in our testing, especially for the metagame we were expecting. Because we were already operating under the impression that we wouldn’t be playing against many aggro decks, the Angel package offered by the Bant deck wasn’t worth the cost of the manabase, and the good draws from these decks were incredible against the control-leaning midrange decks that planned to use permanents in order to accrue card advantage.
The way that the Mass Manipulation; Nissa, Who Shakes the World; and Tamiyo, Collector of Tales package is able to fight against the Esper strategies was incredibly attractive. Unfortunately, with Collins Mullen doing so well at the Invitational, the deck wasn’t exactly a secret, so Autumn and I wanted to find a way to possibly go over the top in the mirror.
While brainstorming ideas of how to go incredibly over-the-top within the parameters of what we’d set out to build, we both jokingly brought up the classic Simic Nexus variants from the early stages of the format.
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (13)
Spells (42)
This list was originally based on Adam “Yoman5” Hernandez’s list from the Top 8 of Summer Championships. Autumn and I both hadn’t originally planned to sink a bunch of time into it.
Just a few games, we said. “We’ll play until we get crushed and then move on.”
Except we both played it for an entire day, and lost a total of seven matches between us, while laddering on Arena, with Autumn reaching the Top 10 rankings among Mythic players. When we regrouped, we came to a handful of conclusions as to the reason that Nexus was performing so well for the both of us:
Although Teferi interacts favorably against Wilderness Reclamation, it did a lot of work pushing out counterspells in the format. It’s considered fairly radical right now to play anything other than a few Dovin’s Vetoes or Negates. Spell Pierce shows up at times as well, but that isn’t a huge problem for a big mana deck that’s planning on prolonging the game as it is.
Gruul Aggro, specifically the version with Living Twister, has made it a very difficult place to be a Ghitu Lavarunner. At the beginning of the format, Mono-Red Aggro was one of the decks that exploited the perceived dominance of the Simic Nexus decks. With Mono-Red Aggro being pushed out, Simic’s worst matchup was very underrepresented.
Most of the removal that people are playing right now is specifically oriented towards answering planeswalkers. During the first week of War of the Spark Standard, people weren’t leaving home without a good number of answers to Wilderness Reclamation. With Reclamation on the decline, and no real enchantments that aren’t answerable by Teferi seeing much play, people aren’t as interested in committing sideboard real estate to cards like Mortify, Demystify, or Crushing Canopy.
All of this has come together to convince Autumn and me that Simic Nexus is the best way to go over the top of the slower fair decks that people are bringing. We have sideboard plans that respect how strong both Teferi and Narset can be at times and hope to capitalize on the number of dead cards that people will have in the matchup during pre-sideboard games.
Hopefully my next article will have “*1st*” in the title, but regardless, I feel good about our prep going into this event, giving the time constraints we had to operate under, as well as our reasoning for arriving where we did. At this point, the metagame breakdown seems fairly favorable for us.
Now we just gotta play the games.