A good listen while grading quizzes last night.
Matt and I are working on releasing more detailed information about Champs. I was glad to hear the discussion about classifying decks as Big Blue versus Combo, and that Steve agreed with me on classifying your guys' deck Big Blue. It is hard to tell where to draw the line though. Is it at X City Vault? Belcher?
I do somewhat disagree with your narrative about the results from Champs. Looking at the major tournaments since the Lodestone restriction, I think a more accurate description is that there is a cyclic nature in whether gush or shops are on top. EE5 was utterly dominated by gush. Before that Thorn did well at the TMD Open. Before that gush did well in a pair of Power 9s, which was preceeded by Shops/Eldrazi doing very well at NYSE.
I think the two big takeaways from this are that:
- Gush and thorn are still the most powerful general strategies.
- People tend to over-metagame against the archetypes which have been successful very recently.
As has been said many times before, you can build a non-gush, non-thorn deck that beats one of these strategies, but it is unlikely you can beat both. Gush or thorn themselves can be built to beat the other, but once one strategy becomes overly dominant they cannibalize themsevles by building too much for the mirror.
The gush deck I played at Champs has a solid thorn matchup but struggles against Grixis Therapy and some combo matchups. I expected neither of these decks but unfortunately was only paired against thorn once in nine rounds (I would have loved to switch opponenents with Steve.) Grixis Therapy dominates against any blue deck, but has a much tougher time against Shops and Eldrazi. I haven't played your PO Mentor deck, but I imagine its winrates somewhat resemble Grixis Therapy's.
Feedback unrelated to the content:
While listening there were multiple instances where the audio would make small skips for ~5 seconds. I don't think this was just my computer. Also a small correction: I believe you interchanged Brian Pallas and Joe Brennan's places in the top8; Joe beat Brian in the quarterfinals.
last edited by diophan