The Gaming Stadium is an Esports organization based in Canada that hosts events for MTG Arena and many other competitive games. On Sunday, they hosted a free-entry Standard tournament with a $2,000 Canadian prize pool. With 167 players entered, this is easily one of largest tournaments that has taken place since the release of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt and the Standard rotation.
With such a large player pool, events like this give us a great look at the developing competitive meta in new Standard. In this article, we will take a look at the overall metagame and present the Top 8 finishing decklists from the event.
Additionally, you can find even more competitive decklists by following the links below for Standard Metagame Challenge 7-0 decks as well as our newly relaunched Top Mythic Decks of the Week:
To view the full metagame, please see the tournament’s MTGMelee page.
The Izzet Dragons archetype was present in Standard before rotation. It was one of the most popular archetypes in the Standard 2022 Arena queue, where rotation came early without the new cards from Midnight Hunt. Now, it appears that Izzet Dragons is here to stay – and potentially a force to be reckoned with in best-of-three Standard.
Although Dragons made up the lion’s share of the meta, it had a sub-50% winrate in non-mirror matches across the board. However, the archetype has two examples in the Top 8 including the overall winner, so it’s clear that the deck has the capacity to perform at a high level. Earlier this week, DoggertQBones posted an excellent guide for the deck, which we highly recommend for players interested in trying it for themselves.
It’s not really much of a surprise to see Mono Green Stompy decks at the top of the meta share either, considering the deck’s success in Standard 2022 and the powerful new cards added to the archetype by Midnight Hunt. Gruul Aggro decks were also heavily present in the meta, as the fourth-most represented archetype overall.
Perhaps the biggest standout from the meta of this event is the Izzet Turns deck. Variations of Izzet Control have been showing up here and there in post-rotation Standard and Standard 2022, and Alrund’s Epiphany has always been a key card in the archetype. The Turns deck takes the Epiphany strategy a step farther by playing some number of Galvanic Iteration with the intention of copying Alrund’s Epiphany to get even farther ahead.
Izzet Turns was the third most popular archetype at the format with almost 8% of the meta, but what’s even more impressive is the deck’s overall winrate at a remarkable 62%.
While the Top 8 from other Standard events since rotation have been fairly diverse, we’re seeing a lot of Izzet in the Top 8 at the Clearly Frame Advantage. Six of the eight decks were one of the variations of Izzet that we discussed in the meta section above, and frankly all of the variants have quite a few cards in common.
Could it be possible that the Izzet color pair is too strong for the format thanks to cards like Goldspan Dragon and Alrund’s Epiphany? It’s much too early to say, and the meta will continue to adapt as players run more hate for the matchup in their own lists. If the winrate of the Izzet Turns archetype continues to stay this high even after the meta bends to beat it, it’s possible that some kind of banning could be on the table in the future.
Either way, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the Izzet color pair and the Turns archetype in particular.
