2023 Magic World Championship XXIX Standard Analysis and Conclusions

World Magic Championship has recently taken place with a fresh new format thanks to Wilds of Eldraine. Over 100 players came to battle it out for the title, defended by Nathan Steuer.

The format was Limited and Standard Constructed. In this piece, we will focus on Standard, since there will be major metagame consequences based on what happened.

Without further ado, let’s dive straight in!

Expectations Coming In

Let’s take a look at the metagame right before the tourney:

Bo3 Standard Metagame Tier List and Rankings

There were a few groups of decks that one could anticipate – ramp, midrange, and aggro.

The best deck coming in was Five-Color Ramp. It was chosen by very powerful players, including the one and only Reid Duke who won the last Pioneer Pro Tour *and* made top 8 of this World Championship.

It was certainly the favourite to take it down because of its sheer power but also thanks to how it matches up against most midrange strategies.

I expected to see Dimir Midrange back at the top of the blue counterspell metagame but… that didn’t really materialise. Dimir was, dare I say, nowhere to be seen at all. It seemed to have been pushed back by other midrange variants like Esper, Golgari or Grixis.

Esper Legends came back with a bang. We saw a ton of decks in the Esper colours, be it midrange or control. It seems that white is indeed worth splashing for, despite what Dimir offers.

In Esper Control you really want access to Sunfall and The Wandering Emperor and Esper Legends offers a unique mix between aggro and midrange that compensates worse mana.

I fully anticipated Mono Red to get in there and punish greedy Five-Color decks. Much to my surprise, that did not happen. Mono Red was present but not to a degree that I thought it would have.

However, Azorius Soldiers in the hands of Simon Nielsen proved to be the small creature aggro deck in the format in a version that I don’t think anyone could have foreseen.

Overall, some expectations were met, but the tournament as a whole certainly was a box of surprises.

The Metagame

Based on my previously mentioned expectations, I thought we’d see Five-Color Ramp at the very top, followed by Dimir Midrange, Mono Red, and then some forms of Esper.

It was similar to what I’d thought we’d see but in a different order.

Esper Midrange at a whopping 19% being a fifth of the field was super surprising from the metagame point of view. However, if you factor in the fact that it’s generically good regardless of what it faces and also has proper agency to it – it makes sense that pro players gravitated towards it. Instead of going Dimir like in the past, the deck has adopted white back again.

Mono-Red Aggro was also super high but it halved the representation of the field. This was a very logical call when you suspect that a lot of Ramp is going to be present. You want to go under and finish them off before they even get going.

Esper Legends making a comeback. It’s quite different from Esper Midrange in that it has an aggressive slant and is super creature-oriented, compared to Midrange where the number of noncreature spells is much higher. This is a better choice in the face of Ramp where you can actually kill them but arguably worse against decks that go slightly bigger than you.

Romain Ramp as the third/fourth most represented deck is not something I would have predicted, but it seems that players wanted to be one step ahead of the perceived metagame at the time.

Crucially, all these most popular decks make up around 40%-45% of the tourney, meaning 55%-60% were different strategies. I’d say this proves that the format is both healthy and diverse.

The Innovations

Players brought a ton of super spicy new decks or fresh takes on existing strategies that I will happily cover in the future in the form of guides.

Let’s take a look at a couple of them.

Easily the spiciest and highest placing deck was Bant Control by the control master Greg Orange.

It utilises Up the Beanstalk as an innocuous draw engine. While it’s not as broken as it is in Modern where you have a ton of ways of triggering it, Sunfall and Leyline Binding do just as well in the Standard context.

Crucially, you can overpay for Syncopate or March of Otherworldly Light to meet Beanstalk’s requirement to draw an extra card!

Another key addition that I personally really like is Horned Loch-Whale, a card that I’d hoped would see play in control strategies. It’s a removal spell early and a Beanstalk-drawing threat late. Perfect for a control deck.

I’ve already mentioned Simon Nielsen’s Soldiers but this is the perfect section for it as well. He’s taken an interesting route with the deck.

The most glaring new part of the deck is full four Knight-Errant of Eos. A great draw engine that synergises with all the body-makers like Wedding Announcement or Resolute Reinforcements.

Four copies of Lunarch Veteran (who’s not a Soldier!) is a wildly good metagame call in the face of so many Mono Red decks.

Simic Cauldron did very well at the tourney, present at the top Constructed tables this weekend.

It’s essentially a combo deck whose aim is to generate infinite mana, grant a creature Realm-Scorcher Hellkite’s abilities and shoot the opponent down for lethal.

The fact that it attacks from a completely different angle makes it that much more viable in an otherwise reactive meta. There is nothing a control deck hates more than a deck they have no idea how to counteract.

Conclusions

To close out with, let’s take a look at win rates and where we go from here.

While the best-performing deck was Bant Control, it was played by one person only so I wouldn’t focus on it too much. I want to look at the decks with a few dozen of matches in the sample size.

And so Esper Midrange with a hundred of matches in the sample size managed to rack up almost 60%! That’s a very good result that, if it persists, indicates this could be *the* deck to play.

Domain Ramp unsurprisingly performed well, preying on Esper Midrange.

Mono-White Humans might actually be the under-the-radar aggro deck to play with 56% in an okay sample, actually going 4-0 against Mono-Red!

Esper Legends seem to have underperformed despite winning the whole tournament.

The biggest loser is unfortunately Mono-Red Aggro with 40 matches played and, similarly, 40% win rate. While it did okay against Esper Midrange and Ramp, it failed completely in the face of other aggro decks in the format.

Overall, this tournament has brought a ton of innovations, deck changes, new shells, and super interesting metagame changes.

Stay tuned to see all of that unfold with new content brought by me in the upcoming weeks!