Strixhaven Championship Weekend
Strixhaven Championship weekend is upon us, where 250 pros and hopefuls alike play for $250,000 and Post Season events in Standard and Historic. We know that the Standard Metagame is pretty locked up this late in the format, but where there’s room for innovation and excitement is in Historic. We released our analysis of the Historic meta a few days ago ahead of deck submissions for the weekend, and Frank Karsten has put out his Metagame Breakdown as well, and we now have a more clear picture of the Historic Decks making waves at this weekend’s Strixhaven Championship.
The 3 Format Defining Cards of Historic
Historic is full of incredibly powerful spells that have made massive impacts on the format in the past. Thoughtseize, Thassa’s Oracle among others have previously been staple cards in prior championships, but this weekend, 3 cards far and away are being favored by players. By Karsten’s data, players registered an astounding 647 copies of Brainstorm, 483 copies of Expressive Iteration, and 374 copies of Faithless Looting in Historic alone. Strixhaven and the Mystical Archives really coming out to play a huge role in this weekend’s tournament. This data and knowledge confirms what we speculated in our meta analysis, but let’s take a look at the official numbers to see where these powerful spells are being utilized.
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3 Stand Out Decks
In our Historic Metagame analysis, we covered 4 decks that did very well in the first weekend of tournaments with Historic Anthology 5 in the format. the 3rd place decks that we highlighted were Jund Food, and Mono Black Aggro. Both of these decks put up positive results and had reasonable amounts of representation. By the numbers from this weekend, we can see that, while these decks aren’t fighting for 3rd place, they are the 2 top decks that are not using our 3 favorite cards. These decks are spouting 7.2% and 5.2% representation this weekend respectively.
The 3rd place deck of the weekend is one that I thought would be a bit more represented, is Jeskai Control at 9.6% of the field. Above we have Cory Burkhart’s Jeskai Control list, and the song of the deck is the same as we saw from the past weekend. Main deck Rest in Peace, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Brainstorm and a wide variety of removal spells and counter magic provide this deck with a rather complete kit to take on a lot of the field. We haven’t seen any Jeskai Control decks in feature matches on stream at the time of writing, but on paper, this deck should be poised to handle nearly everything.
The 2nd place deck by nearly a 2:1 ratio is Jeskai Turns. Jeskai Turns has been a new archetype with the release of Strixhaven and has been iterated on continuously, even over the course of the last week. Above is LSV’s Jeskai Turns list, and in a Post Round 1 interview, he conveyed that his team had anticipated that our number 1 deck was going to be the deck of the weekend, and felt that Jeskai Turns had a favorable match up to that deck. We see that 45 players agreed with him on these thoughts, and we see a lot of similarities in these lists, but definitely some deviation from previous week’s card choices. The theme of this deck for this weekend is to favor quite a bit more card selection with Prismari Command, Expressive Iteration, and some playing Fire Prophecy, and then a bit more of a control game with some counter magic thrown in to play a longer game and really grind with opponents. From the matches that we’ve seen, this deck is definitely able to go the distance.
The most represented deck of the tournament, again nearly doubling the representation of the second place deck is Izzet Phoenix. We saw this last weekend as well, with the combination of Brainstorm, Faithless Looting, and Expressive Iteration giving a massive boost of power to this long standing Historic Archetype. 88 players, or 35.2% of the field is on this list, and while there’s some variation between the lists, the core spell package above, and the core creatures of Arclight Phoenix, Stormwing Entity, and Sprite Dragon caught enough attention to be anticipated to post up incredible results over the course of this weekend.
We are in for an exciting weekend of magic with the Strixhaven Championships, which you can watch now over on the official Magic Twitch channel. Frank Karsten always provides some great insights as well, so definitely check out his Historic Metagame Breakdown. Which Historic decks do you think will perform the best over the weekend? Let us know in the comments!
