The first Mythic championship came and went, and boy was it exciting.
I’m a little sad that a new archetype did not emerge as was usual in Pro Tours of the past, but I still enjoyed the tournament a lot.
Basically, what we saw is the meta in full swing, tuned sideboards and main decks from the game’s finest.
Let’s go through the tunes and tweaks that caught my eye:
1.) Hostage Taker main board in Sultai Midrange:
This is the least exciting addition, as it is something that most people expected. Sultai was, by a fair margin, the most played deck and people were expecting it to be as well. So, they tweaked their main deck for the mirror. Hostage Taker is one of the best cards in that matchup. Its interaction with Hydroid Krasis is the obvious reason and, apart from that, exiling a Jadelight Ranger, Thief of Sanity or even a puny Llanowar Elves is good to great value. Basically, the card is never dead in the mirror and almost always nets you value. A lot of people opted for the full 4 copies between main and side board. I don’t blame them.
2.) Entrancing Melody main board in Monoblue and Izzet Drakes:
Another addition that makes a ton of sense. Entrancing Melody has been a premier sideboard option for blue decks in this metagame. Autumn Burchett, Jose Cabezas and Eugeni Sanchez opted for main deck copies of Entrancing Melody. Reid Duke and his testing group had 3 in the sideboard. Brian Braun-Duin and his team had mainboard and sideboard copies of it in Izzet Drakes.
Apart from Esper control and Nexus decks, all other archetypes utilize creatures that can be easily stolen for great value.
Let’s see a few examples of creatures Entrancing Melody can steal. You can get a Pteramander for 3 mana and then adapt it, if it wasn’t already a 5/5. You can get a Krasis of any size for 4 mana. You can get Tempest Djinn for 5 mana, the drakes from Izzet for 5 or 6 mana, Wildgrowth Walker for 4 mana and so on.
There’s a lot of problematic creatures for blue creature strategies in this standard meta and Entrancing Melody helps you not only mitigate them, but threat to kill your opponent with their own guy.
3.) Kaya, Orzhov Usurper in Esper Control:
Another deck that performed amazingly in Mythic Championship Cleveland was Esper Control. The combination of great removal tools plus inevitability is as old as Magic itself and whenever the card quality allows it, control decks can be very, very good. That is the case with this particular Esper Control variant.
Kaya serves a lot of purposes at this day and age. Her plus ability is good vs Monoblue, Izzet and Sultai. Her minus ability covers a very narrow range of threats in general but, in this meta, it is enough to see play. It kills enough things in Monoblue and White Weenie to justify it. Getting that pesky Curious Obsession can win you the game, especially because if you target the Obsession itself the opponent cannot use dive down. Her ultimate is a lot of times a win condition against decks you need to close the game, such as Nexus decks in game 1. All in all, a copy of Kaya maindeck is, in my opinion, correct and you should try her out.
That’s all I got for you this week. I’m excited to see how the meta will unfold to counter the top strategies and what adaptations will be made to the top decks!
See you next week!
Kratos
Marios Tsop on Twitter