I was busy hunting Fungusaurs.

Kalle Nord's Parfait.

Giacomo Zorzan's Erhnam Burn'em. Love this strategy, and haven't seen it played for many years.

Heya!If one would argue that I have been lazy updating the Decks to Beat page, one would have merit. Of course, I have a sack filled with excuses to for that very purpose.But excuses is not why we're here. We're here for tech, and I've sorted the top decks from Ivory Cup 2, Scandinavian Championships, Alphaspelen 3, The Horrible Horse Gathering, Fishliver Oil Cup Ed. 1, and BSK 2017. Three lists are still missing, but nonetheless we have 49 new Decks to Beat collected.35 participants, photos of 7/8 decks.The second edition of Stockholm's annual Ivory Cup was a smashing gathering. The attendance had risen since last year, as had the powerful cards. Erhnam Djinns faced of each others in the finals, leaving strategys like Atog Burn, The Deck and Dead Guy in their trail.48 participants, photos of 6/8 decks.The first edition of Scandinavian Championship in Arvika was hosted in the familiar area we know from the Arvika Festival. As always when visiting that community, great ambiance and good people were aplenty. Jimmie's mono Red Atog Burn took down the championship, with Parfait, Disaster, Power Monolith, and different variants of Zoo and control also showing up in the top8.12 participants, photos of 4/4 decks.Alphaspelen is one of the more local tournaments in Stockholm. This gathering was home to some creative tech in the top4, including a new take on White Zoo with Personal Incarnations, CandleFactory, and some sort of ErhnamBurn'em midrange with Sedge Trolls.27 participants, photos of 8/8 decks.The Horrible Horse Gathering pitted Norwegian spell slingers in the largest 93/94 gathering in Oslo yet. The final was battled out with Lions and Efreets on both sides, leaving Troll Ponza, Athopher, Titania's Song Control, Juzam Smash and other sweet tech in the elimiation rounds.86 participants, photos of 16/16 decks.One of the major European gatherings, the Fishliver Oil Cup has quickly become home to some of the best that the format has to offer. The people, the atmosphere and the brews truly puts a smile on your face. Rather than having a top8, Lorenzo and Megu opted to go for a top16 in the elimination rounds for this one; with 14 different archetypes among the 16 decks.38 participants, photos of 8/8 decks.BSK is the second oldest annual tournament in the format, and one of the most revered by the "old school old school" players. This was the eight annual Halloween gathering in Borås, bringing foogies from different corners of Sweden to dust of their old cards in chance of winning a The Fallen. Once again, Master of Magic Cards Olle Råde claimed the trophy, using his URb Burn to defeat MirrorBall in the finals. Combo had good showing here, and the top8 also included e.g. TwiddleVault and PowerMonolith.Is there something we can see here? Piles and piles of awesome cards! But I guess some people are interested in the top-tier meta trends as well. We see an impressive number of different archetypes at the top tables. Aggro, Midrange, Control and Combo are all well represented, along with a handful prison decks and some sweet weird pet decks. Seems like unrestricting Maze of Ith didn't kill the format after all ;)Perhaps we don't need to analyze the meta. It looks healthy and fun, so delving might be unnecessary. But I guess it could be worth noting that The Deck's presence in elimination rounds of mid-size to large tournament has declined further since last year. In the 49 top decks here, variants of The Deck has dropped slightly from around 18% to 16% (down to around 14.5% if we don't look at the 9-16th place finishes in the Fishliver Oil cup). That's like, very low for a supposed boogie man. There's also a fairly low number of pure UR Burn strategies this time. Many aggro decks seem more inclined to combine their Serendib Efreets with Savannah Lions than with Chain Lightnings at the moment.Teching with the aggro angle is not that strange. Though I believe the URb version that Olle won BSK with is still one of the most powerful decks in 93/94, trying out new attacks are very much in the spirit of the format and I don't believe the shifting meta is "solved". It seems like a lot of players got their eyes on the power of Savannah Lions around the same time; much like many of us sleeved up Flying Men a year or two ago. But the continuous decline of control seem a little odd. I mean, The Deck, the supposed end boss of the format, hasn't won a tournament in Sweden or Norway in over a year at this point. It averages around one The Deck per top8, where we a couple of years back had two or three. There were a total of 34 Jayemdae Tomes in the deck lists above, which is less than the number of Savannah Lions (36). And far less than the number of Su-Chis, which clocks in at an impressive 52 copies (about the same number as Serendib Efreet).I'm not saying we necessarily need more The Decks in our tournaments, but it could be interesting to try and find out why control keeps falling out of favor and Su-Chi has become a far more popular 4-drop artifact than the book. Are the control players suddenly more interested in different strategies, have we all learned how to play better against it, or are we as a community cowing people out playing control as some deem it "unfun"? Any The Deck players out there, current or former, are very welcome to give their take on the situation :)If any other tournaments across the continents would like to add their decks to the decks to beat here, please go ahead and email me a list and a short description and I'd be happy to add them.Next time we'll check out another guest report from Gathering the Knights of Thorn 3 in the Netherlands. Really impressive community down there :)