There were a very small number of events this past weekend, with the StarCityGamesOpen in Washington, D.C. being the only large live event.

Standard

SCG Open – D.C.

The Top 4 of this Open could have been the Top 4 of a Grand Prix, so it’s worth taking particular notice of this event.

"R/U/G Run"

• Creatures (14)
• 1 Snapcaster Mage
• 2 Frost Titan
• 2 Phantasmal Image
• 2 Thragtusk
• 4 Primeval Titan
• 3 Solemn Simulacrum

• Spells (20)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 3 Bonfire of the Damned
• 4 Farseek
• 4 Ponder
• 4 Rampant Growth
• 4 Temporal Mastery

• Lands (26)
• 1 Mountain
• 4 Island
• 5 Forest
• 1 Inkmoth Nexus
• 1 Kessig Wolf Run
• 2 Cavern of Souls
• 4 Copperline Gorge
• 4 Glimmerpost
• 4 Hinterland Harbor

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Thragtusk
• 2 Beast Within
• 3 Crushing Vines
• 2 Negate
• 1 Karn Liberated
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 2 Whipflare
• 2 Cavern of Souls

Buy This Deck

First of all, we have Reid Duke’s winning Wolf Run list with the inclusion of blue. As far as I can tell, the genesis of this list is from the Pro Tour Qualifier–winning list played by Josh Ravitz, and Reid has incorporated a number of Magic 2013 cards into it to further improve it. Like I said last week, decks that are capable of playing sweepers seemed well positioned this week, with the number of weenie aggro decks increasing and cards that are good against sweepers (such as Strangleroot Geist) seeing less and less play.

Another metagame inclusion in this deck to counteract so much aggro is Glimmerpost—to counteract the life lost against the more aggressive decks early in the game. (It’s worth noting here that you gain the same amount of life from the Posts when you have one in play already by fetching two and then one (3 × 2 + 4) as you do if you fetch one and then the other two (2 + 2 × 4).) The inclusion of Frost Titan is also interesting, but its ability to shut down a Birthing Pod or opposing Titan is quite relevant.

Charles Gindy, Ben Lundquist, and Josh Cho all played Delver, and here I present their average decklist:

Once again, Delver has warped to the metagame. There is now almost a complete set of Gut Shots to improve the matchups against Pod (since killing mana creatures is important) and in the mirror. On the other hand, the number of Restoration Angels we see continues to go down (with only one of the three lists running them), showing the decline in popularity of R/G aggro. Also of note is that two of three players choose Cavern of Souls over Moorland Haunt, a card that was previously thought to be critical to the archetype.

This SCG Open once again reminds us that when the Open offered incentives for people to travel and grind the circuit, it led to a rapid evolution of the top deck (Caw-Blade back then, although I guess when you sometimes start with eight cards in hand, it affects your results slightly), and now we’re starting to see that again with Delver. This trend can only continue if top players find the SCG Open circuit worthwhile, and with an increased prize pool (as well as a worthwhile Invitational), this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Magic Online

Magic Online Premier Events results are fairly similar to the results from the SCG Open, with R/U/G Run winning another event, although Delver’s performance is significantly worse, but that’s probably due to the fact that the caliber of player playing it at the SCG Open who was doing well with it was very high.

Legacy

It was a pretty uninteresting week in terms of Legacy, although the presence of no Show and Tell decks in the Top 8 could be a sign of a metagame shift away from that deck and back toward more traditional combo decks such as Storm. R/U/G continues to be the deck to beat, and Merfolk has apparently also fallen out of favor. Legacy seems to be slowly converging to a point where the Top 8s are less diverse than those in Standard, and I’m not sure if that’s a healthy thing for the format, but if that trend continues, I expect Modern (which has a much higher number of viable decks at the moment) to replace Legacy as the Eternal format du jour.

Chris Mascioli

@dieplstks on Twitter