Sunday, January 11, 2015

The seemingly ever evolving Standard Metagame

Hi Everyone!
While I do spend a lot of time looking at Magic Online data to see what cards are good investments and what cards are bad investments I didn't play a lot of Standard over the past year because I thought it was a boring format. I had a Mono Black Devotion deck when it was RTR-THS blocks but i didn't like that the same decks were the top decks for an entire year, that didn't change until Khans came out. I think the theme of the set is better than Theros block, but more importantly I like the way the multi-color clans make deck building more complex by adding an extra element of complexity to manabases by only printing enemy color pain lands and only allied color fetches with no duals to fetch.

I have had a couple standard decks since Khans came out. One is Abzan Midrange. It's pretty good and I enjoyed playing it but I have been busy the past few weeks and haven't had a chance to play as much as I usually do. I won the majority of matches I played, but when I went online this week to play I got slaughtered three rounds in a row. All three times it was a different deck, they were very aggressive and were just too fast for my midrange deck to come back from. The only games I won were games where they were severely mana screwed.

I noticed when I was looking at the top decks for Magic Online Abzan Midrange was the top deck, but since then has changed to the top deck being Abzan Aggro. It's an obvious shift that I can see when I play and a shift that shows in the number of people playing certain decks.

I looked over the top decks and found that while it's not the most played (it's the second most played) Abzan Midrange was the most expensive. I believe that the metagame is shifting to a very aggro centric metagame and the prices for Abzan Midrange cards have not caught up with the shift yet, probably from a variety of factors that cause lag, most likely the fact that while it gets slaughtered by fast decks, it's still the second most played online.

I went ahead with this knowledge and got out of all my cards that are in Abzan Midrange but not in any popular aggro decks.

Just remember that while there are many sources of information that you need to look to and accurately gauge their credibility, there are many unconventional ways to collect information and ways to back up data you collected. I do want to caution everyone that if you're specifically looking for something with anecdotal data, you'll certainly find it, do your best to be objective.

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