Power Rankings

Congratulations to Autumn Burchett for taking down the first Mythic Championship with Mono-Blue Tempo! Going from a budget FNM Hero deck to winning one of the toughest competitions in Magic over the course of one set has certainly been an upgrade for the deck. The kicker is that the best cards were already here. Curious Obsession and Tempest Djinn let you play a very interactive and aggressive deck while not skimping on power cards.

While Mono-Blue won the day and Sultai Midrange failed to find a Top 8 finish, it should be noted that Sultai Midrange remained a respectable chunk of the winner’s metagame. Hydroid Krasis is a big reason for that finish and gives midrange decks the longevity required to battle decks like Esper and other midrange strategies. While Mono-Blue may be enjoying top honors, don’t expect Krasis to be going anywhere.

Alright explore package, I’m kind of tired of seeing you in a successful midrange deck. There seems to be a theme with Wildgrowth Walker—the format comes out and is aggro-heavy so Wildgrowth Walker is great. Then the format over corrects and decks try to bully midrange or make cuts to make midrange go bigger, so Wildgrowth loses value and people write think pieces on cutting them. Then inevitably by the time the Pro Tour / Mythic Championship rolls around the meta stabilizes and everyone runs 3-4 Walkers anyway and nobody cuts them for the rest of the season. Just keep a playset in your 75 and skip the question altogether next time.

While Simic Nexus may have been kept in check, it was by no means a pushover this past weekend. Simic builds ended up being the go-to and Michael Bonde had the best finish of all of them with a Top 8 berth. The base build seems to have been settled on and with that I can safely say Growth Spiral allows for so much of the degeneracy. Growth Spiral allowing the deck to turn 3 a Wilderness Reclamation or sneak around Spell Pierce due to being an instant is one of the biggest strengths in the deck. It looks unassuming but Growth Spiral is the key piece that keeps this deck from being a turn too slow against aggro.

In a way the sideboard plan from Esper involving Thief of Sanity is almost scarier than their game 1 configuration. In the matches where Thief is good, it is game-changing and one of the best threats in the format. It allows the deck to take a much more effective, proactive approach post-board than Simic Nexus while doing the same things. It also ends up with quite a bit of value in matches you may not otherwise want it, meaning you always need to respect the possibility of Thief.

Negate is basically the only reason Simic Nexus and Wilderness Reclamation in general haven’t already dominated this format. Instead of another dumpster fire of a format we have quite possibly the best Standard format of all time and cards like Negate and Duress are a big reason why. To put it in perspective, there were 284 copies of Negate in the top finishing Standard decks with nearly 3/4ths of the field packing them in some capacity. While it does skew the format a bit blue heavy, with the good mana we enjoy that’s not really much of a complaint.

While Ikawa was defeated in a close finals match, it showed that Esper Control is plenty viable and that despite many Arena complaints you don’t really need a win condition (except to beat Nexus) besides Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. In case it hasn’t already been established, Teferi is probably going down as the 2nd or 3rd best planeswalker of all time and arguably is more relevant in Modern than its predecessor, Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

While Azorius Aggro and WW didn’t quite live up to the billing they had going into Championship Weekend, it still netted plenty of players 6 wins or more and the Elephant is a big reason why. It's by far the best card in aggro mirrors as it limits vulnerability to spot removal and plays well with the mono 1-drop plan many of the decks are taking. Shout outs to players who thought skipping 2-3 points of damage was a deal breaker on the best pump spell in the deck.