Pioneer Regional Championship Meta Data Analysis and Results

Hi! My name is Vertyx and I will go over the data from 5 Regional Championships that took this weekend. The talk is about United States RC, South East Asia RC, Mexico RC, Japan RC and China RC! Many skilled players competed with what they thought was the best deck to play for qualifications to the Pro Tour Barcelona and the World Championship! Lets go take a look how it shaped the Pioneer metagame.

Mexico Regional Championship

First lets take a look at the RC in Mexico. It had 162 players so quite a small sample size to draw out any conclusions but lets take a look at what did well. Acording to our data which you can see above, the deck’s with the highest winrate were Gruul Aggro, Boros Convoke and 5c Enigmatic Incarnation.

Gruul Aggro and Enigmatic Incarnation have a good matchup against Rakdos Midrange which was expected to be the most played deck and the prediction worked out well for the pilots. Both of these decks are also quite good at beating various creature based midrange or aggro decks because they both pack a lot of ways to deal with a board full of creatures.

Boros Convoke is the new hot deck (also Hogaak as people like to call it). The deck got discovered a few weeks before all of the Regional Championships and it caught people off guard since they were not prepared for it. The deck is able to put a lot of power onto the battlefield very early but after the first week others got adapted to it so some of the decks numbers went down. However, its still a deck that should be respected and I expect it to still put up some good numbers in the upcoming weeks! Even that the sample size of 162 players is small, 65.6% win rate is very high for a deck and it proves that the deck is powerful!

China Regional Championship

The Regional Championship in China was even smaller than the Mexico one with only 94 players! The best performing decks at this tournament were Lotus Field Combo and Azorius Control!

Lotus Field is very good against midrange and control decks since it can take a lot of time to set up before they are forced to combo off. This tournament did not have many aggro decks registered and the most played deck was Rakdos Midrange which this deck is strong at beating. The meta was good for Lotus and it proved that by having the highest win rate in the tournament at 59.8%

The other top performer was Azorius Control with its win rate at 59.2%. According to our data the deck did well against most decks. The only really problematic matchup for it at this tournament was Lotus Field Combo with a 33.3% win rate against it.

South East Asia Regional Championship

The third tournament was South East Asia Regional Championship with 155 players! The decks with the highest winrate were Mono-White Humans, Mono-Green Devotion and Boros Convoke!

Mono-White Humans was the deck with the highest win rate at 61,7%. According to our data the deck struggled against Enigmatic Incarnation (which is strong at beating creature decks thanks to its endless answers), against Boros Convoke which is a deck that can put more power on the board faster than Mono-White Humans and Mono-Green Devotion that will also put more power on the board faster most of the time. Aside from that it did quite well against the other decks in the tournament.

The second deck with the highest win rate at 58.6% was Mono-Green Devotion! According to our data the deck did well against a lot of other decks in the tournament. There are a few exceptions but the sample size is so small that I would not drive conclusions from it (it was only 1 match against Boros Convoke and Lotus Field Combo) The deck is good at answering various situations with its sideboard built for Karn, The Great Creator, so it has answers to most of the formats decks already in game 1!

The third best performing deck was Boros Convoke with a 55.2% win rate! As already explained above the deck was created a few weeks before the RC’s and people were testing it a lot to see how strong it is. The win rate has for sure went down compared to the week it was created since no one was prepared for it at that time, but it still remains as a strong deck choice!

Canada Regional Championship

We are slowly moving into bigger numbers with the Canada Regional Championship at 264 players! The decks with the highest winrate at this tournament were Rakdos Sacrifice and Azorius Spirits!

Rakdos Sacrifice was the deck with the highest win rate at 65%! The deck is good at beating various creature aggro and midrange decks since it has many tools to remove them from the battlefield and the data shows exactly that! It did the best against decks like Mono-White Humans and Rakdos Midrange. The decks it struggled against were 5c Enigmatic Incarnation since they have a much better late game and this deck has a hard time closing the game fast. The second being Azorius Control for similar reasons since they are also quite good at answering the threats that Rakdos Sacrifice can present

The second deck with the highest win rate were Azorius Spirits at 60.3% win rate! According to our data it won the most matches against Creativity, Greasefang, Enigmatic Incarnation and Mono-Green Devotion. All of these decks can struggle with interaction and flying threats at the same time so for that reason spirits did well against them. The deck Struggled against Mono-White Humans and Rakdos Sacrifice since both of these decks are quite good at managing the board against other creature decks.

United States Regional Championship

The last one is the United States Regional Championship with a whopping 1170 players attendance! The decks that did well were Azorius Spirits and Rakdos Sacrifice! the data is very similar to the Canadian Regional Championship but with a much larger sample size

The deck with the highest winrate were Azorius Spirits at 57.4%! It did the best against Enigmatic Incarnation, Abzan Greasefang and Lotus Field Combo. The decks it struggled against were Creativity, Rakdos Sacrifice and Rakdos Midrange. Both of the largest Regional Championships had Azorius Spirits at its win rate over 57%!

The second deck with the highest win rate was Rakdos Sacrifice at 57.3%! The deck was the strongest against Mono-White Humans, Azorius Spirits and it struggled the most against Abzan Greasefang and Creativity. Same as spirits it had its win rate over 57% in both of the largest Regional Championships this weekend!

Combined data from all of the Regional Championships

Data from all of the Regional Championships combined having almost 2000 players and over 10 000 matches played! The decks that had the highest win rate in the hostile environment full of strong players were Rakdos Sacrifice and Azorius Spirits!

Rakdos Sacrifice had a combined win rate of 58.2%! It did the best against Mono-White Humans, Rakdos Midrange and Azorius Spirits. It Struggled the most against Enigmatic Incarnation and Lotus Field Combo. Rakdos had a very good win rate in the sample size this large and moving forward I expect it to be one of the decks to beat!

The second deck was Azorius Spirits at a win rate of 57%! It did the best against Enigmatic Incarnation, Abzan Greasefang and Lotus Field Combo. It struggled against Boros Convoke and Rakdos Sacrifice. Same as Rakdos Sacrifice the deck had a very high win rate in the sample size this large and I also expect it to be one of the decks to beat in the close future!

That would be all for today! I hope you enjoyed the article. If you had any feedback feel free to reach out to us!