World’s Week is always one of the most fun times on the magic calendar. While the World Cup is always entertaining, if you like star power and high-level magic, the World Championship is the event for you.
Yesterday started with three rounds of Vintage Masters draft (likely the first sanctioned phantom draft in paper magic) highlighted by Wraper opening a Mox Jet and Jeremy Dezani’s first match taking nearly three hours to finish 0-2-1 (which was actually great for me, because despite my best intentions, I didn’t wake up until 5 AM, nearly two hours after the start of the event).
I spent the lunch break calculating the EV of drafting VMA in paper. By using the cheapest version of each card (so white bordered power, Revised duals, etc) and discounting commons and uncommons all together, I came up with a touch over $166 (and its probably a bit higher if you count things like Reanimate at uncommon and Brainstorm at common). Either way, if anyone offers you the chance to pay $150 for a non-phantom paper VMA draft, you should probably take it.
Modern Meta
While opening Mox Jet’s is awesome, and the EV of paper VMA is interesting, what I really wanted to talk about was the Modern metagame brought to Worlds by 24 of the best players on earth. If you check out the deck lists , here is the breakdown you’ll find.
Most Played Cards (Lands)
*The highest number of any single card that could be played in a 24 player field is 96.
Land Discussion
I should mention right off the bat that using a 24 player tournament made up of ultra-spikes may not be the best way to generalize to the broader meta. On one hand, people do tend to follow the pros lead, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of their innovations showing up on-line or in your FLGS over the winter, but at the same time, a deck like Pyromancer Ascension takes a lot of skill to play well, so it’s definitely not for every F&M grinder. This said, it’s still worth discussing what the pros are up to in modern.
First off, there are a ton of Scalding Tarns and Steam Vents being played at the World Championship. While this isn’t really a surprise, finding that a 66.67 percent of the World Championship field is playing the full four copies of Scalding Tarn (across several different decks, no less) is worth note. Prices on Tarn have been steadily decreasing for a year now and there is some amount of speculation/fear about a reprinting in the near future. I don’t think ZEN fetches will show up in KTK-block (mostly because of the “the enemy/ally breakdown of lands in standard is already equal” argument), and while having ONS fetches in modern relieves some of the pressure on mana-bases as a whole by allowing for less expensive substitutes, the World Championship field shows that the correct (i.e. no budget concerns) modern manabase is going to be Scalding Tarn heavy. Whether or not this means a recovery for Tarn is yet to be seen, although having a modern PT in a couple months, and on-camera SCG events starting soon can’t hurt.
Second, where the heck is Polluted Delta? Blue decks, and blue fetches are dominating the tournament, but Delta is nowhere to be found.
Third, if you had told my Sunday that there would be 12 Faerie Conclaves in the field, I would have laughed you out of the room.
Fourth, it is worth mentioning that there are two difference Jeskai Ascendency builds, the CFB Fatesticher based combo, and a 5-color version from Lars Dam. While I would guess that most people will move towards the CFB build because of the groups popularity, Dam’s build is running x4 Gemstone Mine, which hasn’t really made much noise in modern. If, for some reason, Ascendency Combo heads Dam’s direction, maybe there could be some potential here?
Dig Through Time or Treasure Cruise?
So, as the above pie chart shows, there are more Cruises than Digs in the World Championship field. At this point it clear that Dig is better in control, and Treasure Cruise is better in tempo/aggro (basically, decks where most of your cards do the same thing). The most interesting Dig/Cruise revelation from the World Championship comes from what decks are not playing Cruise, specifically the CFB Ascendency deck, which decided on a 1-4 split in favor of Dig. This is a major evolution in the Ascendency deck, as the earlier build of Ascendency Combo tended to favor Dig.
Counterspells
Non-situational counters are at an surprising low, especially considering the number of Scalding Tarns in the field. However, the versatile Izzet Charm is out in force. Both the F&M promo and RTR foils are sitting at between $2.50 and $3.00, with a foil multiplier of about x4, and could represent a good buy.
Final Notes:
I was going to break down creatures, but given that a high percentage of the deck in the field are creature free (Pyromancer Ascension), creature-light (Ascendency Combo, Scapeshift), or Delver, there really isn’t much to see here.
The fact that nearly half the Delver decks are splashing green for Tarmogoyf is interesting, and represents another new development. The return of Pyromancer Ascension is a good story, and the deck could see an uptick in popularity as a budget option for local modern events. Ascension was as high as $10 over the summer, and you can pick up copies for as little as $5 currently and could be a card to keep an eye on. Its probably worth skimming over the some upcoming modern results to see if the deck is on the upswing, or if it is simply the product of the pro meta.
CFB returned to the Gifts/Rites transformational SB plan, which was somewhat popular online a year or so ago. While it probably won’t impact prices of anything much, as a player it’s something to be aware of because it does seem like a good way to pick up some free wins with Iona, given the severe lack of any graveyard interaction in the World Championship meta.
Finally, don’t think about specing Fatestitcher. Sure, the deck is cool, but it’s an uncommon, and even foils are uninteresting due to those horrible all foils Alara block packs.
Anyway, what do you make of this data? What did I miss. Let me know in the comments, or @SaffronOlive on twitter.
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