So going into Mythic Championship VI, the battle lines have been drawn: It's Oko versus the world. You need to be either join the group of Oko players or find a way to beat them. These two directions yield two questions that I will aim to answer after decklists get submitted and the Standard rounds in Richmond get underway.

Question 1: What is the best Oko deck?

For the players in the "join them" camp, they will have to figure out which Oko deck to choose. Simic Food, Sultai Food, and Bant Food all have their advantages and disadvantages, and there is a lot of flexibility in how to fill out the final slots.

Antoine Lagarde won Grand Prix Lyon with a Bant Food list featuring main deck Mass Manipulation, while Riku Kumagai took down Grand Prix Nagoya with a lean, nimble Simic Food list featuring main deck Aether Gust. Meanwhile, many Sultai Food players are trying to go over the top of other Oko players with Casualties of War. As of right now, there is no consensus yet regarding the best way to build Food for the current Standard metagame, and it will be interesting to see what the Mythic Championship VI competitors settle on.

So far, I have used "Food decks" and "Oko decks" interchangeably, but that's not entirely accurate: The set of Oko decks is a superset of Food decks. In other words, there are other potential homes for Gilded Goose; Oko, Thief of Crowns; and Wicked Wolf. For example, they appear in decks like Four-Color Sacrifice (which can sacrifice the generated Food tokens to trigger Mayhem Devil, grow Korvold, Fae-Cursed King, and/or return Cauldon Familiar) and Temur Superfriends (which uses Sarkhan the Masterless to turn Oko and other planeswalkers into Dragons). Whether these decks are better or worse than the stock Food decks remains to be seen, but they are certainly options to be considered as well.

Question 2: Is there a way to beat the Oko decks?

For the players in the "beat them" camp, they will have to try and find a deck with a favorable matchup against Food. I believe this will be difficult but, with several weeks of preparation and many prizes on the line, there's a chance that some Mythic Championship VI competitors manage to break the format.

Generally, when you are trying to beat a deck there are two main approaches: Go over them (i.e., beat them in the late game) or go under them (i.e., beat them in the early game). Given the makeup of Food, going under them seems structurally difficult. Their planeswalkers have absurd amounts of loyalty, they can deploy big blockers early on, and they can restore their life with Food tokens. This makes it difficult to attack Food with an aggro deck.

For a while, it seemed like going wide with Selesnya Adventures might work, as Edgewall Innkeeper could exploit the relative lack of removal in Simic Food, and their aggressive starts were not easily brick-walled by Wicked Wolf. However, once most Oko players settled on Sultai Food, they gained Massacre Girl to answer the creature swarm and swing the matchup.

Instead, I expect that going over Food will prove more successful. Without Field of the Dead going over them isn't easy, but I believe that it is still possible by combining the right interaction with powerful spells. Based on the results of the MCQW and the Grands Prix, two non-Oko decks stand out to me as having the most potential.