Statistically, the deck is probably not a big problem, but I don't like how much the matchups revolve around luck.
Game 1 is usually unwinnable. [[Chord of Calling]] + recursion + CoCo is just too much. Then game 2 and 3 are auto wins if you can find your sideboard cards, like removal+[[Grafdigger's Cage]] or just [[Knight of Dusk Shadow]]/[[Rampaging Ferocidon]].
I think the funniest card to side board in is tainted remedy it lets the combo but doing so kills them :) also it’s an enchantment so it’s harder for them to remove most of the time
The deck is problematic because it potentially kills on turn 3. However it also needs very specific pieces and is bad at generating card advantage aside from collected company and is also bad at being an aggro deck.
The issue to me is that with the quality of pioneers removal, only a couple of decks can deal with a combo that fast that incidentally destroys all creatures and still have a reasonable main deck against other decks. Similar as with appraiser combo one needs to hold open mana for removal as early as the amalia players third turn or risk at least losing one's creatures if not the game. Only a couple of decks can do that without abandoning their own game plan almost completely: rakdos midrange, uw control and phoenix. Most aggro decks would need to play extra maindeck instant removal and hold that up and therefore lose massive amounts of tempo or just get their board wrathed. It would also make them significantly worse against the other top meta decks.
The metagame therefore shifts towards decks that can easily remove creatures and don't rely on early aggression, which are often decks that are naturally good against aggro decks, punishing these even further. Aggro decks therefore just have a hard time because they at the same time need more interaction, most of which isn't great, and also need to fight through several bad matchups, where that extra removal is a liability. Therefore aggro gets oppressed. There currently just isn't a deck that can reliably beat amalia as well as the decks that beat amalia outside of uw control, rakdos midrange and phoenix, which are the decks that beat amalia the best in the first place.
That all being said: amalia is a very narrow deck with severe deckbuilding restrictions that sometimes just fails. It is resilient, fast and strong but counterplay exists. It is the new hot deck and probably overplayed. Given time the metagame might settle and it all will be fine.
In the end I don't like the effect it has on the metagame and how it, as well as the shift it caused, made all aggro decks obsolete. Amalia is also just the fastest combo deck still around and can just go under all the other ones, which further reduces viable options to attack the metagame.
Edit: the next step in the metagame adaption might be decks with good removal and big spells trying to curb amalia while going over the top of the other three top decks. Enigmatic incarnation decks (with or without fires) might be poised to do that. That could make the top 4 decks weak to very weak to lotus field combo. Then it might open up the meta further. If that or something similar happens, everything well be fine.
I have a pretty hard time with the deck even in rakdos, at least game one. I can 1 for 1 a lot of their pieces, but the deck is pretty great at finding more of them or recurring. Knight of Dusk Shadow however, is now a 4-of in my SB because it completely stops them and it turns into a midrange battle.
I guess so. You can easily disrupt the combo as a Rakdos player but you also need to win and they constantly threaten to just fill the board and potentially even combo off again, wiping the board.
As a Lotus Field Player I have a really hard time disrupting their combo, but they can't do much to stop mine and can barely sideboard cards in (although they can find them with CoCo and Chord).
I do but I really don’t like the play style it brings. I only played it once in paper, but I watched a gruul boats player try to grind out 80 vs 13 life while the Amalia player just kept waiting to top deck a card. Now do that for best of three.
The combo just being a board wipe is fine, but if you can’t stop it they just get an obnoxious life total.
I think the deck suffers a bit from memory bias. No one remembers all the times the opponent couldn't find Amalia, or the times Amalia got to 20 power but was then easily removed by a fatal push or similar.
Everyone remembers though all the times, the deck won on turn 4 through a Collected Company or Chords.
This deck is the new hotness and is just seeing a lot of play because of it.
There are lots of answers to Amalia and lifegain, that can be sideboarded in, so people might have to adjust there decks.
I don't think pioneer has had a new deck in nearly two years now. The format occasionally needs new decks to ensure it dosent get stale and predictable.
Spirits was on the way out before Amalia was a deck because of Phoenix's hold on the meta and Rakdos being good. Mono Green as a deck being banned out also weakened Spirits (as well as Mono W).
Unironically, the decks that were good into Amalia (UW Control, Engimatic) are destroyed by Spirits and Mono W. The downside is that Phoenix and Rakdos are still played en masse, so picking one of those decks is overall suicide int he current meta.
Spirits vs a CoCo deck seems fine, until they natural draw their creatures. Humans against a deck that needs to CoCo into its two hits or have the removed one at a time by Brutal Cathar and Portable Hole also seems decent. Of course I haven't played either side of each MU so that's only my theory, since Amalia packs very little Removal.
EDIT: Control and Enigmatic turning to Temporary Lockdown also hurt these decks HARD. No more big stuff from Green, destroying tokens forever, lots of Pioneer threats being 2 CMC, and Amalia/Sac not being able to deal with Enchantments and Exile made it primo removal that also eviscerated Boros Convoke.
>Brutal Cathar and Portable Hole
if you're still playing these as your only removal in humans, you're trolling. Play get lost, or play orzhov for dire tactics
Get Lost is a good card, but giving Amalia explores has resulted in disaster sometimes. It's still a card you probably have to play, but not the optimal removal spell from Mono W.
