It’s been a long and grueling day of competition at the Neon Dynasty Championship, as the Top 8 finalists battled it out in a double-elimination Alchemy tournament with six World Championship XXVIII invitations and $450,000 of prize money on the line. The Championship has now completed, and we have our winner – Eli Kassis!

This article is the third and final day of our coverage of the Neon Dynasty Championship here on MTG Arena Zone. We’ll be giving a narrative rundown on some of the day’s highlights along with the final results and some other infographics from the tournament. For those who may have missed it, you can view a replay of the entire day’s live broadcast on Magic’s official Twitch channel.

You’ll find all of our previous coverage from the Championship below, including a summary of both days of Swiss as well as a brief explainer on the tournament’s metagame – we even got some spoilers from the casting team for the upcoming expansion Alchemy: Kamigawa!

Neon Dynasty Championship: Final Bracket

Rank	Player	Historic Deck	Alchemy Deck	Cash Prize
1	Eli Kassis	Izzet Phoenix	Orzhov Venture	$20,000
2	Zach Dunn	Rakdos Arcanist	Mardu Midrange	$15,000
3	Yudai Miyano	Rakdos Sacrifice	Esper Clerics	$11,000
4	Jonny Guttman	Golgari Food	Mono White Aggro	$9,000
5	Jean-Emmanuel Depraz	Azorius Affinity	Jeskai Hinata	$7,000
6	Zhi Yimin	Rakdos Arcanist	Mardu Midrange	$7,000
7	Jim Davis	Azorius Auras	Grixis Midrange	$5,000
8	Brent Vos	Izzet Phoenix	Orzhov Venture	$5,000

Over the first two days of play, streamer Jim Davis caused quite a stir by making an incredible 12-0 run perfect run in the Swiss rounds. Unfortunately for Jim, he wasn’t destined to take down the whole tournament – he lost a close match in the first feature match of the day against Eli Kassis, putting him down into the lower bracket right off the bat.

That wasn’t the end of Davis’ misfortune though. Later in the day, he faced off against Jonny Guttman and his Mono White Aggro deck, who ran Davis over with aggression, forcing him to settle for a seventh place finish. Kassis, meanwhile, was also destined to get kicked out of the upper bracket in his next match, a 2-0 blowout against Yudai Miyano’s Esper Clerics.

This put Kassis on a crash-course with Jean-Emmanuel Depraz, the other player besides Davis who managed to go undefeated in day one, in the lower bracket. Depraz had just managed to survive his first match in the lower bracket by knocking out Brent Vos when he had to face Kassis – making for back-to-back matches against Orzhov Venture. Depraz wasn’t able to scrape by twice in a row though, and Kassis took the win.

Kassis still had to grind through two more matches to make it to the finals though, first against Guttman’s Mono White, and then a rematch against Yudai Miyano. Kassis persisted though, and managed to set himself up for the finals.

The other player to make it all the way to the finals, US college student Zach Dunn, won all three of his matches in the upper bracket before facing off with Kassis. The finals played out in three full best-of-three matches pitting Kassis and Dunn in a showdown of the two breakaway Alchemy decks of the tournament: Orzhov Venture and Mardu Midrange featuring Citystalker Connoisseur and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker.

Congratulations @Eli_Kassis! 🎉🎉🎉#NEOChamps pic.twitter.com/LiUjqB93py

— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) March 14, 2022

It was an incredibly close series of matches, with the advantage swinging from one player to the other at least once in nearly every game. In the end, the incremental advantaged gained from Kassis’ venturing into the dungeon with cards like Triumphant Adventurer and Nadaar, Selfless Paladin ground Zach Dunn out of the game despite an admirable performance.

In the final match, with Kassis already up one game, Dunn was on the backfoot with a dwindling life total. Dunn had a decent board presence including The Wandering Emperor, but Kassis ripped The Meathook Massacre off the top of his deck. This allowed Kassis to mop up Dunn’s board while leaving his Nadaar behind, setting him up to take out Dunn’s Emperor and lining up exact lethal damage on his following turn. It was an intense match, and we absolutely encourage any interested players to watch for themselves.

Alchemy and Historic Archetype Winrates

There are two big takeaways from the performance of the various archetypes in Alchemy this weekend. Firstly, Naya Runes was considered the deck to beat going in, and made up over 18% of the field. However, every player who wasn’t playing Naya had prepared for the matchup. 23% of the competition chose to play Mono White due in part to the good matchup it has with Naya.

A card that ended up being important in both Mono White and some of other white decks, such as Orzhov Venture, was Archon of Emeria. The three-mana archon stops the Runes deck in its tracks by preventing them from cantripping rune after rune. This isn’t the first time Archon of Emeria has shown up in Set Championships, but it was certainly the most we’ve seen it played – the card was even in quite a few maindecks.

