Mana Tutors

We’re out of the bannings-every-Monday phase of the pioneer format (beta phase? alpha?). Pioneer is now officially a real boy, with its own pro tour and everything. Having called the previous several sets of banned cards pretty accurately, I’ve honesty been waiting the last few weeks to see if llanowar elves gets banned, to no avail. Not surprising, as the number of green stompy decks appears to have actually decreased by quite a bit with the rise of goblin chainwhirler decks. So long Oko, and thanks for all the elks.

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Having just been released, there’s the potential that walking ballista and his new partner in crime Heliod, Sun-Crowned will run the tables. The immediate comparison to the Saheeli combo comes to mind: add two cards to your deck that function as reasonable value engines on their own and together form instant-death Voltron. Both combos are easily broken up by wild slash and its ilk, both involve 3 and 4 drops. Ballista combo even takes fewer colors, and ballista itself is arguably better than either of the previous combo pieces, and the Heliod portion is near impossible to actually get off the table. Saheeli had two advantages; one, it only actually cost 6 mana to do all the things in one turn, and two, the two cards helped dig for each other. Basically, walking ballista is easier to fit into any ‘ol deck, but loses to any creature removal and takes more mana. The hardest part is that most tutors don’t find both pieces of the combo. (chord of calling, finale of devastation, etc.) Basically, all the normal tools that enable a creature combo of this type don’t really work. Also, the combo hasn’t actually put up a result yet, and it’s been like 5 WHOLE DAYS. I suspect that the fewer copies of Heliod in the actual deck, the better this combo will be; possibly in a 3 color delirium shell starring traverse the ulvenwald. In short, I expect that this will be a nuisance, especially once the right shell has been found, but I don’t expect it to run the tables in quite the same way Saheeli did.

Let’s go over the messed up cards that are still remaining in the format and how they warp around each other to form a metagame.

I’d like to start this post off by pointing out how cool and clever I am after predicting the most recent bannings for the pioneer format. Almost every deck in the top 16’s of the ptq’s from last week contained the offending cards I mentioned in my previous metagame review. When a new format is that uniform and only ~3 actual decks are viable it’s time to make some changes.

Normally ptq’s will happen at disparate locations all over single weekends. In this case there was an online ptq every day of the week. As a result players could react between events with the publicly posted results from the previous event. This resulted in a month or more worth of metagame movement happening in a week. Mostly players just reacted by playing more dark betrayal; which seems pretty indicative of how things were going. I’m honesty surprised they pulled the trigger on all of the bannings at once. I expected them to perform the necessary smuggler’s copter ban, followed by field of the dead ban a week later, followed by once upon a time shortly thereafter. Clearly they knew what was up and took the necessary steps to remove the noxious play patterns that were haunting the format. Good job Wizards.

So what does this mean now? No idea! But we can guess pretty well, as there were technically a few decks that weren’t running any of the previous holy trinity. Also there are a few busted cards that can be identified as likely to run the room now that the specters of yesterweek allow cool things to exist again. Let me start with a traditional update to the metagame diagram.

Wizards really hit a home run with the Pioneer. A new format has been due for a long time. I don’t think I’m the only one that was starting to get a little burnt out with Modern as the only other commonly played format besides standard. And I’m certainly not the only one who was sick of standard. At MC Richmond I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to scrub out of a tournament; not seeing my Nissas coupled with questionable play on my part led to a rough tournament for me. Even with the recent standard bannings I think that Pioneer’s status as the new kid in town will keep it wildly popular for the foreseeable future.

This leads to the obvious question: what’s the best thing you can be doing in pioneer? Well that’s what we’ll set out to answer today. With the first few rounds of bannings, the most consistent and obnoxious combo decks have been removed or at least slowed down. Without Felidar Guardian, cat combo ceases to be a thing. Without Leyline of Abundance, green devotion at least has to work for it’s most busted draws. The result is that while a combo component to the meta exists, we are still squarely in the aggro-midrange portion of the metagame cycle. While the most flagrant violators of mtg law have been removed, there is definitely still a subset of cards that are significantly more powerful than the others. If I were forced to place the metagame into one of my signature aggro->mid->control->big mana->combo charts it would look something like this.