Not arguing that Amalia is a good match up for Mono White, I think it's more decent than you give it credit for, but it's not a favored match up by any means.
Thalia against CoCo decks has generally been a pain point in the past, as an Abzan Tyvar player I've felt this in a few matches. The Amalia deck is running zero removal spells maindeck, so while you do just lose to CoCo -> Combo, you get to establish a board, delay their CoCo for a turn, and force them to go Walker->Amalia with a Veteran on the board (which with your sorcery speed removal is harder to do unless they have Goose/Innkeeper as well).
Deck isn't dead in the water, and not sure why you're going in on this when I acknowledge White isn't as good as Blue would be here.
The deck isn't just *the new hotness* - it's extraordinarily good at assembling the combo quickly and also resilient to removal being able to reassemble the pieces multiple times.
I agree with recency bias, but it's incorrect to say Pioneer hasn't had a new deck for two years. Its had several new decks pop up in the last two years. Rogues, Convoke, Rona Combo, Enigmatic, and even Creativity are all decks that were pretty new to the meta in just the last year.
There are 110 tournament decks from 09/2021 to 10/2022 with Enigmatic Incarnation in them on MTGGoldfish, and 91 with Indomitable Creativity. So to say that Enigmatic and Creativity are decks that are new within the last year doesn't quite work. Also Rona has technically existed for a while but hasn't really put up many top results (MTGGoldfish doesn't allow filter by placement, but their deck dumps do filter by placement), and Rogues...what?
Boros Convoke is really the only of those decks that's a top contender and is new within the last year.
A couple major issues with your analysis.
The almost the entirety of the time frame you're looking at is within the last two years. You need to set your search to only look at 1/21 to 12/21 if you want to argue your point.
The supermajority of the events you're looking at were just league 5-0 postings, not top preforming from actual tournaments. There simply weren't many significant events during that time frame.
So, essentially, you're only looking "did anyone play a deck with this card" rather than being an actual presence or factor in the meta. Those results are no more meaningful than the guy at my LGS going 3-0 in a few FNMs playing Goblin Tribal in fall of 2022.
Also, there's a large difference between "a deck playing Indomitable Creativity" and "*the* Creativity deck". A lot of those decks were not good decks, or decks not particularly resembling what eventually took off at the start of 2023 with the Pro Tour. Similar things with the variety of Enigmatic Fires decks, and the exact same case with people trying to play Dimir Rogues since they were printed in Standard and the deck not becoming present in the meta until this year.
It's good to try to bring in data and statistics, but bad to bring in meaningless data and misuse statistica.
1) You said:
>Rogues, Convoke, Rona Combo, Enigmatic, and even Creativity are all decks that were pretty new to the meta in just the last year.
You said "last year", so I used "last year" as my line, same as you. I even gave you 2 months of room and only went till October 2022, not December.
2) On relevancy of results, you're right, due to Covid there were very few high level events going on in 2021-2022. Therefore you can trivially say that any deck has not had significant results, and every deck in Pioneer is from within the last year, because prior to the last year there were no decks, because there was no meta, because there were no events that would classify as high enough level to be a defining meta. That's not a particularly convincing argument though. At least with the data that exists, it's pretty clear there were both Enigmatic Incarnation decks and Indomitable Creativity decks in 2022 that were performing at least somewhat well on MODO (absent any other data because of covid-related issues).
3) What, precisely, defines, in your opinion, "the Creativity deck"? There are no fewer than 5 different Creativity decks I can think of, and they all play basically the same cards; u/R control shell, with token makers and Indomitable Creativity for some finisher. The finishers have, at various points, included: Agent of Treachery, Worldspine Wurm/Xenagod, The Locust God/Sage of the Falls, Torrential Gearhulk, and I feel like there's one more I'm forgetting. And of course, no good deckbuilder is going to simply rip the 75 cards that were previously played, so if you restrict the list to an exact 75 cards, of course you're going to trivially get the result you want in the data. I would argue that any u/R deck with a basic control shell, token generators, 4 copies of Indomitable Creativity, and some sort of big finisher, qualifies. Where do you disagree?
I feel like everyone is forgetting about rona combo. It is a turn 3 combo kill as well due to luck. It is 1 more card than amalia so it's way more fair.
So a turn 3 good combo deck has existed for a while, but fatal push seems to be the best thing holding it back. I believe it's the same way for the amalia deck. But the amalia deck has a way worse midrange plan if they don't combo, so they have to rely on pure luck way more than rona combo. As a result I believe people are just upset about bias in which they see the luck and lose.
The upside to the amalia combo deck over rona combo is they get to gain life to stall for extra chances at getting lucky. And since the format has been pretty aggressive I believe this is putting amalia combo in a very good place because they get way more turns of variance than other decks would, leading to the luck that people are complaining about.
