The TopDeck Invitational & Open Results! - TopDeck.gg Newsletter

Welcome to the TopDeck newsletter! Read on for upcoming events, a metagame breakdown for both the TopDeck 2024 Invitational and Open, and as always, the latest tips and tricks from Magic Pro Matt Sperling.

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Welcome to Sperling’s Tip of the Month - our monthly column where former Magic: the Gathering Platinum pro (with 4 Pro Tour Top 8s) Matt Sperling will give you a piece of his mind, helping you improve your TCG game. This month - how do you adjust to a new format when cards are banned?

How to Win After Cards Get Banned

By Matt Sperling

Following the recent announcement of banned and restricted list changes in multiple formats, I want to take a moment here to discuss the strategy elements of how to adjust. Setting aside our emotional reactions to what took place, how do we adjust to the new format(s) that announced changes create?

Here are some tips and shortcuts I use when bans are introduced to a format I’m competing in shortly thereafter.

Did the ban go far enough?

With some bans, like Nadu in Modern, a strategy is clearly taken out of the picture and leaves little or nothing behind. Other times, such as with Sorin in Pioneer, there may be a deck (RB midrange) that is different, that exists in a different metagame now, and that perhaps isn’t as powerful, but that still could be a tier 1 deck.

Key indicators are when a deck had multiple lines of play or game plans that felt extremely powerful and only a subset were impacted by the ban, or perhaps there’s a viable substitute for the banned card (imagine if they had banned Shuko, then this would be the case, which is why they did not ban Shuko – but sometimes it happens!).

What strategies were the now-banned cards particularly good against?

Sometimes there’s a “fair” deck, or what passes for fair in an unfair format, like Tron in Modern, that beats up on other “fair” decks but can struggle vs. broken combo. Well, when broken combo gets a visit from the grim reaper, that leaves space not just for all decks to fill equally, but for an uneven redistribution of that win percentage. Look for these fair decks that beat the other fair decks.

Look also for previously tier 2 combos that were perhaps half a turn too slow against the banned combo. These might now be good within a space others are no longer expecting and devoting sideboard resources too. But be careful. It’s also possible that the combo speed still matters and it’s possible that sideboard slots intended to hate out, e.g., Storm in modern, are still very popular because there’s fewer other combo decks to worry about, and sideboards are built to assuage worries.

Lastly, there’s often just some card-specific dynamics of what lined up poorly before the bans that may line up well now. For example, if a banned card happens to be discard like Grief, cards like Through the Breach that try to assemble in-hand combos but aren’t able to deploy or protect the pieces before hand disruption gets at them will go up in value if Grief is gone.

“Meta” means thinking not just about what you believe to be true, but also what you believe to be true about what others believe to be true

Expect to play vs. Tier 1 decks that were not directly impacted by the ban. Duh. But beyond that aspect of the emerging metagame, consider the first “ah ha” conclusions you drew about the types of impacts I outlined above. Those easy to intuit, low-hanging impacts and resulting pivots are probably not exclusively yours to consider but part of this early metagame. Imagine you find yourself thinking, “Treasure Cruise is still legal in Pioneer, Phoenix will be heavily played, and I think that a great strategy against Phoenix is UW control tuned to beat it.” Well, you may want to predict not just an uptick in Phoenix, but also an uptick in UW control and a disproportionate winners metagame share held by UW control, whether you land on UW control yourself or not.

Have fun out there with these new formats.

The Boil 2 Is Up Next!

Attentions now turn to our next event - The Boil 2 cEDH 10k at Charlie’s Collectible Show from Nov. 9-10. It’s still a ways away, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prepare! This massive tournament has already had its cap raised to 300 players and is sold out - meaning that it’ll be the largest Competitive EDH event in history. They just keep growing! Make sure to not miss out and keep an eye out for your chance to snag a ticket to this fully proxy-friendly event today.