With the release of Outlaws of Thunder Junction and the latest RCQ season on the horizon, the players of MTGO put up over 850 results over this past week. With a Showcase challenge, more mid-week challenges and leagues participants this week, how did the overall Pioneer metagame shake out? Well, the headlines won’t shock you, but we did start to see an emerging deck cement its place among the top decks and we saw a variety of decks taking down challenges, despite Vampires and Phoenix continuing their data domination.

Looking at the pioneer metagame Data

When we look at the overall Pioneer metagame, we can see that Vampires and Phoenix continue to pace the field with eighteen and seventeen percent of the overall metagame respectively. This is an increase in metagame share for both decks over the previous period and it doesn’t look like players are shying away from playing the format’s best decks.

After these two titans, we drop to a collection of decks between five and ten percent. This includes Izzet Ensoul, which we highlighted last week as a new riser, Niv to Light, Lotus Field Combo, Mono Black Discard, Abzan Amalia, and Azorius Control. Once we account for these top decks, we have seventy-eight percent of the total metagame. If you are hopping onto MTGO or planning for your RCQs, while you need to be cognizant of the other decks present here, you can cover nearly eighty percent of the metagame by focusing on just these few decks.

Next, let’s take out the leagues and drill down into our higher-level Pioneer events:

Here, we can see that by removing the leagues, Vampires and Phoenix each gain a percentage overall as more competitive events tend to encourage more consolidation of top decks. Many of the other top decks hold their percentages such as Niv, Discard, Lotus, Ensoul, and Amalia. The only deck of the top representatives to lose meaningful weight in the Pioneer metagame is Azorius control, which falls down to three percent.

It isn’t surprising to see that the jump from all events to all events minus leagues doesn’t make a huge difference in the overall metrics, so let’s see what happens when we begin to focus on the winner’s metagame and focus on decks that went 4-0 or 3-1 in preliminary events or finished within the top 32 of challenges.

While Phoenix and Vampires remain at the top, we see that Phoenix actually edges out Vampires and takes over the top spot with eighteen percent of the metagame. While Vampires’ sixteen percent is nothing to downplay, it is a drop from the earlier measurements and last week where Vampires was able to hold its eighteen percent winner’s Pioneer metagame share.

In addition, we see Ensoul, Amalia, Lotus, Niv, and Discard all sharply increase their metagame shares with Ensoul making the leap up to eleven percent from last week’s three percent! It’s clear that Izzet Ensoul has joined the rest of the top decks at the table and heading into Outlaws of Thunder Junction, players will need to look at more than one Izzet deck as a potential threat to take down their local events.

Once again, when we look at the seven decks mentioned above, it covers eighty percent of the total winner’s metagame, showing that while we have a diversity of decks that are viable within the current metagame, you’re very well served to focus your preparation and potentially your sideboards against this collection of top contenders.

Finally, I wanted to take a look even deeper into the Pioneer metagame and show off the decks that managed to top 8 the challenges and MOCS Showcase challenge from this past weekend. These were your top finishers and the decks you may most want to consider for your local RCQs starting this next weekend:

There’s no surprise that Phoenix and Vampires maintain their dominance, but Lotus Field managed to jump up to thirteen percent of the top 8 metagame and looks like a great choice for pilots looking to play something other than the two best decks.

In addition, we see the same suite of decks continuing to put up strong results with the addition of Quintorius Combo putting up a surprising three top finishes including a challenge win. While the deck is not quite breaking out in the same quantity as Ensoul, I expect it will remain a top rogue deck to surprise unsuspecting opponents and take down your local events for the upcoming season.

pioneer metagame Deck Highlights

Now that we’ve seen the overall Pioneer metagame data and drilled all the way down to the top finishers of the weekend, let’s deep dive into some of the individual deck highlights of the weekend!

Strange, but successful

We’ve seen various forms of Transmogrify throughout the past few months of Pioneer. However, we usually see them in base Rakdos colors, since Izzet decks looking to cheat out Atraxa, Grand Unifier tend to lean towards Indomitable Creativity. This version of Transmogrify, which top 8’d the Pioneer Challenge on 04-12 by Wara, takes the shell of Creativity and makes the switch to Transmogrify allowing you to play Reckoner Bankbuster and cheapening your “Combo” turn.