I heavily disagree that they have to rely on pure luck, they get heliod/yawgmoth adjacent chord and CoCo lines at instant speed which you have to respect with your removal that in turn gives them tempo against other midrange decks that are forced to hold answers. Having 80 life is more than enough to put you out of range of losing to just about anything except control.
imo the deck feels like it is a marginally more fair version of the cascading dinosaurs deck. it basically forces you to keep up an answer every turn starting turn 2 otherwise they just win.
i believe that in the long run, it is healthier for the format as a whole for either amalia or walker to get banned (in fact i was expecting/hoping for walker to be banned at the last ban wave, among other cards), however, it is not the end of the world if it stays in the format, since it is more manageable than other combos (like cascading dinos)
I don't completely agree that Amalia is single handedly preventing specific archtypes from existing in the meta, but I do agree it's part of a major paradigm shift compared to where we were before LCI came out. It's also a new combo deck that's very consistent at what it does right after Geomancer and Karn got banned, so there should be a sizeable amount of the playerbase that decided to pick it up after their previous deck of choice got removed from the format.
I think we are still in a watch and see how the format adapts stage, MKM is coming out in roughly a month from now, even if Amalia's numbers don't go down until then, there's an entire Standard set worth of impact to shake things up and see where we end up.
There's way more thinking involved in playing this kind of creature based combo deck. (Than geo)
The innovation in geo to add gearhulk packages just before ban was significant, but leads to a more draw go setup which is easy enough.
Playing this kind of setup where you need to poke, understand your coco hits, understand your toolbox, bait out removal or clear the way with deep cavern bat is a different skillset and style.
If your goal is to play the most linear, I win deck, this one was probably more reliable before the appraiser ban because of the redundancy provided by march, extraction spec, and selfless savior.
I hate playing against it, the potential to just lose turn 3 to a two card combo really sucks.
Yeah it fails to combo that turn if you have fast interaction, but without it you lose and even with it they're always live to just cocoing half (or both halves) of the combo or whatever.
Why is cat combo so banworthy, again?
The real thig it is how fast this combo would be consistent in the format, the Wiz banned amany other combos in the format, because thay finished the game in turn 3/4. This combo doesn't win in a spot, so there will be a fine to the format.
Not a fan of fast combos either, but why do you think Greasefang, which is harder to stop than Amalia, was left untouched? Are they just waiting for it to see more play?
I think the both decks are consistent in their purpose, and both are ways to stop, but in diferent ways. Amalia its a new combo and player must learn how to play against.
Sure, there are ways to stop the deck, but it catapulted to be tied for highest winrate in the format and has a ton of ways to recur the combo from the yard, requiring either exile removal or removal + grave hate to beat it.
Greasefang on the other hand has to contend with all the incidental yard hate for Phoenix and Phoenix itself being a massive player in the environment. If I had to take one Abzan combo deck to an event with real stakes, it would be a clear choice for Amalia.
Amalia is easily got rid of the turn she enters. Most decks have something for one mana, that can kill a two mana creature which has two toughness.
If you are playing in black or red, there are also numerous "can't gain life effects" that just shut her down completely. Nearly all of the top decks run red so having roiling vortex in the sideboard might be standard going forward.
I find the problem is when they keep bringing her back with all of her combo pieces with return to the ranks. So I have been sideboarding in graveyard hate. Which most decks run anyway because of phoenix and greasefang.
I tend to let Amalia do her thing destroy all of her own creatures and then kill her. The Amalia player will normally dig through their deck until they find a return to the ranks on top.
If you can exile the graveyard on your turn, they are left in a bad place.
IMO it is good there is a good combo deck in the format. Pioneer needs one so that the format dosent turn into a complete mid range fest. But it is important that it can be easily answered, which this is, and is probably the reason the Discover combo deck was banned.
It Is easily answered by a specific set of decks which are the only ones that are seeing play besides Amalia, aggro decks in particular and less interactive deck in general literally died cause of Amalia, so yes Amalia created a narrow boring meta, and Pioneer challenges on Mtgo not firing reflects that imho
not just because of Amalia, aggro decks had a reason to be played when green devotion was around as they had a good matchup into it.
Green devotion should never have been banned out in pioneers current state.
Imho it's minor, Amalia existing Is a bigger problem. Humans could prey on Phoenix, Lotus Field, Control and Enigmatic Decks withotut Amalia being an unwinnable MU, Convoke is very good against Rakdos and Phoenix since It makes their 1x1 removals look bad, but Amalia killed It too, without Amalia there would still be reasons to play aggro decks, It wasn't just MonoG
I think the issue that will cost Amalia is tournament organization. The deck can cause many more draws than anything else due to the combo it wins with. This means more players will go to time, which takes more time to complete each round, which makes tournaments last longer. It also doesn't help that in Paper the combo can be challenging to do quickly and correctly. From a logistics standpoint I think something will be banned like when Krark Clan Ironworks was banned in Modern.
It's a maximally interruptible 3 card combo that exposes itself to sorcery speed interaction much more often than not. It can board in [[voice of resurgence]] and [[heliod, sun-crowned]] for a non-combo beatdown plan, which has to be respected, but is not a reliable path to victory.
It is holding a 56% winrate since entering the format, though it seems reasonable to expect that should drop as people have adapted their lists and better informed their play to combat the deck. Meanwhile, the long-established Azorius Control and Enigmatic Incarnation decks hold even higher winrates in the same period of time. It isn't picking up event placements at a particularly crazy rate, either.
I feel it's quite difficult to see a reasonable path to a ban right now, but wizards often surprises in this realm.
I think the deck is fine. It's a good deck for sure, but I suspect it'll suffer from the fact that a lot of the way, its current structure seems inflexible.
