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Main » Articles » The Premodern Power Rankings - "The Washed Kings," according to MichaelJ

The Premodern Power Rankings - "The Washed Kings," according to MichaelJ

Michael Flores
Posted on February 28, 2025
 Reddit

What's going on in Premodern?

For a format that has technically added negative one cards in the last year and a half, the recent Premodern metagame has proven remarkably dynamic. Remember when I was talking about how Portent sucked in Mono-Blue Dreadnought? Wow was that naive! (also wrong) Turns out the slow draw can be a feature more than a bug. Then it was all about u-w Dreadnought versus Mono-Blue... And if you first heard of Premodern from my 2022 run at LobsterCon, you might imagine actually deploying Dreadnoughts as a side plan instead of making a Sutured Ghoul super big and super fast.

The Two Decks in Tier One

1. Mono-Blue Dreadnought

  • Macro Archetype(s): Combo-Control, Aggro-Control, Lock

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 59.7%

  • Previous Ranking: 1*

Mono-Blue Dreadnought (or Doctor Surf & Surf) won both last year's LobsterCon main event in the hands of former World Champion Brian Selden and the Saturday follow-up! What a crusher.

Dreadnought is overpowered. I guess full stop? The card Phyrexian Dreadnought is arguably the strongest card in the format... It enables combo decks around Buried Alive, Sutured Ghoul, and even Greater Good. But the clear Number One deck in the format uses it to deploy a giant 12/12 trampling creature as early as turn two.

Phyrexian Dreadnought

It's not just that... The alternate combo with Vision Charm can create built-in protection for your massive monster. But Dreadnought's best draws often involve both a Daze and a Foil so even if the opponent has the Swords, Seal of Cleansing, or Naturalize to answer it... All kinds of Force of Will action.

Daze into Foil is a kind of combo in and of itself.

Dreadnought | Premodern | Raczka

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Doctor Surf & Surf creator David Raczka has made his deck a "moving target" in recent weeks by removing the Parallax Tide combo from the sideboard in favor of Accumulated Knowledge and Dominate.

This version can ride an opposing Control deck's Accumulated Knowledges!

It can steal an opposing Dreadnought (or Mishra's Factory) at instant speed!

Boogeyman!

2. Replenish

  • Macro Archetype(s): Combo-Control, Board Control

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 59.7%

  • Previous Ranking: 2

If you argued Replenish as the Number One deck, it would be difficult to argue on the box score alone. According to the Duress Crew data, Replenish has the same expected win rate as Dreadnought and a positive win expectation against 12/12s themselves.

In terms of how Power Rankings work, Replenish recently took down both the Italian Nationals in the hands of Mythic Invitational Champion Andrea Mengucci; and just last week the Premodern Super Gauntlet in the hands of PSS Champion Rich Shay. For his part, if community curated Old School formats have a consensus best player... Well, there is no consensus. But Rich is a Premodern LobsterCon Finalist; Old School Champion; and also won something like three out of four Monthly webcam tournaments last year... All with Replenish.

2025 Super Gauntlet Champion | Premodern | Rich Shay

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My own Premodern coming out party was with Replenish back in 2022; when I finished 3d at LobsterCon, with a far less focused list than either Rich's or Mengu's.

The Replenish main game plan revolves around Parallax Wave and Opalescence. If you have both in play, Parallax Wave can remove your opponent's creatures and then "reset" its fading counters by removing itself. Timing rules allow you to exile opposing creatures permanently, essentially infinitely, and in response to whatever your opponent wants to do... As many times as you like! You can also attack with your Parallax Wave and then "untap" it by exiling (temporarily) to itself.

When you add Parallax Tide to the mix, you can remove the opponent's lands in the same way, resetting over and over because your Parallax Tide has (like the Wave) also become a creature.

Unlike most of the other top decks in Premodern, Replenish's cards are ex pen sive. Tons and tons of four mana cards! But sometimes you can use Intuition, Frantic Search, and Attunement to put them in your graveyard and cast just the one four mana card (namesake Replenish) to get everything online on turn four three.

Replenish is a deck that hasn't exactly improved in recent months, but I also would never have rated it worse than #3 at any point since Land Tax was banned.

The main things to consider when preparing for this deck are 1) how many City of Traitors it plays (if any) and 2) what the sideboard looks like. Rich plays a lot of cards like Orim's Chant and Abeyance to help resolve his big spells against Blue decks (and they are also incredible in response to the opponent casting the card Phyrexian Dreadnought). Mengu on the other hand sided in eight copies of Meddling Mage and Exalted Angel in essentially every match, often benefitting from an opponent who sided out creature removal.

