Hello, and welcome back to Metagame Mentor, your weekly guide to the top decks and latest builds on the road to the Pro Tour. On April 20, the next round of Regional Championship Qualifiers (RCQs) will begin, with Pioneer as the Constructed format for in-store events. If you aspire to make it to a Regional Championship or a Pro Tour, you should know the details of Pioneer.
To get you up to speed, today’s article provides an overview of the format with a metagame snapshot and a breakdown of Pioneer’s top 10 archetypes as of now. Along the way, I’ll add my first thoughts on promising new leaves from Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Next, I’m going to go back in time to highlight a great deck from 1996 Magic World Championship, providing a historical perspective on the metagame at the time.
Pioneer is the unrotated form based on expansion and core sets from Return to Ravnitsa forward, with the most notable papers the ban list being the attraction lands. With over 10,000 cards to choose from, Pioneer has a variety of powerful strategies.
To understand the latest state of the format, I analyzed over 2,400 available decklists from all Pioneer and Explorer events held in Magic Online and Melee from March 8 to March 31. For each deck, I awarded points equal to its corrected number of net wins (ie, the number of match wins minus losses if it was positive and zero otherwise). Each archetype’s share of total adjusted net profits can then be interpreted as its share of the winner’s metagame.
In this table, each archetype name is associated with a well-performing, representative decklist. The “Other” category is included. Mono-Red Aggro, Izzet Transmogrify, Gruul vehicles, Selesnya Auras, Jeskai Creativity, Jund Transmogrify, Mysterious Fires, Grixis Phoenix, Angels Selesnya, Enigmatic Incarnation, Abzan Greasefang, Azorius Ensul, Azorius Lotus Field, Goblins, Azorius Auras, Selesnya company, Izzet Control, Dimir Rogues, Boros Burn, Monochrome Peopleand more.
As indicated by the arrows on the table, the metagame has changed since the Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor. After Seth Manfield’s win, Rakdos Vampires has solidified itself as the top deck to beat, replacing Rakdos Midrange. Decks that are poorly matched against Rakdos Vampires, such as Azorius Control, Lotus Field Combo, and Boros Heroic, have fallen in popularity. Meanwhile, the buffet responds to
Last weekend’s Arena Championship 5, played in Explorer format, solidified the idea that Rakdos Vampires, Amalia Combo, and Izzet Phoenix are the three main decks to beat in Pioneer right now. In a Top 8 with five Rakdos Vampires players, Toni Ramis Pascual emerged victorious, playing Izzet Phoenix. In the finals, he defeated Ryan Condon, who was one of three players in a Quintorius Combo deck with
Since Pioneer rewards in-depth knowledge of your deck’s interactions, matchups, and strategies, anything is winnable in the hands of a skilled pilot, and the metagame in the upcoming RCQs can be quite different. But to set the terms of engagement, let’s take a closer look at the 10 archetypes with the highest metagame winning share in recent weeks. To do this, I used a list aggregation algorithm that takes into account the popularity, performance, and synergy of individual card picks.