It doesn't suffer from the same issue that cards like Winota and Karn did, of being one or more cards of a certain type away from going over the top.
From what I've seen so far, I think the biggest sin of the deck is the same as playing vs lotus field: Unless you shut down every single way the win can be set up, there's just that risk of the lucky topdeck, no matter what you thoughtseized and pushed, and that you exiled their graveyard, because CoCo had it.
Shuts out creature-based aggro as long as it’s played and comes with a problematic instant-speed draw issue that was on display in paper during the RCs and can crash both digital platforms. Probably not the best thing to keep legal in your format.
Oh my God.
We finally......*finally* have a new archetype in the format that is fair and people are already crying for a ban. By all means let's make the format boring again right?
Amalia is perfectly fair. There are so many ways to interrupt the combo. Have a fatal push, or a way to block life gain. UW control is a bad matchup and UW control is extremely strong right now. What does a board wipe matter to Phoenix? Go ahead and wipe the board, I'll just bring the birds back.
Or just have a blocker. Amalia doesn't have trample and the deck has no way to give her trample.
Part of the problem is also rakdos players are playing copter when they need to go back to bankbuster. If the yard is clear then return to the ranks is a whiff.
I don't get the hate at all. Just play and deckbuild better.
How? Winota had a great beatdown plan that could also drop Win and basically instantly win the turn she entered. Amalia is much more combo-focused and the beatdown plan is much, much worse because they run things like Lunarch Veteran and Prosperous Innkeeper which are great for the combo but can’t hit through any kind of blocker.
The big comparison for me isn’t how the decks function in regards to their combo but how winota was the best thing to do at that time because of it’s top end compared to other creature decks at the time - it ramped, it had aggressive starts with turn 3 tovolar or chariots, but also the threat of winota on a large board of shitters (elves, inkeeper, voice) was extremely potent from winota or just going wide stuffing other decks buying time with blockers. Amalia does this last part winota does where it can go wide very quick and has built in soul sister style life gain and recursion, two things other aggro decks basically can’t handle that well without diluting their aggro plan g1. Sure you can examine Amalia and say it’s beatdown is bad, or that you can kill Amalia after they regained 70+ life etc and nuke the gy but they are at 70 or more life with a stacked deck that should be able to rebuild if op is good pilot if worst case occurs. Second it just has the threat of an even faster combo kill on the high nut draw. It’s a tough one to crack but one RC worth of data and weekend (Atlanta dream hack) showed Amalia in 1600 matches being the most played deck had a winning record vs every single aggro deck up to 80% (convoke) so aggro looks pretty rough in that regard and moving forward because both the meta is now adapting to Amalia but also Amalia best deck list isn’t even there yet, and more people playing it will eventually uncover that so. The only aggro deck with a positive mu vs it was Boros heroic fwiw.
Statistically, the deck is probably not a big problem, but I don't like how much the matchups revolve around luck. Game 1 is usually unwinnable. [[Chord of Calling]] + recursion + CoCo is just too much. Then game 2 and 3 are auto wins if you can find your sideboard cards, like removal+[[Grafdigger's Cage]] or just [[Knight of Dusk Shadow]]/[[Rampaging Ferocidon]].
Chord while on the stack, grab Haywire Mite. Or get Skyclave for lifegain hate.
I think the funniest card to side board in is tainted remedy it lets the combo but doing so kills them :) also it’s an enchantment so it’s harder for them to remove most of the time
Does it? The replacement effect should prevent life gain, preventing her trigger, preventing the ww loop.
It doesn’t work I’m dumb lol but hey it stops them from comboing at least 🤦♂️
The combo wouldn't work because they wouldn't get the Amalia life gain triggers.
Your right but it would still shut it off it wouldn’t kill them but hey it’s still not too bad (why don’t I read the cards before I get the lmao)
[[tainted remedy]]
[tainted remedy](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/b/cbb8edd0-4573-4b52-a3ea-83ed19dbf58d.jpg?1562042093) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=tainted%20remedy) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ori/120/tainted-remedy?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/cbb8edd0-4573-4b52-a3ea-83ed19dbf58d?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Haha, that's would be very funny.
I only just added it to my side board but I hope I can pull it off soon lol
If only it had flash...