The X-Factor

3. Tide Control

  • Macro Archetype(s): Draw-Go, Lock

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: No Data

  • Previous Ranking: Unranked

Tide Control has been a statistical outlier for months. This is a big part of the reason it got on the New York radar to begin with. The deck just kept doing well, including placing in Top 8s, or multiple copies in Top 8s, despite relatively low populations.

This led to Andy Levine winning a Brooklyn Meetup with it (besting Yours Truly in the finals). I thought my Goblins deck would have a great matchup, but Andy beat me over and over. I tried my beloved Burn deck. He crushed that, too. It was difficult to see, and non-intuitive, but the combination of old school Draw-Go tools like Force Spike and Quicksand allowed him to stabilize against even the elite red aggro decks.

Andy of course overcame a Round One loss at LobsterCon to make Top 8 last year. And Tide Control has not ceased to impress. Most recently, the deck took down Polish Nationals.

Tide Control | Premodern | Rafal

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Despite lacking the requisite number of matches to be rated in the Duress Crew data, I consider Tide Control one of the best decks in the format, and seriously considered putting it in the first tier.

Tide's is kind of a split identity strategy. Half the time it's a Buehler-esque Draw-Go, controlling the board with Counterspells and colorless removal... And the other half the time it creates one-sided Armageddons with Parallax Tide.

Parallax Wave
Opalescence

Parallax Tide
Chain of Vapor
Stifle

If you have five mana you can target up to five of your opponent's lands, hold priority, and Chain of Vapor the Parallax Tide. This will return it to your hand, triggering your opponent's lands to re-enter play. But they haven't left yet! So then the first ability will resolve, exiling them forever.

Or you can slow roll it by removing up to five of your opponent's lands; and then Stifle their collective return to play the next turn.

Green Decks on the Rise

4. The Decks Formerly Known As The Rock

  • Macro Archetype(s): The Rock / Junk

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 58.4% (for Survival Rock)

  • Previous Ranking: Unranked

I took a lot of criticism early in my membership in the Premodern community for criticizing The Rock as a 46% deck. Well, traditional The Rock has fallen to 43% according to the Duress Crew data!

But Survival Rock -- the new-old take on the Golgari color combination -- is putting up a near-Dreadnought / Replenish win rate.

It's put up a lot of good finishes lately, but the most notable is probably first place at the European Eternal Weekend:

Survival | Premodern | Frantisek Kotas

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This is a toolbox deck that can shred the opponent's hand, or find the perfect answer to whatever the opponent is doing on demand.

Wall of Blossoms
Wall of Roots

One of the big incentives to the deck is a dramatically improved Burn matchup (57% v. 42%), and that's largely because it can hide behind 8 Walls. Ironically Tempting Wurm is probably the single most impactful card in recent Premodern, Survival Rock was one of the first decks to play it in multiples... and it's actually kind of sucky here (relative to other strategies).

Speaking of Tempting Wurm...

Pit Rack| Premodern | Jiri Tuma

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Adding Tempting Wurm to a discard strategy is one of the emerging, exciting, ways to play Premodern. Like, you can Duress the opponent to determine if they can punish you for playing Tempting Wurm. No? Wurm away! They might even empty their hand for The Rack!

Or you can Cabal Therapy and Stupor them into oblivion; so your Tempting Wurm has no drawback, anyway. Hard for the opponent to punish your Wurm with no cards in hand, right?

The widespread adoption of Tempting Wurm has had a couple of recent ripple effects in Premodern.

First, it -- a Green card -- has de facto catapulted Black to the second-best color in the format. Black is contextually the best color, primarily because emptying the opponent's hand makes it easy to kill Dreadnoughts.

Second, it's taken a lot of oomph out of the Red Deck. Good old Jackal Pup is just not very good against a turn two 5/5. And many, many decks can pick up a Tempting Wurm nowadays.

5. TerraGeddon

  • Macro Archetype(s): Pure Midrange

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 60.1%

  • Previous Ranking: 7

Terravore and Armageddon is the big combo here. Nom nom LANDS. Big Lhurgoyf. Nom nom.

TerraGeddon is the deck that keeps Rich Shay up at night. Despite historically liking my Red Deck matchup, I always felt that Terrageddon was underrated as a high Tier Two deck.

Here's the deck.

The strategy was already good, but players like Phil Nguyen went and added Tempting Wurm to the main. Red just can't beat it any more if they go that direction... And that not only means Burn plummets in value, but that Terrageddon got a lot better, contextually.

FWIW Rich would have TerraGeddon as third.

6. Madness

  • Macro Archetype(s): Aggro-Control

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 56.6%

  • Previous Ranking: Unranked

Madness used to be the especial project of one player (cyberpunker) but made it onto my Power Rankings by being one of the Top 4 most successful strategies of the last month. Presumably much more highly played.

