Last weekend held the first ever two Gameday tournaments for the Iloilo community. The second event was hosted by Critical Hit: Comics and Games and congratulations to them on reaching the store level that would finally hold future tourneys like this one. The first Aether Revolt Gameday was held at Rei’s place, at 1 pm and twenty players were in attendance. It was five rounds of Swiss with a cut to the Top 8. The initial rounds finished at around 6pm. The metagame was littered with BG Constrictor, Mardu Vehicles and a few rogues builds, including mine which I will discuss in a separate blog post. By the way, I finished 9th after Swiss.

The top eight decks consist of three BG Constrictor, two Mardu, one Black Red Artifacts, one Red Green Energy, and a Jeskai Copycat combo. It was John Paul that eventually won, playing a Black Green Constrictor created by pro player Brad Nelson which had a main-deck Gonti and the vehicle Aethersphere Harvester. The final Top 8 are as follows:

MtG Aether Revolt Gameday at Rei’s Place
Final Top 8:
1st, John Paul Imperial (BG Constrictor)
2nd, Mao Gonzalez (BG Constrictor)
3rd, Eric Borromeo (Mardu Vehicles)
4th, Mark Tubola (BG Constrictor)
5th, Dean Antonio (Jeskai Copycat)
6th, Raoul Suarez (Mardu Vehicles)
7th, Franco Agudo (BR Vehicles)
8th, Rino Morales (RG Energy)

Sunday’s Gameday at Critical Hit was attended by 16 players and we somewhat started an hour late because we had to wait for the other players in order to get a high number of attendance. Still we ended up one player short for a five-round Swiss. I played the winning Brad Nelson BG list and hoping to a finish this time. That day’s metagame again saw the usual suspects, BG Constrictor and Mardu Vehicles, while there was a new deck in the form of 4-color Shaheeli Marvel, a combo deck which can also curve into an early Elder Deep Fiend. The prizes were still the same, though there were fewer booster pack allocations as compared to that of Reis.

After the four rounds of Swiss, the top eight were a mix of aggro and combo decks. The newcomer archetypes were White Humans & Blue Red Zombies. One Humans deck which I built myself was piloted by my teammate Val and the Zombies was played by my other teammate Ericson. Two other teammates also made it; Raoul playing Mardu Vehicles and Dean playing Jeskai Copycat.

The finals saw Mark T’s 4-color Shaheeli Marvel facing Franco’s BG Constrictor but Mark conceded the matchmaking Franco the Gameday Champion. It was the second championship for the BG Constrictor deck.

I am perceiving that the current Standard metagame will eventually stabilize into the Top 3 archetypes of Mardu, BG Constrictor, and Copycat combo: still a rock-paper-scissors game.

That is a wrap for this post. I will try to write a report of the local weekly tournaments, mentioning specific matchups and new deck techs if ever there is one.

Thanks for reading and until next time.