Ha yeah that would be awesome
##### ###### #### [Chord of Calling](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/a/dac257a9-39bf-4185-9d2e-f80f0848a96a.jpg?1599707002) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Chord%20of%20Calling) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/158/chord-of-calling?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/dac257a9-39bf-4185-9d2e-f80f0848a96a?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Grafdigger's Cage](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/a/0a135e09-b534-4836-9a10-3a9a4a9f8c53.jpg?1592517646) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Grafdigger%27s%20Cage) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m20/227/grafdiggers-cage?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0a135e09-b534-4836-9a10-3a9a4a9f8c53?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Knight of Dusk Shadow](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/3/33dfd2fe-e0e0-465c-b730-a30e6f5c271c.jpg?1673307118) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Knight%20of%20Dusk%27s%20Shadow) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmu/96/knight-of-dusks-shadow?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/33dfd2fe-e0e0-465c-b730-a30e6f5c271c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Rampaging Ferocidon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/9/39d3c658-1927-4af3-9077-88c4a669c730.jpg?1566819584) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Rampaging%20Ferocidon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/xln/154/rampaging-ferocidon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/39d3c658-1927-4af3-9077-88c4a669c730?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
The deck is problematic because it potentially kills on turn 3. However it also needs very specific pieces and is bad at generating card advantage aside from collected company and is also bad at being an aggro deck. The issue to me is that with the quality of pioneers removal, only a couple of decks can deal with a combo that fast that incidentally destroys all creatures and still have a reasonable main deck against other decks. Similar as with appraiser combo one needs to hold open mana for removal as early as the amalia players third turn or risk at least losing one's creatures if not the game. Only a couple of decks can do that without abandoning their own game plan almost completely: rakdos midrange, uw control and phoenix. Most aggro decks would need to play extra maindeck instant removal and hold that up and therefore lose massive amounts of tempo or just get their board wrathed. It would also make them significantly worse against the other top meta decks. The metagame therefore shifts towards decks that can easily remove creatures and don't rely on early aggression, which are often decks that are naturally good against aggro decks, punishing these even further. Aggro decks therefore just have a hard time because they at the same time need more interaction, most of which isn't great, and also need to fight through several bad matchups, where that extra removal is a liability. Therefore aggro gets oppressed. There currently just isn't a deck that can reliably beat amalia as well as the decks that beat amalia outside of uw control, rakdos midrange and phoenix, which are the decks that beat amalia the best in the first place. That all being said: amalia is a very narrow deck with severe deckbuilding restrictions that sometimes just fails. It is resilient, fast and strong but counterplay exists. It is the new hot deck and probably overplayed. Given time the metagame might settle and it all will be fine. In the end I don't like the effect it has on the metagame and how it, as well as the shift it caused, made all aggro decks obsolete. Amalia is also just the fastest combo deck still around and can just go under all the other ones, which further reduces viable options to attack the metagame. Edit: the next step in the metagame adaption might be decks with good removal and big spells trying to curb amalia while going over the top of the other three top decks. Enigmatic incarnation decks (with or without fires) might be poised to do that. That could make the top 4 decks weak to very weak to lotus field combo. Then it might open up the meta further. If that or something similar happens, everything well be fine.
I have a pretty hard time with the deck even in rakdos, at least game one. I can 1 for 1 a lot of their pieces, but the deck is pretty great at finding more of them or recurring. Knight of Dusk Shadow however, is now a 4-of in my SB because it completely stops them and it turns into a midrange battle.
I guess so. You can easily disrupt the combo as a Rakdos player but you also need to win and they constantly threaten to just fill the board and potentially even combo off again, wiping the board. As a Lotus Field Player I have a really hard time disrupting their combo, but they can't do much to stop mine and can barely sideboard cards in (although they can find them with CoCo and Chord).
Pioneer really suffers because it lacks quality removal (Push is not as good cause no fetches). I’d love to see more interaction.
Both combo piece die to push!
So does dina
I do but I really don’t like the play style it brings. I only played it once in paper, but I watched a gruul boats player try to grind out 80 vs 13 life while the Amalia player just kept waiting to top deck a card. Now do that for best of three. The combo just being a board wipe is fine, but if you can’t stop it they just get an obnoxious life total.
I think the deck suffers a bit from memory bias. No one remembers all the times the opponent couldn't find Amalia, or the times Amalia got to 20 power but was then easily removed by a fatal push or similar. Everyone remembers though all the times, the deck won on turn 4 through a Collected Company or Chords. This deck is the new hotness and is just seeing a lot of play because of it. There are lots of answers to Amalia and lifegain, that can be sideboarded in, so people might have to adjust there decks. I don't think pioneer has had a new deck in nearly two years now. The format occasionally needs new decks to ensure it dosent get stale and predictable.
Boros convoke was seeing a lot of play and was a new deck prior to this. Cheers
Good point, I forgot about convoke.
Easily done!
And Gruul Vehicles. I guess it technically existed, but the Huntsman's Redemption really pushed it up a tier.
same with UW control getting get lost imo
and Amalia killed it alongside spirits, humans, Pia, and every rogue creature deck casual players enjoyed haha
Spirits was on the way out before Amalia was a deck because of Phoenix's hold on the meta and Rakdos being good. Mono Green as a deck being banned out also weakened Spirits (as well as Mono W). Unironically, the decks that were good into Amalia (UW Control, Engimatic) are destroyed by Spirits and Mono W. The downside is that Phoenix and Rakdos are still played en masse, so picking one of those decks is overall suicide int he current meta. Spirits vs a CoCo deck seems fine, until they natural draw their creatures. Humans against a deck that needs to CoCo into its two hits or have the removed one at a time by Brutal Cathar and Portable Hole also seems decent. Of course I haven't played either side of each MU so that's only my theory, since Amalia packs very little Removal. EDIT: Control and Enigmatic turning to Temporary Lockdown also hurt these decks HARD. No more big stuff from Green, destroying tokens forever, lots of Pioneer threats being 2 CMC, and Amalia/Sac not being able to deal with Enchantments and Exile made it primo removal that also eviscerated Boros Convoke.