Given how successful both Creativity and Transmogrify have been in the past, merging the two decks seems like a smart plan and going for the value plan rather than the combo plan makes the deck more resilient to removal, interaction, and extraction effects that otherwise devastate the other variations of this deck. The only thing I’d like to see added to this deck are the Hullbreaker Horrors that are a key pivot piece of Creativity to really punish opposing controlling decks post-board.

We’ve got Rogues taking down a Prelim! Every once in a while, I am reminded about the terror that was the Rogues deck in Standard as it shows up in Pioneer, but rarely does it find even this level of success. Thanks to a slick combination of cheap and evasive creatures along with efficient spells, the deck can easily switch between an aggressive gameplan and a more controlling one. Especially with the sideboard offering pivot cards such as Extinction Event and Path of Peril, this deck can easily sneak under control decks or dominate aggressive decks as a control deck itself.

While I have some concerns about the overall fragility of the creature base of this deck, it’s going to be hard for former Faeries and Rogues players not to at least take this deck out for a spin given it managed to put up a strong result and even showed up in a challenge or two as well.

But what about second breakfast

Ok, maybe it’s a little disingenuous to compare this deck to Cheerios, but that’s the only thing I can do when I see four Accorder’s Shield, four Bone Saw, four Cathar’s Shield, and four Spidersilk Net in a decklist. This version instead of looking to finish the game with Grapeshot uses Sram, Senior Edificer to keep the draw engine going and Monastery Mentor to power out plenty of powerful prowess monks. You can also use Leave to repeat the free spell loop and continue drawing towards your finishers with Sram. Once you’ve dumped your handful of free artifacts, you can use Ghirapur Aether Grid to shoot down opposing threats or just the opponent themselves.

While these style of decks tend to be very fragile, adding in Skrelv as a Giver of Runes replacement gives the deck a reasonable form of protection and the addition of Showdown of the Skalds allows you to sneakily create a massive creature on combo turns to sneak through proactively with Skrelv as well.

Once we look over at the sideboard, you can see that there are plenty of powerful effects to target the top decks such as Tears of Valakut for Vampires, Rest in Peace for Phoenix, Rending Volley for Amalia, and Silence for control decks. The deck certainly will allow for some fun combo turns and you can really change up the sideboard numbers to attack the metagame as it develops throughout the upcoming season. This is a great homage to one of my favorite Modern decks of old and is easily a deck that can steal your local FNM!

A new aggro deck emerges.

In several prelims and challenges, I started to see a Gruul Aggro deck pop up. At first, I figured it would be either Atarka Red or Vehicles, but upon further inspection, I found this deck several times. With a mono red main deck outside of Ghor-Clan Rampager and The Huntsman’s Redemption, I wasn’t quite sure if there was enough benefit to splashing a second color, but then I saw the sideboard plan. With access to four Pick your Poison and two Cindervines, the deck is able attack some of the more challenging permanent types for Mono Red while continuing to threaten the various combo decks of the format.

While this isn’t the most unique take on a mono red deck splashing green, I think it does a really good job of potentially setting up opponents to rely on their haymaker sideboard cards only to lose them to Pick your Poison along with a very fast clock accelerated by cards of old like Ghor-Clan Rampager, which pairs incredibly with Cacophony Scamp and Voldaren Thrillseeker.

If you’re looking for a newer take on this aggressive style archetype, I’d consider this decklist, especially since it did show up more frequently than I ever would have expected in the various leagues and a handful of prelim events this week.

Wrapping up

There you have it! As we head into Outlaws of Thunder Junction, the metagame feels rather solidified with nearly eighty percent of the winners metagame held between seven decks. That isn’t to say that other decks won’t find success, but if your goal is to take down your local RCQ or even just find success on MTGO, be sure to consider these top decks.

Oh, and don’t leave home without an answer to Vampires and Phoenix. Even with a new set dropping, I don’t foresee these decks dying off anytime soon.