In the end, it was the Orzhov Venture decks that had the highest overall winrate at 61.8% – clear proof that the archetype significantly increased in power after the recent rebalancing.

In Historic, none of the major archetypes ended the tournament with some of the high winrates we saw in Alchemy. Azorius Control and Azorius Yorion had the highest winrates in the format, at 54.5% and 57% respectively.

Interestingly, the similar Azorius Lotus Field decks performed significantly worse, with a mediocre 43% winrate. This appears to be at least partially due to Lotus Field performing poorly in the quasi-mirror against other UW decks.

azorius control (yorion)

55.5% global win rate

2.22% metagame share

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vs azorius lotus field

83.3% win rate

6 tracked matches

vs esper control

80.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

vs jeskai control

75.0% win rate

12 tracked matches

vs other

63.6% win rate

22 tracked matches

vs golgari food

63.4% win rate

41 tracked matches

vs azorius control

58.8% win rate

17 tracked matches

vs azorius affinity

50.0% win rate

12 tracked matches

vs rakdos arcanist

43.8% win rate

16 tracked matches

vs izzet phoenix

43.2% win rate

44 tracked matches

vs selesnya humans

42.9% win rate

7 tracked matches

vs gruul aggro

40.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

vs azorius auras

35.0% win rate

20 tracked matches

vs simic merfolk

25.0% win rate

8 tracked matches

vs 5c niv-mizzet

20.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

Izzet Phoenix, which was the most popular Historic deck at the tournament by a significant margin, performed admirably with a 52.8% winrate overall. It was good enough to help carry Kassis into the Top 8 after all, although the playoff tournament was played entirely in Alchemy.

izzet phoenix

50.5% global win rate

15.33% metagame share

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vs dimir rogues (lurrus)

100.0% win rate

8 tracked matches

vs rakdos arcanist (lurrus)

85.7% win rate

7 tracked matches

vs esper greasefang

80.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

vs azorius control

71.2% win rate

73 tracked matches

vs mono-red burn

66.7% win rate

6 tracked matches

vs rakdos goblins

66.7% win rate

9 tracked matches

vs azorius lotus field

65.4% win rate

52 tracked matches

vs 5c niv-mizzet

63.6% win rate

44 tracked matches

vs simic merfolk

62.5% win rate

16 tracked matches

vs other

61.0% win rate

82 tracked matches

vs dimir control

60.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

vs selesnya aggro

60.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

vs orzhov auras (lurrus)

57.9% win rate

19 tracked matches

vs rakdos arcanist

57.7% win rate

104 tracked matches

vs jeskai control (yorion)

57.1% win rate

7 tracked matches

vs azorius control (yorion)

56.8% win rate

44 tracked matches

vs Tainted Pact

56.5% win rate

23 tracked matches

vs jeskai control

55.0% win rate

60 tracked matches

vs mardu greasefang

50.0% win rate

10 tracked matches

vs jund food

50.0% win rate

26 tracked matches

vs mono-red goblins

50.0% win rate

6 tracked matches

vs esper control

50.0% win rate

6 tracked matches

vs azorius auras

49.2% win rate

132 tracked matches

vs mono-red aggro

45.0% win rate

20 tracked matches

vs heliod company

43.8% win rate

16 tracked matches

vs rakdos sacrifice

42.9% win rate

14 tracked matches

vs orzhov midrange (yorion)

40.0% win rate

5 tracked matches

vs selesnya humans

39.4% win rate

33 tracked matches

vs gruul aggro

38.1% win rate

21 tracked matches

vs golgari food

36.3% win rate

204 tracked matches

vs rakdos midrange

25.0% win rate

8 tracked matches

vs azorius affinity

24.6% win rate

57 tracked matches

vs selesnya enchantress

21.2% win rate

33 tracked matches

vs jeskai creativity

18.2% win rate

11 tracked matches

vs mono-black aggro

14.3% win rate

7 tracked matches

World Championship Qualifications

Each of the top six finishing players – that is, players who managed to win at least one match in the playoffs – also earned a qualification for the upcoming World Championship XXVIII. The remaining qualifications will be determined through the New Capenna Championship May 20-22. We’ll see you there.

Winning Decks by Eli Kassis

Alchemy:

Historic:

All Top 8 Decks

Alchemy:

Historic:

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This concludes our coverage of the Neon Dynasty Championship on MTG Arena Zone. Follow these links to find our coverage from day one and day two of the event, and you can also check out magic.gg for more official coverage. The next Set Championship will be the New Capenna Championship on May 20-22. Thanks for reading!