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“But, Romeo,” you say, since no one but my Momma calls me Chris,”I’m not gonna have any fun if I don’t win a few matches.” So, build a deck that has a great record against what you think the most prominent decks will be. In other words, as our Esteemed Editor wrote about in his last piece, create a metagame deck. “What’s a possible metagame deck look like,” you ask? Oh, I have theories, yes indeed…

Despite my hopes and wishes, Arcbound Ravager is just flooding the field. This is by no means breaking news to anyone who has played in a Type Two tournament lately. Regardless, it’s still upsetting. I don’t plan on whining about how this and that should be banned, because that accomplishes nothing. Instead, I would like to give everyone a quick update on Lynch Mob and let everyone know how the deck has evolved in light of the newest changes in the metagame. Oh, and I’d also like to fill you in on a competitive Darksteel Reactor deck. No, I’m not kidding, so click the link already…

Here is the thing: I’ve saved talking about this deck for awhile, mostly because I think it is one of the more powerful choices for Regionals and I like to save the better decks (and Rogue decks) for later, if possible. The thing is that I think people are severely underestimating this deck, and I would like to bring it back into the limelight.

Whenever a new set comes out, a freakish occurrence spills into the Magic world. Players completely forget everything they knew before the metagame shifted. Or at least, it seems like writers live in that world, and the rest of us sit there wondering what’s going on. People discuss matchups that have already been discussed three or four hundred times before. I haven’t yet seen a name for this phenomenon, but I’m sure we’re all pretty familiar with it. Hopefully, I can avoid that. I am going to talk about a previously known archetype that never pushed above tier 2 in the previous format, but it’s been changed by Darksteel enough that it’s reasonably interesting.

Thanks to the recent French and German Regionals, we now have a first glance at what the metagame for the U.S. Regionals may look like, and it’s pretty much what was expected: Ravager-Affinity, R/W Slide, and Goblin Bidding. There are a few other culprits (like the quite fun and imaginative”Rat Deck Wins” coming from the French side of things), but those three aforementioned decks pretty much comprise the foundation of your testing gauntlet. What I want to look at today is a deck that may have game against all three of the decks above: R/G Control.