The Star City Games Tour Online continues, with the latest weekend being the third in the series. Star City Games is one of Magic: The Gathering’s largest and most prestigious tournament hosts, and the SCG Tour Online typically feeds into high-level official Magic events. If you missed coverage from last week, you can find that here.
In this iteration of the SCG Tour, there are up to eight satellite tournaments each weekend that reward players who perform well enough an entry to a $5,000 Invitational Qualifier that takes place every Sunday. In addition to the cash prizes, the best players from each Invitational Qualifier earn entries into a paper tournament being held by SCG in the fall, as well as an upcoming MTG: Arena Championship.
The meta across the weekend’s eight satellites was fairly diverse, but Gruul Adventures was a standout in that it was one of the most popular archetypes across all of the SCG events. In fact, out of nine total SCG tournaments, seven of them had Gruul Adventures as the most played deck- usually by a fairly wide margin. Gruul Adventures also had consistently high winrates across the board, including some events where the combined winrate for the archetype was over 60%.
Dimir Rogues has also been rising in the meta, and this week the archetype had very mixed results. At the Satellite #2 on Friday, Rogues was the most played archetype at ~17% of the field, but the overall winrate for the decks was a bleak 34%. Meanwhile, in Satellite #1, the archetype showed its highest winrate of the weekend at 54%.
Over the last few weeks, Dimir Rogues decks have had low representation in the meta of most competitive events, but the archetype was showing promising winrates. As Rogues decks have returned to popularity, it seems that other decks are coming more prepared for the matchup. Dimir Rogues remains a strong deck, but when the meta is prepared to face it, it becomes much worse thanks to Escape cards that can exile their controller’s graveyard such as Ox of Agonas. In addition, Rogues is known as a very difficult archetype to pilot at the high level. The combination of these factors means that Rogues will probably continue to show up in the meta to some extent, but it is very unlikely to take over.
Naya Winota continues to be an important deck in the meta as well, making up a significant part of the meta at each of the SCG events from the weekend and consistently posting results in the Top 8. The archetype was also played quite heavily at the Challenger Gauntlet, where the deck showed up in the Top 4, earning Keisuke Sato an invitation to the MPL.
Following the same format as usual, we’ll get started by presenting the meta and full top 8 from the 5k Championship Qualifier. Next, we take a look at the metagame tables and the top 4 finishers from each satellite event, along with decklists from each of the first place finishers.
