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The first Mythic Point Challenge has now wrapped up on MTG Arena, a tournament that players who achieved the top 1200 Mythic ranking in the previous seasons were qualified to participate. This is a new series of events that do not directly lead to an invitation to a Mythic Invitational, but awards Mythic Points, which are important for players in the Magic Pro League and Rivals League to fight for their spots in their respective leagues.
Other consistently high achieving players not in these leagues can also get on the Mythic Points leaderboard, which gives them an invitation to a future Mythic Invitational or the ability to participate in the qualifier events without having to grind the ladder. You can find more details on the official Magic.gg esports page.
The tournament itself was not covered in any official capacity, but we have had players who chose to stream their run and a lot of players shared their successful (or not so successful) results and decklists through social media. Below you will find the list of decks, sorted by the number of win record (starting with the maximum 10). After that, we will then discuss the metagame and standout decks from the tournament.
Mythic Point Challenge – Ikoria Decklists
Mythic Point Challenge – Ikoria Metagame
We do not know the exact metagame breakdown for this tournament, since we had to rely on players self-reporting their results. We also excluded the duplicate decks with different pilots, since we won’t be able to get an accurate representation anyway. Overall, we saw a relatively even representation of the top archetypes. The usual ones we have been seeing so far – Azorius Control, Mono Red Aggro, Jeskai Fires – all performed quite well in the hands of these highly skilled players to achieve maximum possible wins.
However, the metagame can still evolve as players find better ways to deal with the top tier decks. The five deck archetypes below have been the standouts from this weekend, that have demonstrated strength in different matchups. We will discuss them in more detail below.
Temur Adventures
The biggest winner of the weekend was Temur Adventures. Several pro players took the exact list (or with one or two changes) from Aaron Gertler’s winning deck at DreamHack Anaheim up to the full 10 wins. This included high profile Magic Pro League and Rivals League players such as Luis Scott-Vargas, Brad Nelson and Brian Braun-Duin. The original pilot himself made it up to 9 wins, and the consistency of his high finishes with the deck in the last few months is nothing short of amazing.
The deck will clearly be a greater force to be reckoned in the metagame with for the next month, at least until the release of the next set. Similar to Jund Sacrifice, the deck has a lot of decision points and will require a lot of practice to master. The deck is very strong against Azorius Control and other slower decks. It can be weaker to aggressive and combo strategies, as the pieces take a few turns to set up and the interaction spells are minimal.
Bant / Sultai Ramp
Simic Ramp has been mostly forced out of the metagame mainly due to its severe weakness to Mono Red Aggro and lack of ways to interact with early plays. Splashing for a third color – White (Bant) or Black (Sultai) – seems to be the answer to enhance the ramp strategies involving Nissa, Who Shakes the World, Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath and Hydroid Krasis as both colors provide good ways to interact with your opponents.
Crokeyz once again has shown to be a front runner with his deck building skills with another Bant deck (previous one was Bant Adventures), which other players found success with. Although crokeyz himself finished at 5-3, iSkeezy (tournament report at reddit r/spikes) took the exact list to a 10 win finish, and other players adopted his deck to good finishes. The Bant option makes it a bit of a hybrid between Azorius Control, with Teferi, Shatter the Sky and Dream Trawler.
Sultai Ramp gives access to direct removal, hand disruption and Casualties of War, which will show its usefulness once again as slower decks such as Temur Adventures become more popular. Uro is also utilized better to allow it to come back repeatedly, enabled by cards like Enter the God-Eternals and Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths. Mono Red Aggro will be a slightly unfavored matchup.
Jund / Rakdos Sacrifice
Jund Sacrifice is still a top tier but a deck hard to master similar to Temur Adventures, and has been shown to be very good in these types of events. Mayhem Devil is just a very troublesome card in general for Mono Red Aggro decks, which the meta is full of. The flex spots of the deck were different between decks, ranging from Wolfwillow Haven, Thrashing Brontodon to Lovestruck Beast.
With the presence of Temur Adventures however, some players opted to play the faster and more aggressive Rakdos Sacrifice. Caleb Durward and Nexus ran some very fun looking versions including Mire Triton, Tymaret Calls the Dead and Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger. Hall of Famer Raphael Levy gave a chance to Slaughter-Priest of Mogis in his version, which he went 7-3 with but climbed up to the #2 spot on the Mythic ladder.
Chris Kvartek also went 10-2 with Rakdos Sacrifice, but he said he will reveal the deck next week on his first stream. We cannot wait to see what innovation he will show us this time!
Wrapping Up
As for myself, I went 3-3 with a very fun Gruul Aggro build by JdoubleR2 but definitely could have done better with some preparation. We will be posting more decks as we find out more throughout the week, so check back often. Please let us know on Twitter if you participated in this event and would like to share your deck!
