A truly gripping aspect, that lends Standard a lot of longevity, is seeing its evolution week-by-week as the metagame’s churning cauldron spits out its latest innovations. In week 3, we see some old faces re-emerge and make their mark on the Theros: Beyond Death metagame, while the last fortnight’s challenger grows ever more powerful with its adoption of a terrifying new threat…

There’s a brief update below, but you can scroll to the bottom for the lists! As promised, we have some Historic decks on show as well.

For those wishing to participate in the upcoming daily qualifiers for MagicFest Online starting on Monday, you’ll want to brush up your knowledge and find out what you can expect from the tournament.

Check out more Standard decks from previous week’s Mythic decks:

Standard Metagame Update – March 21, 2020

The crucial data this week comes from the Ikoria Mythic Invitational Qualifier #2 results; check them out!

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble!

Last week, we told you there were two primary aggro decks to watch out for; now one of them has won a major battle, and so the war swings in their favour… Rakdos Sacrifice has proven the superior choice in tackling the meta’s evolution into bigger more midrangey decks – decks Red Deck Wins has historically struggled against – while devouring Mono Red, and so the latter has fallen off slightly. Rakdos can play the value and later game far better, is less susceptible to Aether Gust, deals far better with big midrange value creatures, and adopts its own for maximum power as we’ll see with our Card of the Week in a moment!

Jeskai Fires continues to prove itself the Returned King that you can never count out… despite being on hiatus for a couple of weeks there, it’s re-emerged as one of the best choices with its great aggro matchup, strong sideboard options, and the raw power of being able to cheat massively on mana, slam two huge threats on turn 5, and kill people out of nowhere. Look no further than this week’s Mythic Invitational Qualifier, where its Cavalier approach dominated the competition. Maindeck Gust has been in and out of popularity, but it seems 2-of is the way to go, as every single one of the top-performing lists had it. We even saw some of them main Disenchant for the mirror and to handle those pesky Elspeth Conquers Deaths and Witch’s Ovens that litter the meta; if the meta continues in this direction, we could easily see that become Standard. Elspeth can tone down the brags, as Fires is what’s truly conquering Death each month!





The Nissa/Uro decks remain strong, with Bant and Sultai Ramp each vying for position. Each has its own appeal, based on what you’re trying to prepare for; Sultai tends to have a better matchup against Bant, Fires, and Temur Adventures, owing to the incredible blowout potential of Casualties of War, and plays a more consistent game with its efficient removal in Tyrant’s Scorn and great card draw in Atris. Thanks to its sweepers, Bant performs better against aggro and midrange creature decks, and with Teferi against Reclamation. ECD means it has a much better matchup against Uro (though Kroxa still dodges it), and the Teferi-ECD combo gives it great resiliency and disruption against Control decks. Both are great choices; I suspect Bant is still slightly better but I would recommend Sultai more for ladder as it’s substantially more fun to play in my experience; it’s nail-bitingly close though and we’ll see which wins out in the coming weeks!

Well, we saw the hero that never stays dead, so it’s poetic that we also have the villain! Reclamation performed well at the Invitational and remains a strong choice on ladder, with its good matchup against Fires and the ability to go over the top of slow decks with its combo kill. That being said, we’re seeing an unprecedented amount of hate for Wilderness Reclamation itself so landing said combo kill is hard, and with decks becoming greedier and greedier and adopting cards like Tamiyo and Kroxa, Reclamation is struggling far more than it used to. Games can really come down to the wire when you’re having to continuously deal with whatever new unkillable threat your opponents present, so I’d recommend Reclamation if you know the deck well and have practice, but one of the other decks here will be much easier to adopt if not!

Card of the Week

One of Rakdos’s best tools has been Kroxa, a card that shines in the midrange matchups and perfectly complements the Cat Oven burn plan. What better way to fight Uro than with his edgy brother? Kroxa fills a fantastic and much-needed role; he hinders these mana-hungry greedy slow decks early since even discarding one card can make it tough to hit land drops, and then is a disruptive deadly threat that you can bring back over and over until they run out of answers late.

With such a frightening look, I wouldn’t be surprised if he psyched them out a bit too…

MTG Arena Mythic Standard Decks of the Week

Here are the full list of known Mythic decks over the past week shared by the players, sorted by the deck archetype name with their highest placement noted:

MTG Arena Mythic Historic Decks of the Week

Unfortunately, we don’t have too much data on Historic this week – Mono White seems to be very popular for climbing as it is straightforward and streamlined – but we did just publish our first version of the Metagame Tier List. Enjoy!

That’s it for week 3 as we start to say goodbye to Theros Beyond Death and await the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths shakeup. In the meantime, we have a lot of things on the agenda over the next few weeks to help get us through everything going on in the world, from special events (Arena Sealed Cube, anyone?), daily tournaments via MagicFest Online, to the start of the spoiler season for the next set.

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This column is our weekly roundup of Standard and Historic decks players are using to climb the ranked ladder on MTG Arena! Our goal is to curate and post a variety of deck archetypes and interesting card choices at the end of each week to help you keep up to date with the latest trends in the metagame. If you have any decks you want featured, please tweet us at @mtgazone or give us a shout at our Discord.