Anything But: The New Meta

Very interesting article, and a great first insight into the new post-ban meta. Nothing beats statistics and even though there’s only a limited pool of dailies to work from, you do the best statistics out there. And your focus on a single event is really worthwhile too imo.

Despite your indication in the opening para that you’d stay away from opinion, your generally negative opinion about the bannings did shine through (nothing wrong with that, opinion is fine!). I think you were a little unfair though in implying that WoTC’s criteria for the bans was merely “perhaps the format got a bit stale”, and this actually does affect the conclusions you draw from the later statistics where you seem to be implying that the bans have failed because the meta is if anything less varied in raw statistical terms. As I’m sure you’re aware, there was an official explanation of the bans:

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/pr/232&dcmp=ilc-mtgrss#84614

The key reasons outlined there there were that “the interactivity of the games suffered over the last couple years. The Storm decks that finished with Empty the Warrens and Grapeshot were becoming oppressive and Infect decks with access to Invigorate were ending games of Pauper before there was any game to be played.” Non-interractive and too fast are touchestone criteria for WoTC banning things across all sorts of formats, and although I (and many others) would nitpick re: ETW on that front (although ETW could technically be faster than grapeshot, T1-2 going off was highly feasible), it’s awfully difficult to argue with the fact that invigorate and grapeshot lead to decks that were both too fast and not interractive enough in this format.

Given that Post is being kept in reasonable check by 3 other good decks (delver, stompy and affinity), I can’t necessarily see any further bans in the immediate future. I could be wrong though.

I think that this article could and perhaps should have elaborated more on Elves and Delver Fiend(what you call WeeFiend for some reason) since these 2 decks have just recently(post BnR) come to power and are neither Temporal Fissure nor 8 post based. All the other decks like Stompy, Affinity, MUC, Delver Blue, etc have all been around for ages and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon unless there will be new BnRs.

What I find interesting with Elves is that it functions in the same way that Affinity does, it can win games very fast like other aggro decks but it can also fall back onto a combo or pseudo combo, infect style if you want. Affinity does this by getting a bunch of 4/4s very early on and if that fails fall back onto the Atog+Fling+possibly Disciple of the Vault, Elves do it by emptying their hand incredibly fast with mana elves and Quirion Ranger shenanigans to get a ton of power on the board on turn 2 or 3 at the latest and beat down the opponent with your Elves and some pump spells and if that fails fall back onto the powerhouse Elves to either get massive life gain, give a massive pump to an unblocked creature, generate tons of Elf tokens, etc.

Delver Fiend on the other hand is a much simpler deck, and is currently the only combo deck that still tries to kill you fast rather than just bounce all your permanents and than slowly beat you down with 1 or 2 power creatures. The interesting part about Delver Fiend is that it is an extremely fast deck, with the possibility to win as early as turn 3 with a good hand, and it is surprisingly resilient to creature removal with Apostle’s Blessing giving you protection to whichever removal spell is being used. The deck is still somewhat vulnerable to counter magic obviously but once you have 1 of your non Delver creatures in play and a bunch of spells in hand you can go off at any turn, so counter magic will only delay you in most cases. Now, given that counter magic is mostly incorporated in control decks, you can afford to take a few counters early on and still beat them before they get their finishers. Delver Blue is the only fast deck with reliable counter magic, and you have answers to it with your own creatures and burn spells.

Between the 2 above mentioned decks, all the various 8 post and Temporal Fissure variants, Delver Blue, Stompy, Affinity, etc there are plenty of powerhouse decks to choose from under the current meta, and while you will see either 8 post or Temporal Fissures, oftentimes both at once, in a lot of matches, you will also see plenty of other major contenders both old and new favorites.

Lastly, considering that WotC’s weak argument for the BnRs was to hamper excessively fast and non interactive decks, I think that WotC has failed to accomplish that. Delver Fiend is as uninteractive a deck as you can come across that can still pull off turn 3 wins with some regularity. All the Temporal Fissure decks aren’t interactive either, just give you more time to slow them down by removing their creatures or fragile land base, be it Ravnica bounce lands or locust lands, but not being able to completely shut them down like you would if you prevented TPPS/Infect to go off early.