With eight rounds of Magic down and eight more to go tomorrow, only two players remains undefeated at Mythic Championship II London.
Don’t miss our recaps of Day 2 and the Top 8.
Hall of Famer Olivier Ruel started his third draft of War of the Spark ever with two Massacre Girls, which he converted into to a 3-0 Limited record, and then rattled off five more wins with Esper Control in the Modern rounds. Fernando David Gonzalez also finished the day undefeated, going 7-0-1 and playing Hardened Scales in Modern.
The Modern Metagame with the London Mulligan
Modern was a sea of Izzet Phoenix in the events preceding Mythic Championship II London. But in February, Wizards of the Coast announced that they would be testing a new mulligan rule in London, where players would draw seven cards each time the mulligan and, after keeping a hand, put one card from their hand on the bottom of their library for each time they mulliganed.
The consensus was that the the London Mulligan would make combo decks stronger because they could more easily mulligan to their combo pieces. But would it have a dramatic impact on the overall Modern metagame?
The answer is a resounding yes—but only for one specific archetype. Tron made a massive jump, becoming the most-played deck at Mythic Championship II London making up 14.6% of the field, closely followed by the last two bogeymen of the Modern format: Izzet Phoenix (12%) and Humans (10.3%).
But the increase in Tron decks seems to have mostly taken a bite out of Izzet Phoenix’s popularity, leaving the popularity of Modern’s other archetypes relatively stable despite the new London Mulligan. This is likely due to the fact that Modern was already comprised almost exclusively of streamlined linear and combo decks that would benefit from the new mulligan rule.
If the metagame doesn’t give you a good sense of just how fast and powerful Modern is these days, maybe the list of most played non-land Modern cards at Mythic Championship II London will help.
All eight of the most-played cards in Modern this weekend are either cantrips that help combo decks find their key cards, removal, or Surgical Extraction.
Surgical Extraction was the most-played card in Modern at Mythic Championship II London, with more copies registered (569) than players at the tournament (515). That’s 1.1 copies per player and over 100 players included the card in their maindeck!
If you want to explore the metagame further, Wizards has published every single Modern decklist from the Mythic Championship.
Prerelease Drafting at the Mythic Championship
On top of the London Mulligan experiment, this weekend’s Mythic Championship II London is also War of the Spark’s prerelease weekend. The set’s full spoiler was posted a week ago, and War of the Spark only became available on MTG Arena and MTGO on yesterday, the day before the event…and only with support for Sealed tournaments. That means that most players had very little experience drafting the format.
The combination of brand new cards, very little time to practice, and extremely high stakes led to 18 draws in the Draft rounds—the most since drafts became the first three rounds of Day 1 at Pro Tour Dragon’s Maze in 2013.
Here’s to hoping tomorrow’s Draft rounds go a little quicker!
Day 2 of Mythic Championship starts tomorrow morning at 4am Eastern on twitch.tv/magic.