This past week, there were over 700 MTGO results for Pioneer including league 5-0’s, Preliminary events, and Challenges. Among the over 700 results, there were clear top decks and some wild surprises that popped up, including winning one of the many challenges. Join me as I take a look at the past week’s Pioneer metagame data and evaluate what decks you’re likely to see overall on MTGO, what decks are finding success, and what the top winner’s metagame looks like heading into the upcoming RCQ season and Outlaws of Thunder Junction.

Looking at the Data

First, let’s look at the overall metagame, limited to decks that had at least two finishes this past week. This includes all instances of league 5-0s, all preliminary and challenge participants regardless of record or finish. With 700 total results, everything above 35 results accounts for 5% of the metagame and 70 results account for 10% of the overall metagame.

While these results make up the overall metagame of what you should expect to play against on MTGO, we can start to refine our data by removing the leagues and focusing on premier events including all preliminary and challenge results to see what players are bringing to more challenging events.

Once again, we will limit our data to decks with at least two results but know that there are plenty of one-of decks hiding out in the leagues and prelims. We once again see the same decks floating towards the top with Niv to Light and Abzan Amalia flipping from the overall results.

We continue to refine our data into the winner’s metagame. To me, this is the most important portion of the data, and it shows what decks are finding success with 4-0’s and 3-1’s in preliminary events and top 32’s of challenges. While looking at the overall metagame can be helpful to see what you may face and focusing in on the premier events will show what decks are making the leap from leagues to challenges, the winner’s metagame is the best place to look if you want to win your local events.

Here, we have consolidated enough that we can easily show every deck that found success this weekend. The biggest takeaway from this is that Vampires and Phoenix get even more percentage of the winner’s metagame with Vampires even pulling ahead of Phoenix. Niv continues to climb along with Amalia and Lotus Field as decks that are represented in the winner’s metagame at a higher rate than they show up in the overall metagame.

While the winner’s metagame doesn’t radically change the story of the overall metagame, we can clearly see that the top decks are converting those play-rate numbers into winning numbers and that even with targets on their backs, Vampires and Phoenix continue to find success.

Deck Highlights

Now that we’ve looked at the overall data, the premier data, and the winner’s metagame data, let’s highlight some interesting decks from among the data. I’ve grabbed a few decks that caught my eyes and fall into a few key categories:

Wildest 5-0 of the week

I’m a sucker for Pack Rat and any deck that can 5-0 with the rat in 2024 catches my eye. Once you look a little closer, you can see the power of Training Grounds and Enigma Jewel in a deck focused on activated abilities, especially with extra draw abilities from Spectral Sailor and Faerie Mastermind. Add in the staples of Fatal Push and Thoughtseize and it is clear that this deck has enough legs to warrant a run through a league or taking it to FNM.

Update to older archetypes

Here we see a solid 3-1 preliminary finish for Atarka Red. It’s been a while since we’ve seen this deck find any meaningful success, especially with the rise of Convoke as the cheap aggro deck of the format. But in looking at the updates to this list, seeing Ancient Imperiosaur as a four-of caught my eye, since it gives the deck a massive trampling threat with ward to help push through the final bit of damage.

The other benefit is that the Ancient Imperiosaur dodges all forms of damage-based removal since it should come down as a 10/10 at the least. When paired with Gleeful Demolition, you’re almost half-way to a two-mana 16/16. The real key here is pairing the Imperiosaur with Bushwacker to give it haste, much like how Recruiter can steal games for Convoke, this gives you ways to outsize even Vein Rippers and more.

Competitive risers

Izzet Ensoul has been one of the highest performers in leagues recently with 23 results, but as we move towards preliminaries and challenges, we see those numbers fall a little, and even more so in the winner’s metagame. I suspect that Ensoul is a deck that hasn’t quite gotten the love it deserves, but with the deck winning the 64-player challenge on April 6th, I fully expect more players to carryover the deck from leagues to premier events. Expect to see more Ensoul this week as players want to see if there’s more than one Izzet deck to play at the top of the metagame.

Quintorius Combo started catching fire in Explorer recently, especially with the top result from the Arena Championship, so it doesn’t surprise me that this deck has started to show up more in Pioneer. With the ability to combo kill opponent on turn four, you have the power-level to compete in Pioneer. We’re continuing to see refinement of the lists and more consistent results as people get more confident and comfortable with this deck and if players start moving towards a ship’s in the night style metagame, Quint combo is a great option to consider.

Surprise Challenge Winner – Jeskai control

We’ve seen plenty of Azorius Control recently including challenge wins and top 8s, but overall, it is still struggling to put away Phoenix and Vampires. This new build of Jeskai Control that won the 32-player challenge on April 7th looks to improve your matchup spread by adding in powerful red cards like Torch the Tower for Phoenix and Amelia, Lightning Helix to help with Heroic, and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker for overall quality and value.

Given this is a Yorion shell, there’s plenty of room for extra spells and upping the overall removal suite and power-level through Fable is a great idea. I’ve liked Azorius Control a lot, especially since you have such a good Amelia matchup, but adding in these extra tools to help against aggro and grind through midrange decks can help take Azorius to the next level and content with the other top decks of the format.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, the past week in Pioneer on MTGO! We had over 700 results to make up the Pioneer Metagame and while there were some clear contenders at the top of the winner’s metagame, we still saw some rogue decks stealing challenges. Heading into this week in Pioneer, be sure to plan for Vampires, Phoenix, Niv, Amalia, and Lotus Field and continue to innovate – we’ve seen it pay off this week and several times over the past few weeks.