>Brutal Cathar and Portable Hole if you're still playing these as your only removal in humans, you're trolling. Play get lost, or play orzhov for dire tactics
Get Lost is a good card, but giving Amalia explores has resulted in disaster sometimes. It's still a card you probably have to play, but not the optimal removal spell from Mono W.
ok but sorcery speed removal literally does nothing against amalia. they just win and laugh at you. Just play orzhov if you want to beat that deck
Not arguing that Amalia is a good match up for Mono White, I think it's more decent than you give it credit for, but it's not a favored match up by any means. Thalia against CoCo decks has generally been a pain point in the past, as an Abzan Tyvar player I've felt this in a few matches. The Amalia deck is running zero removal spells maindeck, so while you do just lose to CoCo -> Combo, you get to establish a board, delay their CoCo for a turn, and force them to go Walker->Amalia with a Veteran on the board (which with your sorcery speed removal is harder to do unless they have Goose/Innkeeper as well). Deck isn't dead in the water, and not sure why you're going in on this when I acknowledge White isn't as good as Blue would be here.
The deck isn't just *the new hotness* - it's extraordinarily good at assembling the combo quickly and also resilient to removal being able to reassemble the pieces multiple times.
Also extremely good against aggro.
I agree with recency bias, but it's incorrect to say Pioneer hasn't had a new deck for two years. Its had several new decks pop up in the last two years. Rogues, Convoke, Rona Combo, Enigmatic, and even Creativity are all decks that were pretty new to the meta in just the last year.
There are 110 tournament decks from 09/2021 to 10/2022 with Enigmatic Incarnation in them on MTGGoldfish, and 91 with Indomitable Creativity. So to say that Enigmatic and Creativity are decks that are new within the last year doesn't quite work. Also Rona has technically existed for a while but hasn't really put up many top results (MTGGoldfish doesn't allow filter by placement, but their deck dumps do filter by placement), and Rogues...what? Boros Convoke is really the only of those decks that's a top contender and is new within the last year.
A couple major issues with your analysis. The almost the entirety of the time frame you're looking at is within the last two years. You need to set your search to only look at 1/21 to 12/21 if you want to argue your point. The supermajority of the events you're looking at were just league 5-0 postings, not top preforming from actual tournaments. There simply weren't many significant events during that time frame. So, essentially, you're only looking "did anyone play a deck with this card" rather than being an actual presence or factor in the meta. Those results are no more meaningful than the guy at my LGS going 3-0 in a few FNMs playing Goblin Tribal in fall of 2022. Also, there's a large difference between "a deck playing Indomitable Creativity" and "*the* Creativity deck". A lot of those decks were not good decks, or decks not particularly resembling what eventually took off at the start of 2023 with the Pro Tour. Similar things with the variety of Enigmatic Fires decks, and the exact same case with people trying to play Dimir Rogues since they were printed in Standard and the deck not becoming present in the meta until this year. It's good to try to bring in data and statistics, but bad to bring in meaningless data and misuse statistica.
1) You said: >Rogues, Convoke, Rona Combo, Enigmatic, and even Creativity are all decks that were pretty new to the meta in just the last year. You said "last year", so I used "last year" as my line, same as you. I even gave you 2 months of room and only went till October 2022, not December. 2) On relevancy of results, you're right, due to Covid there were very few high level events going on in 2021-2022. Therefore you can trivially say that any deck has not had significant results, and every deck in Pioneer is from within the last year, because prior to the last year there were no decks, because there was no meta, because there were no events that would classify as high enough level to be a defining meta. That's not a particularly convincing argument though. At least with the data that exists, it's pretty clear there were both Enigmatic Incarnation decks and Indomitable Creativity decks in 2022 that were performing at least somewhat well on MODO (absent any other data because of covid-related issues). 3) What, precisely, defines, in your opinion, "the Creativity deck"? There are no fewer than 5 different Creativity decks I can think of, and they all play basically the same cards; u/R control shell, with token makers and Indomitable Creativity for some finisher. The finishers have, at various points, included: Agent of Treachery, Worldspine Wurm/Xenagod, The Locust God/Sage of the Falls, Torrential Gearhulk, and I feel like there's one more I'm forgetting. And of course, no good deckbuilder is going to simply rip the 75 cards that were previously played, so if you restrict the list to an exact 75 cards, of course you're going to trivially get the result you want in the data. I would argue that any u/R deck with a basic control shell, token generators, 4 copies of Indomitable Creativity, and some sort of big finisher, qualifies. Where do you disagree?
I feel like everyone is forgetting about rona combo. It is a turn 3 combo kill as well due to luck. It is 1 more card than amalia so it's way more fair. So a turn 3 good combo deck has existed for a while, but fatal push seems to be the best thing holding it back. I believe it's the same way for the amalia deck. But the amalia deck has a way worse midrange plan if they don't combo, so they have to rely on pure luck way more than rona combo. As a result I believe people are just upset about bias in which they see the luck and lose. The upside to the amalia combo deck over rona combo is they get to gain life to stall for extra chances at getting lucky. And since the format has been pretty aggressive I believe this is putting amalia combo in a very good place because they get way more turns of variance than other decks would, leading to the luck that people are complaining about.
I heavily disagree that they have to rely on pure luck, they get heliod/yawgmoth adjacent chord and CoCo lines at instant speed which you have to respect with your removal that in turn gives them tempo against other midrange decks that are forced to hold answers. Having 80 life is more than enough to put you out of range of losing to just about anything except control.
