The Magic Online Championships is in the books, and so is the Prediction Game. How well did the community predict the metagame at the Magic Online Championships when $50 in Cardhoarder bot credit was on the line? Um… not so well.



You can check out an in-depth breakdown of the submissions in my previous blog post , but in short, the community overwhelming picked the BG decks to both be most popular and to win the tournament. Mardu Vehicles came in second, and Saheeli a distant third. And at the actual tournament? The full decklists are available on the mothership , but here’s the archetype breakdown:

Ouch. BG was actually a distant third, at 2 decks split between 2 archetypes, coming behind a solid showing from 4-color Saheeli and an even more solid showing from Mardu Vehicles, which comprised fully half of the field. Mardu was also the choice of all three of the players tied for best standard record: Lee Shi Tian, Marcio Carvalho, and Piotr Glogowski, all at 6-2.



All in all a pretty poor showing from our community prediction survey. It would be one thing if the numbers were close and BG was just barely edged out by Mardu. But Mardu was fully half the field, and even second-most-common Saheeli had double the metagame share of BG. So what happened? Well, let’s look at the breakdown of predicted metagame share of each of the top decks by date of survey submission. Note that this is a 100% stacked column chart, so even though the vast majority of submissions came in over the weekend I’ve normalized the subsequent days to show how the proportions compare over time.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it does appear as if the community was just a step behind the metagame. Most of the submissions came in over the weekend, when GP Utrecht was still in progress and the results from the GP Pittsburgh, at which BG did dominate, were fresh on people’s minds. However, once the results from Utrecht became public on Monday, there was an immediate metagame shift: the “Mardu Ballista” or “Big Mardu” technology demonstrated that Mardu had fresh legs. BG previously was popular because it feasted on a favorable matchup against the “best deck” coming out of the Pro Tour, Mardu. But if Mardu Ballista tech could reverse that matchup - and it appeared from the Utrecht results that it did - then that would leave BG without a place in the metagame, and room for Saheeli to rise to number 2.



As the community digested the results from GP Utrecht, there were quite a few articles publicly available that spelled out the metagame implications. For example, at Channel Fireball, Josh Silvestri wrote an article headlined “ B/G is Out, Saheeli is In .” A slightly less high-profile example is my aforementioned blog post , in which I expressed my belief that the survey was a few days behind the metagame’s shift away from B/G and towards bigger Mardu.



The submissions over time graph seems to confirm that it took time for people to recognize the shift. Granted, the sample sizes on some of the later days of the survey are quite small, as we only got a trickle of submissions later in the week. Even so, for what it’s worth we do see a trend towards greater predicted metagame share from Mardu, and decreasing predicted metagame share from BG.



Honestly, dynamics like this hammer home just how quickly the competitive metagame can shift. If you’re still jamming the same BG deck you built after the Pro Tour and GP Pittsburg because it seemed strong then, at this point I think we can safely say you’re a step behind the field. This constant churn even intra-rotation is what makes Standard so interesting from a pure gameplay point of view - but we must admit that this grind can become exhausting or cost-prohibitive for more casual players.



Since this is the MTGO Championships though, I think it’s worth pointing out that the ability to quickly switch decks is one reason why, for all its flaws, MTGO is nevertheless the most cost- and time-efficient outlet for a competitive-oriented player hoping to hone their skills. Swapping cards in real life is process that carries high transaction costs. Either you sell to your local store at half price (to be fair, they need these margins in order to pay the rent), or you binder-grind constantly to recoup as much value as you can from trade partners. In contrast, the online economy makes transactions far less painful as the vendors (such as our contest sponsor, the all-around cool dudes at Cardhoarder ) can be far more efficient in their operations. If you wanted to audible from one tier 1 deck to another the day before the PTQ, you can totally do this online and lose just 10% of your deck’s equity just by conveniently selling and buying cards from a vendor. That's setting aside the fact that decks are typically a flat 25% cheaper online to begin with.



I hope everyone enjoyed taking part in the Magic Online Prediction Game, and that the results were instructive. The winners of the contest have been contacted by email.