The last Pioneer RCQs were this past weekend! Congrats to everyone who queued for their respective RCs, get ready for a bit more analysis and harsher truths about a set that won’t become competitively relevant until after the release of Bloomborrow AND Duskmourn! Unfortunately, we are only 2-ish weeks out from having MTGO data back, so the graph shown below still looks a bit sparse, and those confidence intervals are a bit long. However, we will make do and still learn what we can!

To Tree or Not to Tree (im sorry)

It’s still very unclear if the Rakdos Tree Cauldron deck is… playable or not. There are a small group of players who perform very well with the deck, but it’s overall win rate is sitting at a measly 46.7% (it’s lumped in with the people playing stock Rakdos Midrange but the amount of people doing that is low enough where it’s not very significant). The winning lists of Rakdos Tree are still evolving pretty quickly, we’re beginning to see versions such as this Rakdos Vampires deck using the tech from the Tree deck of Voldaren Thrillseeker, but not putting the “bad” cards like Tree of Perdition in the deck.

Thrillseeker is not only a Vampire, but also plays well with giant bodies like Vein Ripper and Archfiend of the Dross. It’s generally not going to be a threat you want to play on turn 3, as you won’t be able to maximize the amount of damage dealt by it. This is the type of card you want to be the last card in your hand, once the game is close to over, or the board has clogged up and stalled. Flinging an Archfiend at any threat after attacking as a 7/7 (including an opposing Vein Ripper) can be a great way to end games. While this version of the deck is lacking the Agatha’s Soul Cauldron and Tree of Perdition combo, this seems to be the way the deck will be moving forward in the future. The Cauldron does have some cute applications vs Phoenix and Green and can be very good at pushing damage in board stalls, it’s just a bit too narrow in a deck that is moving towards becoming a normal midrange deck with the Sorin + Vien Ripper synergy. To fit another synergy package into the deck does really dilute your midrange plan and will lose you a lot of games in the mirrors and versus control decks. While UW Control might not exist too much online at the moment, that is the type of deck that is always overrepresented in paper metagames, so even if it’s only 5% of the metagame at the moment, it’s something you should account for in deckbuilding.

Wait, didn’t you say Amalia was the best deck last article?

Yes I did, and I still think it is, my thoughts on this archetype are perfectly encapsulated by this tweet by Andrei Klepatch:

Most of my experience in this particular Pioneer format is with Rakdos Vampires and Mono Green Devotion, I only have about 30 matches with Amalia in my belt. Since the archetype’s debut at the last RC cycle, Amalia has consistently maintained a win rate at least 3 percentage points above every other top deck in the format. However, as the upcoming RC cycle approaches, and competitive eyes begin to shift to Pioneer once again, the same thing that always happens is occurring now. Players are gravitating to the top decks that are a clear step above the rest, and increasing the play rate, while also decreasing the overall win rate. This is just due to the more average players beginning to learn the archetype, instead of MTGO challenges being dominated by 3 or 4 stellar Amalia players. As we are seeing now, Amalia’s win rate dropped from 55% to 52.4% over the course of a month, but has still maintained the #1 win rate deck of the top decks of the format.

Amalia is a difficult deck to build and sideboard with, due to the fact that it is a creature toolbox deck that doesn’t actually have an insta-kill like creature combo decks of the past. Amalia can find your Aetherflux Reservoir, but there is about a 30% chance that it does not, and there are a few decks (UW Control mainly) that can disrupt this plan once you create a 21/21 Amalia and wipe the rest of the board away. Lately, we’ve begun seeing Lively Dirge from OTJ being played in the deck as a way to rebuild and attempt another combo turn, usually good versus decks with a lot of spot removal spells such as Phoenix and Rakdos Vamps. There’s still a lot of innovation that’s occurring in this specific archetype, mainly the value Chord of Calling targets that we are beginning to see moved to the mainboard from the sideboard, such as Ruthless Lawbringer and Aven Interruptor. These don’t really help the combo plan in game 1s, but it does free up more sideboard slots to have more ways to beat Grafdigger’s Cage, one of the more difficult cards to answer, as cards like Chord, Dirge, and CoCo can’t dig you for an answer.

It’s currently unclear if Amalia is truly far and away the best deck in the format, as we continue to see more and more average players move onto the archetype and lower the winrate, but Amalia sporting significantly good matchups versus Green and Vampires does really lead me into wanting to get on this deck as early as possible.

What you’re really here for: