Hello everyone! Starting with this week, we’re going to be acting upon a new initiative! We want you to have the most up to date information on the formats, and initially, we did that by providing deck guides to fill out your knowledge. However, we realized that we could still do more so we’re looking to be updating each formats tier list biweekly as well as provide analysis on the standout decks, whether they stand out for their strength, weaknesses, or they have a large change in positioning. As always, you can find the link to the complete tier lists below. Let’s get into it.
To the surprise of nobody, the deck taking the top spot this week in Historic is Izzet Phoenix. The deck remains to be a fast, grindy, and overall extremely powerful option for Historic. As long as graveyard hate or other hate cards don’t have a huge prevalence in Historic, Phoenix will continue to do well.
In a sense, the deck doesn’t really have any bad (popular) matchups which makes it such a potent tool against the field. The only “downside” is the difficulty to play well, but time and practice can obviously make up for that.
Historic is currently, more or less, defined by two decks and while Phoenix is one, Golgari is the other. Unlike Phoenix, Golgari looks to grind through any deck, something it can do with relative ease given enough time. This can struggle more against combo decks than Phoenix (not that there are many) but can be stronger against decks looking to play the value game.
If you’re looking for a powerful deck, like long games, and dislike Phoenix, this would be my obvious next choice for play.
If you saw the Set Championship, then this top 3 shouldn’t surprise you too much, but since there hasn’t been too much mobilization in Historic, I believe Auras as well as Food and Phoenix remain the three pillars of Historic.
Where Golgari and Phoenix go for grindy and somewhat interactive games, Auras simply puts you to the test. You play a bunch of creatures, a bunch of Auras, and you ask your opponent if they can beat that. For better or for worse, for most decks, that answer is no. Auras is extremely powerful, very resilient, and very hard to beat for a vast majority of decks, even if you’re playing a lot of removal.
Its greatest strength and weakness is that playing it reasonably well is very easy as a lot of the onus is on the opponent, but to play it optimally is extremely difficult. If you think the meta is moving away from removal (which it does feel that way), this is easily one of the best decks, if not just the best one.
The Deck’s Looking To Break In / Next Best Options
The main breakout deck from the Historic portion of the Set Championship, Azorius Yorion may slowly become the control deck of choice. Rather than going a traditional route or trying to cheat in a Lotus Field, Yorion allows you to play permanents that accrue value and then allow you to gain massive advantages when blinked.
I’ve always been a fan of Yorion in control shells as it’s rare that you need a particular card over others, rather than a particular effect which you can just play as many as you need. This will mainly be contending with Lotus Field to see where Control goes, but I’m pulling for this more consistent iteration.
If you look at the last Set Championship you would think that Arcanist, Food, and Phoenix were the pillars, so why is Auras up there and Arcanist isn’t? Despite Arcanist being a great deck, it struggles a lot against both Phoenix and Food which puts it in an awkward spot of the metagame.
On ladder play or in a really open field Arcanist is a great choice, but if you’re expecting a lot of people to sleeve up the best decks, Arcanist’s viability wanes quickly. That said, if they can find better plans for the Food and Phoenix matchup this deck can go from a fine option to one of the best.
Enchantress has been making its rounds for awhile and it has maintained it’s status as a fine choice the whole time. If you’re playing against a deck where Nine Lives is good, this deck is a great option. If you aren’t, the usefulness of this deck falls off very quickly.
That said, I would venture to say this deck is effective against more decks than it’s ineffective against, but playing such a polarizing strategy is rarely the best option in an open field.
If Food was a smaller part of the metagame I could see Enchantress rocketing up to one of the best choices, but until then, it’ll likely stay in this middle zone of good, not great.
Another one of the breakout decks from the Set Championship, Jean-Emmanuel Depraz piloted this functionally unknown archetype to a second place finish which is a huge achievement.
This deck is super interesting as you get a lot of natural utility just by playing cheap artifacts between graveyard hate, interaction, and pressure. This deck doesn’t do any one thing extremely well, but can do a bunch of things pretty well which makes it a relatively balanced archetype.
The issue that Affinity faces is that if it ever becomes too popular, there’s a myriad of sideboard options that obliterate the deck so that will inherently make this a tenuous option. However, if players still aren’t respecting this deck, it will remain a strong option.
Despite not seeing much in terms of competitive play, I believe Niv-Mizzet is on the precipice of a resurgence. Historic is becoming very much a slugfest between powerful strategies and it’s really hard to get more powerful than Niv-Mizzet. Furthermore, I believe that this deck has strong matchups against many top decks like Control, Phoenix, and Food which makes it a particularly good meta choice as well.
The biggest issues with this deck is that it’s not great against fast decks and the mana base (although workable) is pretty horrendous which can put a natural limit on this deck’s strength, but I wouldn’t be surprised for this to start making rounds in the tournament scene soon enough.
Robert "DoggertQBones" Lee is the content manager of MTGAZone and a high ranked Arena player. He has one GP Top 8 and pioneered popular archetypes like UB 8 Shark, UB Yorion, and GW Company in Historic. Beyond Magic, his passions are writing and coaching! Join our community on Twitch and Discord.
