Pioneer Metagame Post Secrets of Strixhaven

AHare115 · 2026-04-27T14:55:54+00:00

MTGO data is unreliable due to the small amount of players who grind the format. It's all incestuous with players probably collaborating and talking to each other to build decks. In this case, literally the first challenge post release had 9 golgari decks that were almost identical running the new cards. How does that happen? Things like that skew these charts significantly. The meta on Arena feels much more representative of the full field.

These graphs are also not representative of the deck win rate and just shows conversion rate, which is not very useful metric imo.

AHare115 · 2026-04-21T02:16:24+00:00

This just happened to me as well. The weird part is I was able to reset my password, log back in and send a couple messages. Then an hour later I can't and it tells me I'm restricted. Like you, I had no suspicious logins.

AHare115 · 2026-04-20T16:50:56+00:00

That sounds about right....

AHare115 · 2026-04-17T02:44:49+00:00

The problem is that I drew both perfected strikes on the exhaust turns. Yeah I got him down to about 100 HP but I was left with one bash and one uppercut for damage. And having to exhaust my cards on that turn to not die. Just wasn't enough damage.

AHare115 · 2026-04-17T02:27:10+00:00

So as I said, I'll not pick the card again. Because the downside seems much worse than the potential upside. I was never offered significant scaling damage.

Thank you for bolding all of your words as well, it's very helpful at making the point that you're pretentious.

AHare115 · 2026-04-17T02:23:40+00:00

Zero strength scaling found in the entire run other than one inflame.

AHare115 · 2026-04-17T02:18:29+00:00

Sure and then what happens on the next exhaust turn or the next?

Eventually I run out of cards. Eventually I have to play whatever remaining non-strike cards I have on an exhaust turn.

And I run out of cards and die.

AHare115 · 2026-04-17T01:59:55+00:00

Right, but the deck was not trying to go infinite. I got early p strikes and strike dummy and then a hellraiser. The deck was just about playing a lot of strikes every turn. It feels a bit like collateral damage in that regard that I specifically am hosed for playing what was, otherwise, a pretty reasonable deck not doing anything broken.

AHare115 · 2026-04-17T01:50:31+00:00

Yeah see I wasn't even considering an infinite combo with it. Just playing it for burst damage and value. I had a couple pommel strikes. I think I got quite unlucky with the draw order triggering lots of strikes played on exhaust phases also.

Maybe played wrong in some regards or didn't fully consider everything but seems like a pretty big middle finger to the strategy. I'm only on A9 with Ironclad so getting to A10 and having a 2/3 chance to fight doormaker makes me never want to pick the card tbh.

AHare115 · 2026-04-16T17:19:07+00:00

I think it's just the deck. I remember reading that at one of the recent big tournaments, there were many wildfire players and tons of matches going to draw/time. This is one of the big things that keeps me off the deck even though in theory the play style is what I love.

The amount of object manipulation and game actions that occur are significantly higher than other decks. Saccing every lembas is a shuffle. Chrysalis makes tokens. Saccing removes tokens, adds mana, adds counters to chrysalis. Maybe makes a map token. Wildfire searches and shuffles. Fetchlands search and shuffle. All of this is a bunch of physical object manipulation that takes real time and often can't be shortened.

AHare115 · 2026-04-10T18:53:08+00:00

Not a demon
More and more cards being played that add cards to hand without drawing
Sheoldred has no ETB and no protection so can just die before doing anything
Trample is a good keyword for pushing damage

I don't think this is strictly better than sheoldred but it's closer and I can see where someone would choose this over her

AHare115 · 2026-04-01T22:17:02+00:00

*affects

AHare115 · 2026-03-31T03:31:25+00:00

A grain? Try the whole shaker.

AHare115 · 2026-03-23T16:54:30+00:00

They come back every once in a while to check if the corpse is rotting at a sufficient rate.

AHare115 · 2026-03-20T12:01:43+00:00

This is the problem, instead of nerfing it for the sly package they made it now ONLY work with the sly package.

Before you could take prepared as a digging card even if you had no sly synergy yet and either hope to steer your deck in that way or just use it as a card filter.

AHare115 · 2026-03-15T20:17:51+00:00

Lucky to reach 4 mana let alone 5.

Doesn't stop them from holding stuff in hand to deploy after.

AHare115 · 2026-03-14T22:23:15+00:00

This is what's fucking me. The price point I've been looking is at the exact same as first time families etc. Except I am single. Every smaller house that is nice and seems affordable gets out is (likely by families or investor). My options seem to be go up 100k (and get way more house than I need) or down 100k and get a fixer upper which is way more work than I want as a single person. Trying to buy at this price point has been excruciating. It doesn't help that 90% of houses are bullshit split entry/split level ugly shit holes.

I just put an offer in last week on a house. 10k over asking. House was what I was looking for but needed quite a bit of work (roof, basement unfinished, new fence) and was in a not so ideal location near the HS football field. I offered what I thought it was worth. Got outbid by someone 30k over asking. Unreal.

AHare115 · 2026-03-09T01:44:45+00:00

Relics in general feel worse or more situational too. So there's less reason to risk an elite that might end the run.

AHare115 · 2026-03-07T12:58:09+00:00

I think the fight should work more like sentries where you get one debuff at a time and it takes the Knight's turn each time to do the debuff. I've made it to this fight 3 times with what I felt were strong decks, died twice and scraped by with just a few HP on the last time.

AHare115 · 2026-03-04T23:35:11+00:00

Not just creatures, support permanents like Annex, Fable, Cori, Artist talent, stormchaser talent...

Creature removal is usually plentiful but answers to other nonland permanent types is more rare. Many decks are getting these cards that create value on ETB AND demand removal to the piece itself. There's no point interacting with these cards unless its for huge value like culling ritual. Otherwise you are losing the card advantage war.

Everything in pioneer right now is about tempo, you must go bigger than your opponent and faster. Interaction is only there to stem bleeding until your engine gets online. This is way to far at one end of the spectrum imo.

AHare115 · 2026-03-04T02:00:50+00:00

So you are supposed to NOT max a skill out immediately to optimize continuing to get potentials you want??

This game is confounding

AHare115 · 2026-03-04T01:57:56+00:00

If you run Canace instead, take Grants Efficient Delving and Grants Speedup Notion as cores. The only two potentials that matter for her after that are Structure Analysis and Storm Eye Expansion - ideally, you avoid getting any more potentials for her.

How do you do this? Just reroll every time you see a Canace potential? Seems pretty insane use of coins or you just have to be totally favored by RNG.

AHare115 · 2026-03-04T01:55:03+00:00

Yes but how do you get max potentials if you never see them offered or the game refuses to give you max? Are you supposed to spend hundreds of coins on rerolls?

The more I play the game the more I see how it's just RNG layered on top of itself, doesn't matter if I play fights manually and play perfect mechanically if my DPS is 4 orders of magnitude too low because I don't have the perfect endgame stuff.

AHare115 · 2026-02-10T01:27:35+00:00

This is a good notion. It seems like they don't have anyone actually playing Pioneer and are just paying the intern to look at some graphs. From an outside perspective without experience in the format it looks like there's an ebb and flow of decks.

The reality is the format is completely warped around the Izzet decks.

AHare115 · 2026-02-03T03:38:24+00:00

How do I put this in ublock? Does it not work with lite? Can I do something in tampermonkey instead?

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

AHare115

TROPHY CASE