Preparing for the NA and Euro Champs

PLUS: Updating the Intro to Premodern guide; drawing from the Well of Knowledge; Premodcast returns

Aug 30, 2024

We’re just under a month away from one of the most anticipated weekends in Premodern… the North American Championship on Friday, September 20 and then the European Championship on Saturday, September 21. In preparation for the events, I wanted to share an updated look at my meta tracker of large in-person events this year — which now includes data from the Italian Nationals, New England Summer Regional, and the Universal Championship to bring the count to seven events analyzed. Huge thanks to all the tournament organizers for putting on these amazing events and sharing the data with me.

As a reminder, Black-White includes both BW Control and Deadguy Ale. Some events break them out separately, some don’t. These days there’s a good chance that the majority of this is BW Control though (for example, at the Universal Championship there were six BW Control decks and only one Deadguy Ale deck).
All decks in the “Other” section had less than 3% meta share. Only Pit Rack, Tide Control, Mono Black, and Gro-A-Tog had 2% meta share.

Next, let’s take a look at the Top 8 conversion rate of the most represented decks, which compares the overall meta share with the Top 8 meta share:

All things equal, you would expect a deck’s share of the Top 8 to more or less correspond to its share of the field. If a deck’s share of the Top 8 greatly exceeds its share of the field then it’s an indicator of over-performance (and the reverse).
Over-performers here include Replenish and Elves at the top with Ponza Oath and Landstill also converting quite highly. In contrast, Black-White, The Rock, and Wx Weenie have historically had a tougher time converting. Also of note is Tide Control, which makes up about 2% of the field but 4% of Top 8s.
Across the seven events, 71% of the Top 8 (40 out of 56) consisted of those >=3% meta share decks.

The above leaves us with an interesting situation in which some of the best performing decks in Premodern are also not the most commonly seen. In other formats you would expect the best performing decks to have a correspondingly high meta share, but not the case in Premodern due to a variety of reasons. This presents a conundrum as players could shift more of their sideboard towards Replenish but given it has a 4% meta share of the field, that can be a tough ask. In comparison, the duo of Burn and Goblins comprise nearly 18% of the field so players will often opt to keep their red hate higher than their graveyard hate, depending on the deck. Still, I expect many players in the coming weeks to begin shifting some of their sideboard options towards cards that are broadly applicable to Replenish and other matchups, basically B-Tier answers to hedge a bit more instead of committing to more narrow A-Tier answers to Replenish.

Finally, I wanted to shoutout Gary Roth, who put together a community poll on meta expectations for the North American Championship. He’s summarized the 24 responses, which provide a nice complement to the above data. Last year, I had done something similar, but just for the Top 8.

Refreshing the Introduction to Premodern Guide

Back in 2022, I created the Introduction to Premodern guide (http://www.premodern.guide) with the goal of easily onboarding prospective players to the format. Recently I updated the guide a bit, primarily to reflect new decks as well as update older example deck lists and including links to primers and podcasts about specific decks. I plan to revamp the content creator section in the near future as well but in the meantime, have a look, give me any feedback, and share it with anyone you know that might be interested in trying out Premodern!

I also updated the Premodern Deck Pricing Tool, which showcases popular decks and the cost of buying those decks given various criteria (old frame only, including World Championship cards, including modern frame reprints). This is one of my favorite ways to show how accessible the format can be to prospective players. For example:

There are about 14 decks that are Tier 1 or Tier 2 that you can purchase for under $250, if you include World Championship and modern frame reprints. That’s basically on par with the Pauper format and the deck won’t be subject to the whims of new set releases.

What I’ve Been Playing Lately

Guilty Oath

I ran back my Guilty Oath deck in August for the Beard Brothers league and the Facebook league (deck pictured above), with incremental changes each time.

I ended up making the Top 16 of the August Facebook league, nearly stealing a game from Rich Shay in the playoffs on a mull to three (he was on a mull to five), before he turned it around at one life. Between three events with the deck, I’ve gone a respectable 8-5.
Each iteration has resulted in less and less greedy mana bases… usually I don’t spend too much time on optimizing mana bases but since this deck has been so much fun I decided to actually look up the famed Frank Karsten chart for the first time in my Magic: The Gathering career. Initially, I didn’t see the need for heavy green because an early Oath of Druids doesn’t do a ton when your threat relies on your opponent having a stocked graveyard. The next iteration will increase the green mana count and include Dark Ritual too.
For the sideboard, Tempting Wurm was, to no surprise, a blast to play. My plan was to bring it in against Burn and control/combo decks. I also figured that if any deck could mitigate the downside of Tempting Wurm, it would be this deck loaded with discard. I might try the more mainstream Call of the Herd in the next iteration since it plays pretty well with Oath of Druids and allows me to proactively cast it as a threat without waiting (or gambling) on the contents of my opponent’s hand. Also, I need to take out that Dystopia… kind of put that in on auto-pilot when building a black deck but would you look at that, I have green permanents!

My takeaway: Super fun deck, black is sorely underrepresented in the top decks of Premodern so I’m going to keep working on this one.

Parallax Pit

Replenish is really hot right now and given my earlier admission of my recent obsession with Bottomless Pit recently I decided to try a mashup of the two for my Spice Paradise playoff match. Basically, bin some enchantments, Replenish them back.

One of the inspirations for this deck was how the card Replenish is such a great top-deck when faced against discard… so I wondered if we could use the same strategy to our advantage.
Having your Pits and Arenas attack is a great feeling. So is being able to exile them if needed (you could also exile Pit at end of their turn by hiding it under a Wave with Opalescence out and then blinking the Wave to bring the Pit back at the end of your turn… win-more? Probably. But definitely cool.).
I lost to Wim’s Evil Enchantress deck in three games, but you can’t really be mad about getting hit by a giant Kaervek’s Torch in the year 2024.

My takeaway: Hard to go wrong with Parallax-Opalescence combo. Not sure if this offers any new angles over traditional Replenish but I wouldn’t mind trying it out again.

Content

🪣💧 The Well of Knowledge has launched featuring guides to UW Stiflenought by fpawlusz and Hermit FEB by Carl Winter
🅿️Ⓜ️ Heavy Play has been uploading videos of Portland’s July tournament, featuring Greater Good vs. Burn, MUD vs. Replenish, Suspicious Vise vs. Opposition, and 5C Gators vs. Replenish
🎙️ The Premodcast is back after a brief hiatus to discuss expectations for the North American and European Championships
🎙️ Spike Colony released an episode called The Theory of Everything and also Ponza covering the applicability of the Three Gears and the winning Ponza list from the Universal Championship
🛋️📋 2 Cabal Therapists, a new podcast launched by Ivan Von Lennep and Philipp Altmann is out with their second episode that covers the Universal Championship in Darmstadt.
📜🐘 Lanny Huang runs us through a league with Gro-A-Tog featuring Accumulated Knowledge and Call of the Herd
🫧 Gary Roth writes up thoughts on Urza’s Bauble in Burn
🪄💀 The first round of the New England Summer Regional has been uploaded: Wand of Denial Prison vs. Bant Threshold
🤡🎨🐕 William Hirst is out with a recording of taking Stasis through a league
🔟💪 TenArms shares his winning tournament report using Enchantress
🍕🍔🍟 Fpawlusz runs through a league with Junk Reaver, a really neat deck

BANDING

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