Metagame Mentor: Modern with Dominaria United
Hello and welcome back to Metagame Mentor, the weekly column in which I highlight the decks to beat and the latest Constructed developments on the path to the Pro Tour. Today, to help you prepare for upcoming Modern Regional Championship Qualifiers, I'll analyze the impact that Dominaria United has had on the Modern metagame thus far.
Last Weekend's Biggest Events
Before breaking down the Modern metagame, let me summarize last weekend's biggest events across all formats.
Congratulations to the Arena Championship 1 winner, @SamRolph3! He's taking home $30,000 and a spot at the 2023 Magic World Championship.
— MTG Arena (@MTG_Arena) September 26, 2022
Relive the competition here: https://t.co/px9kxC0wI2 pic.twitter.com/PZfBO8MA52
In Arena Championship 1, featuring the Alchemy format, Sam Rolph broke his "curse" in the best possible way. After finishing ninth in both the Innistrad Championship and New Capenna Championship, he finally made the playoffs in the very first Arena Championships. And he didn't stop there. He made it all the way to the finals, where he defeated Keisuke Sato in a Rakdos Sacrifice mirror match in the Alchemy format. Rolph earned the first-place prize of $30,000, and both finalists earned an invitation to the Magic World Championship taking place in 2023.
Although Esper decks dominated the Alchemy metagame at this event, two of the four Rakdos Sacrifice players met in the finals. This clearly establishes Rakdos Sacrifice as the "Deck to Beat" in Alchemy. Rolph's list with
The 32-player Arena Championships represent the top of the MTG Arena premier play pyramid, analogous to the 8-player Champions Showcase Events on Magic Online. Both signature events are held three times per year and award World Championship seats to the top two finishers. Invitations to the Arena Championship are awarded to players who earn enough wins in Day Two of Qualifier Weekends. Qualifier Weekends used to feed Set Championships, including those where Rolph finished ninth, but these have been sunset with the return of the tabletop Pro Tour.
Congrats to Aaron Miller, our #NRGMIN Modern $10k Champion with 5C Creativity! pic.twitter.com/m66y4Pqpnc
— NRG Series (@NRGSeries) September 25, 2022
On the tabletop side of things, last weekend marked the end of the first round of Regional Championship Qualifiers (RCQs). Chiefly among them was the 194-player NRG Series Trial in Minneapolis. There, Aaron Miller took it down with Five-Color Creativity, defeating Blake Madson's Rakdos Undying in the finals. More on these archetypes later! Both finalists earned an invitation to the first Regional Championships. In the U.S., but also in Europe and Brazil, these will happen November 19—20 and will feed the first Pro Tour in 2023.
From October 1 through December 18, RCQs will award invitations for the second round of Regional Championships, which will take place in the first quarter of 2023. Top finishers at these Regional Championships will then qualify for the second Pro Tour in 2023. To find RCQs around you, you can use the store and event locator with the filter "Regional Championship Qualifier" and/or visit your regional organizer's website.
The 10 Most-Played Cards from Dominaria United in Modern
Modern, created in 2011, is a nonrotating, 60-card format that allows expansion sets, core sets, and Modern Horizons sets from Eight Edition forward, save for cards on the banned list.
To analyze how Modern has changed with the latest set, I used all Magic Online decklists from Modern Preliminary, Challenge, and Showcase Challenge events held since the release of Dominaria United, as well as top decklists from the 4Seasons Modern Tournament, FTF Tour Stop Edmonton, RCQ at CM Games Hixson, and The Last Sun 2022 Qualifier at Hareruya TC Tokyo. I also added decklists with positive net wins from the Singapore Open, Grand Open Qualifier in Paris, and NRG Series Trial in Minneapolis. In total, this yielded 767 decks.
Across all main decks and sideboards, the most-played cards from any set were
Yet Dominaria United is making a substantial impact as well.