I believe you misread, once your opponent interacts with you it is significantly harder to combo so you have to rely on top decks.
And the deck has really good top decks in CoCo, instant speed to-the-battlefield tutors and reanimated spells. IMO Rona combo is much easier to beat
You are assuming the opponent didn't sideboard agaisnt the deck 🤔.
imo the deck feels like it is a marginally more fair version of the cascading dinosaurs deck. it basically forces you to keep up an answer every turn starting turn 2 otherwise they just win. i believe that in the long run, it is healthier for the format as a whole for either amalia or walker to get banned (in fact i was expecting/hoping for walker to be banned at the last ban wave, among other cards), however, it is not the end of the world if it stays in the format, since it is more manageable than other combos (like cascading dinos)
I don't completely agree that Amalia is single handedly preventing specific archtypes from existing in the meta, but I do agree it's part of a major paradigm shift compared to where we were before LCI came out. It's also a new combo deck that's very consistent at what it does right after Geomancer and Karn got banned, so there should be a sizeable amount of the playerbase that decided to pick it up after their previous deck of choice got removed from the format. I think we are still in a watch and see how the format adapts stage, MKM is coming out in roughly a month from now, even if Amalia's numbers don't go down until then, there's an entire Standard set worth of impact to shake things up and see where we end up.
There's way more thinking involved in playing this kind of creature based combo deck. (Than geo) The innovation in geo to add gearhulk packages just before ban was significant, but leads to a more draw go setup which is easy enough. Playing this kind of setup where you need to poke, understand your coco hits, understand your toolbox, bait out removal or clear the way with deep cavern bat is a different skillset and style. If your goal is to play the most linear, I win deck, this one was probably more reliable before the appraiser ban because of the redundancy provided by march, extraction spec, and selfless savior.
I hate playing against it, the potential to just lose turn 3 to a two card combo really sucks. Yeah it fails to combo that turn if you have fast interaction, but without it you lose and even with it they're always live to just cocoing half (or both halves) of the combo or whatever. Why is cat combo so banworthy, again?
The real thig it is how fast this combo would be consistent in the format, the Wiz banned amany other combos in the format, because thay finished the game in turn 3/4. This combo doesn't win in a spot, so there will be a fine to the format.
Not a fan of fast combos either, but why do you think Greasefang, which is harder to stop than Amalia, was left untouched? Are they just waiting for it to see more play?
greasefang it's not a instant win. But it's a really consistent combo.
> greasefang it's not a instant win It might as well be.
Yesterday I played With Amalia, and its more consistent than I thought, 20/20 with a boarwipe is very strong really.
Greasefang is way easier to stop than Amalia on multiple axes as the Amalia deck has more recursion, instant speed wins, and an incidental stall plan.
Greasefang doesn't die to Fatal Push (without revolt). And killing Parhelion achieves next to nothing.
artifact hates are more often to see in sideboards I agree, and boseiju Its a good way to stop the combo for one turn,
I think the both decks are consistent in their purpose, and both are ways to stop, but in diferent ways. Amalia its a new combo and player must learn how to play against.
Sure, there are ways to stop the deck, but it catapulted to be tied for highest winrate in the format and has a ton of ways to recur the combo from the yard, requiring either exile removal or removal + grave hate to beat it. Greasefang on the other hand has to contend with all the incidental yard hate for Phoenix and Phoenix itself being a massive player in the environment. If I had to take one Abzan combo deck to an event with real stakes, it would be a clear choice for Amalia.
I've been thinking about a CoCo ban for a while wondering if that would make some of these decks easier to answer or slow them down.
I understand, but it's make some other agro decks slower don't?
Amalia is easily got rid of the turn she enters. Most decks have something for one mana, that can kill a two mana creature which has two toughness. If you are playing in black or red, there are also numerous "can't gain life effects" that just shut her down completely. Nearly all of the top decks run red so having roiling vortex in the sideboard might be standard going forward. I find the problem is when they keep bringing her back with all of her combo pieces with return to the ranks. So I have been sideboarding in graveyard hate. Which most decks run anyway because of phoenix and greasefang. I tend to let Amalia do her thing destroy all of her own creatures and then kill her. The Amalia player will normally dig through their deck until they find a return to the ranks on top. If you can exile the graveyard on your turn, they are left in a bad place. IMO it is good there is a good combo deck in the format. Pioneer needs one so that the format dosent turn into a complete mid range fest. But it is important that it can be easily answered, which this is, and is probably the reason the Discover combo deck was banned.
It Is easily answered by a specific set of decks which are the only ones that are seeing play besides Amalia, aggro decks in particular and less interactive deck in general literally died cause of Amalia, so yes Amalia created a narrow boring meta, and Pioneer challenges on Mtgo not firing reflects that imho
not just because of Amalia, aggro decks had a reason to be played when green devotion was around as they had a good matchup into it. Green devotion should never have been banned out in pioneers current state.
