Metagame Breakdown

With Standard started our first Main Event of the weekend and although the Modern Trial stole a lot of players, there are still 99 players to battle in this format, a goodbye to Standard until dinosaurs are entering in two weeks.

While roughly a quarter of the field chose the safe choice with the frontrunner of the format, Temur Energy, you could get a sense of the people getting bored with the staleness which always comes right before the rotation as several players wanted to experiment or just play something cool. And believe us, “something cool” doesn't just stop at Mono Blue Engulf the Shore or Grixis Improvise. When it is the last time to play with two very popular blocks before they rotate, some players wanted to sleeve up their favorite toys and play with Werewolfs, Eldrazi and Spirits.

Of course, the usual suspects were also represented and a lot of players wanted to cast Approach of the Second Sun, Vehicles, Zombies, green-black Snakes or just very hot red spells, be it in the aggressive Ramunap form or with some cooling blue cards to control the stack. In fact, a lot of these decks also have their sunset show here in Hamburg as a lot of the main pieces of Zombies and the Delirium deck fall out when Ixalan enters. Blue-Red God-Pharaoh's Gift and Ramp in various forms round out the metagame with a lot of singleton deck choices sprinkled in for interesting decks to watch out for.