In anticipation of this weekend’s professional-level tournament, the Neon Dynasty Championship, Wizards of the Coast published their excellent metagame preview yesterday with commentary by MTG legend Frank Karsten. Today, they put out the full list of decks that players have entered for both the Alchemy and Historic portions of the Championship.
With the Championship now getting underway, let’s take a quick look at the meta and some example decklists from each of the most popular archetypes. The tournament is featuring both the Alchemy and Historic formats this time around, culminating with an Alchemy playoff tournament on Sunday.
As a format that hasn’t yet seen much pro-level play, the Alchemy meta has some surprises in store for us. Most of the field is either playing Naya Runes or specifically trying to beat it, which has resulted in some unexpected archetypes making up the majority of the field.
We’re playing close attention to the Neon Dynasty Championship this weekend, and we’ll be keeping you up-to-date with daily updates until its conclusion Sunday evening, so stay tuned! A link to our day one coverage will be added when available, and you can also check out Wizards’ Viewer’s Guide for more information about the event or tune into their live coverage at twitch.tv/magic. In the meantime, let’s see what decks Magic’s top players are willing to bring to a tournament with a $450,000 prize pool.
While Mono White hasn’t been all that popular on the Alchemy ladder, it has surprisingly shown up as the most popular archetype in the format at the Championship. Mono White’s popularity appears to mostly be a reaction to the power of the Naya Runes archetype – the second most popular this weekend – that has become notorious in both Alchemy and Standard for its explosive lines of play.
Archon of Emeria is showing up in a lot of maindecks along with Thalia, Guardian of Thraben specifically to slow down the enchantment-powered Naya decks. Ideally, the Mono White decks are looking to curve out with cheap creatures starting on turn one in a bid to get underneath the Naya decks as well as midrange and control decks in the format.
Largely considered the deck to beat in the Alchemy rounds of the Championship, Naya Runes is an explosive strategy that can “go off” with the combination of Jukai Naturalist and Runeforge Champion. With both cards on the field at the same time, Rune spells can be cast for free. Since all of the Runes draw a card when they enter the battlefield, it’s possible to rip through the deck with a good draw while building a massive board presence in the process.
Coming in as the third most popular Alchemy archetype, we have another somewhat unexpected deck: Orzhov Venture. Back at the end of January, the Venture into the Dungeon mechanic got a sweeping buff across many cards in Alchemy. Venture decks have been popular on and off on the ladder since then, but it’s still a bit of a surprise to see it getting so much play at the Championship.
The competitors have selected this deck presumably because it plays well against both Naya Runes – again, often with Archon of Emeria in the maindeck – and also Mono White Aggro. It’s an aggressive deck that can transition into more of a midrange plan, making it line up well against the Mono White decks that are primarily focused on taking down Naya anyways.
We had some unexpected archetypes showing up in numbers in Alchemy, but surprising absolutely nobody, Izzet Phoenix is the most popular Neon Dynasty Championship Historic deck – and it’s not close. Izzet Phoenix is an archetype that has survived multiple bannings at this point, and has been around throughout all of the nonsense that’s happened in the format.
Trailing quite a bit behind Phoenix in terms of metagame share, we’re seeing Azorius Control as the second-most popular deck in the Historic portion of the Championship. Azorius Control decks have been around in Historic for a long time, but they received a few interesting new tools from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
The Wandering Emperor is showing up in decent numbers as a planeswalker that can play well on both offense and defence. Meanwhile, March of Otherworldly Light is a strong enough removal option to be seeing play in older formats like Modern, and it’s appearing as a four-of in many of the Azorius decks here as well.
A further iteration of the Jund Food decks that made for one of Historic’s early standout archetypes, Golgari Food is the third most played Historic deck at the tournament. The printing of Ravenous Squirrel in Jumpstart: Historic Horizons pushed the Golgari evolution of the deck to be one of the most important decks in current-day Historic, and while it’s not as popular as Izzet or Azorius at this tournament, it’s still a very powerful deck.