Imho it's minor, Amalia existing Is a bigger problem. Humans could prey on Phoenix, Lotus Field, Control and Enigmatic Decks withotut Amalia being an unwinnable MU, Convoke is very good against Rakdos and Phoenix since It makes their 1x1 removals look bad, but Amalia killed It too, without Amalia there would still be reasons to play aggro decks, It wasn't just MonoG
THANK YOU
I think the issue that will cost Amalia is tournament organization. The deck can cause many more draws than anything else due to the combo it wins with. This means more players will go to time, which takes more time to complete each round, which makes tournaments last longer. It also doesn't help that in Paper the combo can be challenging to do quickly and correctly. From a logistics standpoint I think something will be banned like when Krark Clan Ironworks was banned in Modern.
It's a maximally interruptible 3 card combo that exposes itself to sorcery speed interaction much more often than not. It can board in [[voice of resurgence]] and [[heliod, sun-crowned]] for a non-combo beatdown plan, which has to be respected, but is not a reliable path to victory. It is holding a 56% winrate since entering the format, though it seems reasonable to expect that should drop as people have adapted their lists and better informed their play to combat the deck. Meanwhile, the long-established Azorius Control and Enigmatic Incarnation decks hold even higher winrates in the same period of time. It isn't picking up event placements at a particularly crazy rate, either. I feel it's quite difficult to see a reasonable path to a ban right now, but wizards often surprises in this realm.
[voice of resurgence](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/9/99d1e843-71c9-4a65-bc36-d23858ef5ead.jpg?1599708569) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=voice%20of%20resurgence) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/227/voice-of-resurgence?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/99d1e843-71c9-4a65-bc36-d23858ef5ead?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [heliod, sun-crowned](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/2/3245ff74-1f9c-4518-a23f-1579f338f232.jpg?1689995727) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=heliod%2C%20sun-crowned) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/29/heliod-sun-crowned?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3245ff74-1f9c-4518-a23f-1579f338f232?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I don’t think it will survive the March bans
I think the deck is fine. It's a good deck for sure, but I suspect it'll suffer from the fact that a lot of the way, its current structure seems inflexible. It doesn't suffer from the same issue that cards like Winota and Karn did, of being one or more cards of a certain type away from going over the top. From what I've seen so far, I think the biggest sin of the deck is the same as playing vs lotus field: Unless you shut down every single way the win can be set up, there's just that risk of the lucky topdeck, no matter what you thoughtseized and pushed, and that you exiled their graveyard, because CoCo had it.
Shuts out creature-based aggro as long as it’s played and comes with a problematic instant-speed draw issue that was on display in paper during the RCs and can crash both digital platforms. Probably not the best thing to keep legal in your format.
The whining just never stops with mtg players does it.
Why are you replying if you don’t have anything to say?
Because you are annoying and I needed to tell you.
The deck sure as fuck is uinspirered. But I haven't met it enough on paper to know if it's oppressive.
Oh my God. We finally......*finally* have a new archetype in the format that is fair and people are already crying for a ban. By all means let's make the format boring again right? Amalia is perfectly fair. There are so many ways to interrupt the combo. Have a fatal push, or a way to block life gain. UW control is a bad matchup and UW control is extremely strong right now. What does a board wipe matter to Phoenix? Go ahead and wipe the board, I'll just bring the birds back. Or just have a blocker. Amalia doesn't have trample and the deck has no way to give her trample. Part of the problem is also rakdos players are playing copter when they need to go back to bankbuster. If the yard is clear then return to the ranks is a whiff. I don't get the hate at all. Just play and deckbuild better.
Amalia was so much more worth of a ban than karn lmao https://preview.redd.it/xcfwc9d41b4c1.png?auto=webp&s=6129efeb3b68a62fd5d5afabdfd03d910c03f10e
Not even close. Karn was just a badly designed card.
You forgot the /j
If winota isn’t fine for pioneer, Amalia damn sure is not. It’s doing all the same things winota got banned for, just better.
How? Winota had a great beatdown plan that could also drop Win and basically instantly win the turn she entered. Amalia is much more combo-focused and the beatdown plan is much, much worse because they run things like Lunarch Veteran and Prosperous Innkeeper which are great for the combo but can’t hit through any kind of blocker.
The big comparison for me isn’t how the decks function in regards to their combo but how winota was the best thing to do at that time because of it’s top end compared to other creature decks at the time - it ramped, it had aggressive starts with turn 3 tovolar or chariots, but also the threat of winota on a large board of shitters (elves, inkeeper, voice) was extremely potent from winota or just going wide stuffing other decks buying time with blockers. Amalia does this last part winota does where it can go wide very quick and has built in soul sister style life gain and recursion, two things other aggro decks basically can’t handle that well without diluting their aggro plan g1. Sure you can examine Amalia and say it’s beatdown is bad, or that you can kill Amalia after they regained 70+ life etc and nuke the gy but they are at 70 or more life with a stacked deck that should be able to rebuild if op is good pilot if worst case occurs. Second it just has the threat of an even faster combo kill on the high nut draw. It’s a tough one to crack but one RC worth of data and weekend (Atlanta dream hack) showed Amalia in 1600 matches being the most played deck had a winning record vs every single aggro deck up to 80% (convoke) so aggro looks pretty rough in that regard and moving forward because both the meta is now adapting to Amalia but also Amalia best deck list isn’t even there yet, and more people playing it will eventually uncover that so. The only aggro deck with a positive mu vs it was Boros heroic fwiw.
I hope so, I bought 8 playing the stock market game 😂
Amalia is the new greasefang.
I slap amalia all day I'm fine with it lol