Decklists are due for this season’s US Regional Championship in 9 days, so right now is the perfect time to get a good snapshot of what the expected MtG Pioneer meta will be for one of the most important tournaments of the year for this format. The average player doesn’t partake in the old-as-time tradition of “last minute audibling to a new deck”, so what players have sleeved up right now, is going to be a very good approximation of what the field is going to look like.

Src (https://observablehq.com/@qonfused/mtg-metagame)

azorius control is SO back

The biggest change to the Pioneer meta since the last time I wrote anything is definitely UW control and it’s crazy good winrate. It seems that players have figured out that High Noon is a really good answer to Phoenix, Spell-based aggro decks, and even more niche decks like Lotus or Devotion. All of these decks have generally been bad matchups for UW Control, but having a single 2 mana card that slows the game to a halt really helps UW catch up a bit.

Beza, the Bounding Spring is also an amazing card out of the sideboard to help combat the Rakdos Aggro deck. Since these control decks are generally choosing to play Portable Hole instead of Temporary lockdown, the Rakdos deck is usually going to have enough creatures in play where Beza will always give you 2 1/1 Fish and some lifepoints back. The card is one of the best ways to stabilize, and is definitely better than Supreme Verdict vs a deck like Rakdos where the deck doesn’t need to deploy too many creatures.

What will come out on top?

While the MTGO metagame is generally a good approximation of what any given paper metagame would be, it’s not always a perfect recreation. In this particular case, however, I do think that the representation here will be pretty accurate. UW Control and other slower Midrange/Control decks generally are overrepresented in paper metagames, but since UW only recently started putting up results on MTGO, it’s reasonable to conclude that a meta share of something similar to 8% makes sense. Rakdos Aggro has existed as the “top deck” for long enough where I find it slightly difficult to believe that Izzet Phoenix will be more represented, even if drastically more people own Phoenix already. While it is important to prepare for what the good players will be playing (the day 2 metagame), you should still keep in mind what the average participant will be playing, and the average participant will probably just play what deck they already own in Pioneer.  It is possible that Izzet and Rakdos could be evenly represented at around 15% each, but I would personally put my money on Rakdos squeaking over that line by about a 1% margin.

MTG PIONEER META AKA What you are all here for (and good luck at the RC!)