Madness is a great example of careful tuning and building on more and more technology.

Squee, Goblin Nabob
Pyrokinesis
Cave-In

Cyberpunker didn't like his Goblins matchup in the abstract; but figured out to use the Squees he was already using to power his discard engines to cast "free" mass removal. How cool is that?

Survival Madness | Premodern | Cyberpunker

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One of the other reasons I wanted to talk about this deck is that -- especially if you don't go the Survival of the Fittest route -- it is one of the more affordable entry points for a new player to get into Premodern.

Survival Madness | Premodern | Luciano Sasaki

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A deck like this can murder opponents with Black Lotus -- I mean Wild Mongrel -- despite playing essentially no expensive secondary market cards.

The Washed Kings

Every deck rounding out this Top 10 was at one point ranked no lower than third. All of them had proponents arguing they were the "best" deck in the format at one point or another. You can technically play all these decks (and they all have potential great matchups) but none of them has the ceiling or explosiveness of Dreadnought or Replenish; and all of them are more exploitable in one way or another.

7. Elves

  • Macro Archetype(s): Linear Aggro, Big Spell

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 58.3%

  • Previous Ranking: 6

Elves | Premodern | Demian Vernieri

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Elves is explosive and powerful.

The Natural Order version can make a 7/7 or even 7/7 lifelink!

Elves should theoretically have gotten better with the declines of Burn and Goblins, but they were just replaced higher up in the Power Rankings by decks that can cast Engineered Plague. Oh, and a 7/7 on turn four isn't quite a 12/12 on turn two.

Elves has maybe the best Plan A (or sets of Plans A) between its mana acceleration and Survival of the Fittest, but contextually it's kind of bad against other top decks. I personally became disillusioned with Elves when I Natural Order'd for a third-turn Phantom Nishoba with haste and still lost to Goblin Sharpshooter. It is - generously - challenged by Burn but especially both Gobins and Replenish. Its great matchups on the other hand are less popular decks, like Stasis.

8. Burn

  • Macro Archetype(s): Red Aggro

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 52.2%

  • Previous Ranking: 3

Oh how the mighty have fallen!

My poor, sweet, favorite deck :(

I used to say that "If they rally want to beat you, they can." But they never did. It used to be that Burn had the bad Dreadnought matchup (but would win sometimes), and tended to beat everybody else.

Now "everybody else" can play Tempting Wurm if they want.

9. Ponza Oath

  • Macro Archetype(s): Lock, Non-Blue Control

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 56.8%

  • Previous Ranking: 4

Oath Ponza | Premodern | Ian Hendry

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Oath Ponza is a clever mash-up of Lock strategies. The Oath of Druids side makes it inconvenient to play creatures... At least creatures smaller than a Terravore. Between the nature of the deck itself (tons of lands that you bin with the Oath + all the land destruction), Terravore is one of the few creatures that will reliably be bigger than a Phyrexian Dreadnought.

In addition the whole Wasteland / Rishadan Port / Sphere of Resistance / Winter's Grasp side of the deck makes it sometimes impossible for the opponent to play the game at all. No one likes the manascrew element of Magic. Oath Ponza makes manascrew the whole point of it.

Sound great?

Here's the problem: Gush and Daze out of Dreadnought can make Winter's Grasp look pretty mid. Misdirection is downright unfriendly.

Here's the other problem: Replenish plays three Tsabo's Webs. Penza Oath has something like 17 lands that don't untap with Tsabo's Web in play... And eight of those represent most of its ways to win.

10. Goblins

  • Macro Archetype(s): Linear Aggro

  • Duress Crew Win Rate: 48.7%

  • Previous Ranking: 5

Despite leading all decks in its tonnage of performance recently (including two Monthly titles), Goblins has been under-performing on win rate for something like a year. It's just not winning at the same clip as other top decks, and worse, has sub-40% matchups against both Dreadnought and Replenish.

But sure, it's hard to argue with a first-turn Goblin Lackey.

Part of what makes Premodern so great is that there are a ton of viable decks that didn't even get mentioned in this Power Rankings! Enchantress variants, Bottomless Pit discard decks, fast combo aplenty, my old pal LandStill (and more). I'm sure that at some point, in our old age, we will reminisce with nostalgia how you used to be able to summon a Jackal Pup on turn one without getting laughed out of the room... And at that point no one will have Tempting Wurms in their decks any more; and you really will be able to make a 2/1 for one. Rock on.

LOVE

MIKE

*j/k LOL. There was no previous ranking.

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TAGS articles, magic, casual, metagame, constructed, decks, competitive, best, mtg, mike flores, community, premodern, tiers, cedh, 02282025

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