The most-played new card by a mile is
The enchantment provides universal instant-speed removal for a single white mana, which is something that wasn't available in Modern before. It doesn't matter whether you need an answer to
On top of all that,
For all of these reasons, many players have been trying to adjust their mana bases to fit in
The second-most and third-most played new cards from Dominaria United are the Goblin and Merfolk lords. At 40 and 32 copies respectively, they're not upending the format, but they are valuable for these tribal archetype. More on them later.
The remaining new Dominaria United cards, each with 26 total copies or fewer, had no major metagame impacts. But they still offer small upgrades for various archetypes.
A 5/3 trampler for two mana is never bad, and
There's a wacky Mono-Red Sagas deck that uses
The Modern metagame with Dominaria United
To provide a Modern breakdown that combines both popularity and performance, I assigned archetype labels to all decklists and awarded to each deck a number of points equal to its net wins, i.e., its number of match wins minus losses. For example, a deck that went 5–1 in the Swiss in a Challenge event followed by a loss in the quarterfinals was assigned three points.
The sum of these numbers for every archetype was then used to determine its record-weighted metagame share, which represents its share of total net wins. Each archetype name hyperlinks to a well-performing decklist closest to the aggregate of the archetype.
Archetype | Record-Weighted Metagame Share |
1. Hammer Time | 11.1% |
2. Indomitable Creativity | 9.8% |
3. Izzet Murktide | 9.4% |
4. Rakdos Undying | 7.4% |
5. Four-Color Omnath | 6.2% |
6. Rhinos | 5.2% |
7. Living End | 5.0% |
8. Burn | 4.2% |
9. Jeskai Breach | 3.6% |
10. Azorius Control | 3.2% |
11. Yawgmoth | 3.1% |
12. Temur Scapeshift | 3.1% |
13. Amulet Titan | 2.8% |
14. Grixis Shadow | 2.8% |
15. Mono-Green Tron | 2.0% |
16. Glimpse of Tomorrow | 1.9% |
17. Goblins | 1.5% |
18. Merfolk | 1.2% |
Other | 16.5% |
The "Other" category, continuing the descending order, includes Rakdos Midrange, Eldrazi Tron, Affinity, Mill, Domain Zoo, Twiddle Breach, TitanShift, Calibrated Blast, Dredge, Asmo Turns, Tameshi Bloom, Belcher, Humans, Prison Tron, Jeskai Obosh, Hardened Scales, Jeskai Murktide, Mono-Red Sagas, Izzet Prowess, Azorius Blink, Mono-Blue Tron, Boros Fiddlebender, Asmo Food, Five-color
The breakdown in the table above can be interpreted as a winner's metagame, i.e., a distribution of the types of decks that you can expect to face at the top tables if you make a deep run in a Modern tournament. Comparing it to previous Modern breakdown tables from August 18 and September 1, the pivotal developments since then are:
- A downtick in Izzet Murktide, Four-color Omnath, Yawgmoth, and Amulet Titan. Their fall partly stems from opponents gaining
Leyline Binding , for instance as an answer toMurktide Regent . The corresponding drop of Izzet Murktide has been enormous, and Hammer Time has taken the number one slot as a result. - A sustained onward march of
Indomitable Creativity , Rakdos Undying, Rhinos, Grinding Breach, and Temur Scapeshift. All of them are cementing themselves as top-tier archetypes in the current metagame. Some exploitLeyline Binding , but most of these archetypes were already trending up even before Dominaria United. - The revitalization of Goblins and Merfolk. They were happy to gain a new tribal lord in Dominaria United.
To support these developments with good, representative decklists, I used a proprietary decklist aggregation method that combines popularity and performance. The core of the method was explained in an article, but I have since extended it by considering win rates, sideboards, land counts, and other relevant aspects, inspired by the theory behind artificial neural networks. It provides a systematic way to pinpoint decklists for the hottest archetypes in Modern right now.
