Primordial Knowledge – Ready to Rumble

The Radiant Rumble has come and gone and the constructed meta has continued to develop. While Kagulichu took down the tournament, the popular Dragonborn Kagu Crusader build failed to crack top 8. This reflects positively on the current format’s diversity and capacity for counter play. In fact, seven distinct archetypes topped the tournament – and even the two Kagulichu decks in top 8 were decidedly distinct compared to each other and popular variants.

I brought the standard Dragonborn Kagu Crusader list to the event despite knowing it would have a massive target on its back, and my results showed that the field was ready for it. D/S Ardent was my bane with two of my four losses on the day coming at the hands of Marshal Josephina and Ardent Crusader. Whether it was Ardent, Bloodspinner Zorath, or Angus the Arsonist, players were ready to take down Kagu Crusader.

What they weren’t ready for was Justiis’ unique take on the Kagulichu powerhouse which eschewed aggression for ramp, removal, and Mistress of Bones. I think Justiis had the right idea by bringing the format’s most powerful contender by adding enough of a twist that opponents would not be ready for his exact game plan. You can check out his winning list along with the other top 8 lists here.

Running the Numbers

While the top 8 of a major tournament is a great place to start when analyzing a constructed format, there are a lot of other data points worth investigating. With 435 participants and a $5,000 prize purse, the Radiant Rumble was one of the largest and most significant community tournaments in HEX’s history. Such a significant event brings a significant amount of data with it. To understand the constructed meta better, I’m interested in identifying which decks were most popular and which decks performed the best. I dove into the data provided on hexmeta and created the chart below.

I filtered the hexmeta data by champion and thresholds in order to identify what decks were played and by how many players. I then filtered that data to only include players with seven or more wins. I felt a seven win threshold was low enough to provide a meaningful sample, but high enough to be considered a strong performance. The third column shows what percentage of players playing a specific deck achieved seven or more wins. The last column indicates the deck’s relative popularity.

Unsurprisingly, B/W Kagulichu was the most popular deck in the tournament. Not only was it the most popular deck, but it was one of the best performing decks of the tournament with 20% of its pilots achieving seven or more wins, including the winner of the tournament, Justiis. It is, however, important to note that Kagulichu decks allow for significant variation. While a large number of these lists were likely fairly standard, the two Kagulichu lists in the top 8 seem to indicate that variation bred success.

More surprisingly, Mono Wild and Mono Blood were two of the top performing decks of the tournament. Perhaps most surprising was just how popular Bloodspinner Zorath was. Not only was he the third most popular champion, but more players achieved seven or more wins with Zorath than with any other champion. This is most likely due to Mono Blood’s strong match up against the tournament’s most popular deck, Kagulichu. Note that some of the decks included under Bloodspinner Zorath were Blood/Wild decks, but the vast majority were Mono Blood. I included all Zorath decks together as the champion generally encourages a more control oriented style of play associated with Mono Blood decks.

Mono Wild was arguably the best performing deck of the tournament, with a full third of its pilots achieving seven or more wins. This included JoeZimmers second place finishing list. Wild is arguably the strongest shard in the game at the moment, and no deck utilizes the new Herofall card Mightsinger of Ages better than Mono Wild. Note that while a majority of the lists used Grandfather Elk as the champion, a few used Shoku The Botanist.

Another surprising factoid was the poor performance of aggressive Ruby decks. Despite a large showing by both Angus the Arsonist and Yotul Mogak, neither deck saw many pilots succeeding. This is likely due to the number of players prepared for the match up. Talking to players before and after the event, everyone had Ruby on the mind and ensured their reserves could handle the deck effectively.

Our Primordial Brew

After running the numbers, I was particularly impressed with the success of Mono Wild and felt it was a deck worth exploring further. Lately, I have been battling at the very top end of the Cosmic ladder (hitting rank 1 Cosmic this past Wednesday) with this modified version of JoeZimmers second place list.



Rune Ear Hierophant is socketed with Minor Wild Orb of Brawn and Major Wild Orb of Conjuration





The deck is incredibly proactive and consistent. Your typical game plan is to use Howling Brave or Chlorophyllia to accelerate a powerful curve of Rune Ear Hierophant, Wrathwood Master Moss, and Dreamweaver Ancient. Alternatively, the deck can drop Mightsinger of Ages on turn two to generate card advantage and possibly even swing for seven damage on turn four.

Let’s take a look at how to use your reserves with Mono Wild.

VS ANGUS

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