Hammer Time, at 11.1% of the winner's metagame, is the new number one! The main goal of the deck is to cheat the equip cost on
Hammer Time players are split between mono-white and blue-white lists. A small blue splash is still the most common approach, though. Note that the aggregate list has cut
In addition,
Its game plan is to cast
Not only is it consistent, but it's arguably the most resilient combo deck in Modern as well. Unlike, say,
The addition of
Rakdos Undying has also been on the rise for months. Now at 7.4% of the record-weighted metagame, it has become the number four archetype in Dominaria United Modern, just behind Izzet Murktide. Izzet Murktide, whose aggregate list hasn't really changed, has started to struggle a bit now that
Its game plan is to evoke
This powerful turn-one potential is wrapped into a normal Rakdos Midrange shell, featuring usual cards like
Dominaria United hasn't led to real changes to this deck. Most lists run a mixture of undying effects, although
Rhinos, at 5.2% of the winner's metagame, has become the premier cascade deck in Dominaria United Modern. It sits just behind Four-color Omnath, whose aggregate build still revolves around
The game plan is to cast
After the near-universal adoption of white, Rhinos players are split nearly evenly between 60-card versions and 80-card versions. The 80-card versions generally add extra lands;
To cast
Jeskai Breach is a deck that I've featured nearly every week in this column because it keeps winning large tournaments. At 3.6% of the record-weighted metagame, it still hasn't surpassed format mainstays like Burn, which remains steady in terms of aggregate list and metagame share, but Jeskai Breach is on an upward trajectory.
The game plan of Jeskai Breach is multi-pronged. One option is to combo off by repeatedly milling yourself. This involves sacrificing
But you don't have to combo off to win the game. The deck can also win a fair game by attacking with
When sideboarding against this deck, you can definitely add several anti-artifact, anti-enchantment, anti-graveyard, or anti-storm cards. Almost everyone will have a way to interact with the combo in their sideboard. But you should make sure not to overboard or to misinterpret Jeskai Breach as "just a combo deck". In fact, they sometimes even board out combo pieces. If you draw multiple
Temur Scapeshift, in twelfth place at 3.1% of the record-weighted metagame, is another Modern deck that is on the rise. It doesn't use any new Dominaria United cards—rather, it's a blast from the past making a comeback—but it's well-positioned in the present metagame. Unlike combo decks such as Yawgmoth or Amulet Titan, both of which are on a bit of a downtrend right now, Temur Scapeshift is based around lands and sorceries, so it shrugs off
Your game plan is to ramp to seven lands and then cast Scapeshift. You'd grab
When playing against Temur Scapeshift, be very mindful of your own life total, as the difference between 19 life and 18 life could be the difference between life and death. Don't crack fetch lands unnecessarily.
Goblins, at 1.5%, is not a big part of the Modern metagame yet, but
The main game plan is to assemble an infinite combo. With Conspicious Snoop on the battlefield, you use
If you control Conspicious Snoop and randomly see Kiki-Jiki on top of your library, without controlling
Merfolk, at 1.2%, is an even smaller part of the Modern metagame, and two-mana Lords are nothing new for the tribe. The original
When your Merfolk opponent controls two untapped lands or an
Looking Ahead
Dominaria United has improved a lot of Modern archetypes, and it'll be interesting to see how the metagame will develop in the coming weeks and months. A good barometer for that will be the premier Modern tournaments that are coming up.
This weekend, October 1-2, features major Modern RCQs at The Legacy Pit Open, the F2F Tour Stop in Montreal, and the Magic Showdown in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam event will have live video coverage. As I mentioned, they'll feed the second round of Regional Championships, which will take place in the first quarter of 2023.
Next weekend, October 8-9, there will be Modern $30K and Modern $5K tournaments at SCG Con Dallas, both of which award Regional Championship slots as well. In addition, there is the Magic Online Champions Showcase, where the formats are Modern Cube and Pioneer. It will be exciting to see all the action!